Tales on the Motorcycle Courier Shift...for starters.

I haven't touched much on this topic, but I think this needs to be on this blog since it is about motorcycles and travelling. Sometimes travelling just means going around in circles, over and over again.

Since I was laid-off of my full-time job back in April of this year, I started doing courier work for Postmates, a startup based in San Francisco. I've been doing this since the first day of launch in May here in Los Angeles, and it's kept me busy when other gigs were far and in between. While most people do deliveries in a car, I took advantage of the carrying capacity of my touring bike to actually make decent money with this, even developing a system that makes it easy to respond to dispatches that come in on my phone.

I usually work the dinner shifts to try to avoid the traffic of the day, and some of the things I've encountered while taking this from Point A to Point B have been quite amusing. I've shared most of these things on Facebook with my friends, but I think some of these screen snippets definitely detail my level of amusement on being "paid to ride."

As I had mentioned in a previous post, Eleanor was gone for a month due to repairs and long-awaited maintenance. Once I deemed her road-worthy again for the daily grind of the night shift, the stories came back. When I have a chance to sift through some of the posts from earlier this year, they'll appear in a future blog post. But for now, enjoy.

Independent Motorsports goes to the circus...

With the circus in town here in Columbus, OH this week, I think it would be fun to share this story.

I had a customer come into Independent Motorsports on Tuesday carrying a rear wheel to a 2008 Honda Rebel to have two spokes replaced. When I asked him how soon he needed it, he answered, "I'll need it tomorrow to prepare the bike for my act."

It turns out that he was a performer for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and his "act" involved riding a Rebel across a high-wire up to 70 ft. in the air! Since wheel spokes aren't a very common thing that's carried in stock at most motorcycle stores (they don't break often enough to justify it), I started calling multiple Honda dealerships in Ohio. After several calls and six shops later I came across the guys at Western Hills Honda Yamaha in Cincinnati who had four of the spokes in stock and were able to overnight the parts to our store where one of our awesome techs reinstalled and trued the wheel in less than an hour.

His "wheel" is a stock rim with a large strip of tire rubber riveted down to the inside. There is a deep groove in the middle to accommodate the high-wire that he rides on. According to him, his Rebel has also been modified with a large sprocket for extra torque for short, precise movements and his fuel tank plugged up for, well, just watch the video below to find out why.

This the Honda Rebel 250 wheel that rides across the highwire.

Close-up of the tire groove

So here's our customer, Alex Petrov, entertaining the masses on that high-wire bike. I'm proud to say that I helped get him back in the air again! This is probably the best use of a Honda Rebel that I've seen in a long time, and a very strange (and short) commute from point A to point B. I'm proud to say that, yes, we service motorcycles for commuters and circus folk alike!