Wow, talk about memory lane here.
Stormy Dohner. Thats who did it for me. Wow, I haven't thought about him in years. Him and his family were the ones in the neighborhood who had the yard full of cars, trucks, bikes and literally everything a young boy could dream of. I was 7 at the time walking around the new 'hood and I stumbled on this yard with a guy working on a 4X4 and was sitting inside the engine compartment working on the carb. I walked up, said howdy, he looked at me, said howdy back, I said my names Jeff, he said I'm Stormy, hand me those pliers. Instant friends, LOL. Well, after about a year of hanging out at his place with his Mom, Teds (Brother and Dad), or Carla, his sister, we worked on anything and everything under the sun. One day I got there and he said come with me. We went out back and there were two ginormous tarp covered things sitting there. I looked at him and he said, 'go uncover them' with his #$%* eating grin of his. Well, slap me silly but what I found under those tarps had me dancing around them for like twenty minutes. They were a blue and a green hovercraft, complete with engines, props, and skirts. The bodies were a bit banged up but easily fixed with Fibreglass. He told me his dad got them for the Rat Cuda he finally got done rodding out. After a few weeks of work, we had the bodies fixed and rattle can painted in flat, one black, the other gunmetal grey. He taught me the controls and everything then we spent hours on Saturdays all over the beach and Lake Michigan zipping all over the place.
Sorry, lost the thread there, My first bike involves Stormy so I got sidetracked. It was actually a mini bike we built from the ground up. They had a welder there so we got a bunch of tubing, put it all together in the shape of the bike, mounted the forks and wheels and such. Ted Sr. had an old generator out back with a 25 horse engine in it but the generator part was fried. We pulled the engine, and mounted it in the frame. It was so big the tank we were gonna use didn't fit and we had to mount the tank behind the seat on the rear fender( read fender as a piece of sheet metal welded to the frame
). Then we went out and grapped a centrifugal clutch setup from a crashed snomobile and welded it to the output shaft to the engine. we had this old garden tractor with those big flat baloon tires and finally got them to work. Once all was said and done, he started it up and got on with a helmet. We didn't put a muffler on til later and that thing was so loud you couldn't hear a thing. Stormy took it out for a test ride then came back for me. We screamed all over town on that thing that day. When we got back home that afternoon, he looked at it and said ''Happy Birthday'' with that grin of his. I looked at him funny cuz it was only June, still two and a half months to my B-day. I was going to turn nine that year. I still think it was the coolest birthday gift I ever got. My Mom even thought it was real cool, though she used groovy, after we got a muffler on it.
Well, thats my intro to bike ownership. Once I moved up to bigger and better bikes, I gave it back to Stormy and he gave it to a cousin of his. Every once in a blue moon I think of that little mini and the fun we had together. Looks like I'll have to write to Stormy soon. I'm getting all nostalgic over here.
Peace and Long Rides,
Jeff
