So for this week I thought I’d show you footage, such as it is, of the very first customer T7 built in Qld.
There had already been a bunch of them built by the Yamaha staff at YMA in Sydney, and there were 3 demo specials built for the Qld ride expo that went to dealerships after, but this was the first customer T7 available in Qld.
The customer got some lowering links, a centre-stand and an Akro muffler fitted, and he picked it up about 3 hours after I finished building it.
There's a lot more to building a bike out of the crate than people think. The diagnostic hook up and predelivery inspection/run-in take quite a while.
I was going to do music with it but ran out of interest and inclination. Enjoy the silence until start up.
*copied from the Facebook page. you can find me there @TeeKayMoto
Hey,
Terribly unprofessional greeting, I know, but I’m hoping this can be a slightly less formal blog/chat/stream of consciousness/dribble where I can let people know what’s on my mind.
I’m aiming for 1 post a week, but I want to make them moderately interesting, not the wall of text that is my usual writing style. With a bit of luck this will be the last text only house brick of prose for a while. Obviously once I actually start working at Skinny's there will be updates on what I am doing and how the move is going, but for now I guess you get the existential angst and doubt as I get ready to move.
And it's quite a move. My main tool box (that's it in the profile picture) weighs enough that when I moved workshops last it bottomed out the suspension on the heavy lift ute, and caused the small fork lift we were using to unload it to nearly tip. I'm going to try pulling all the drawers out and I've hired a small pantech truck with a lift for this move. That's just the tool box, it doesn't include the 4 large tubs of assorted stuff for diagnostic work/ repair and reconditioning, the half-million tins of sprays, mystery bolts and fittings, and flat out just stuff. There's a lot of the last one. Lots of just stuff. I'm pretty sure it's going to double the infrastructure when I move in.
The move itself is, well, it's daunting.
I've been with the current company for more than 9 years and I spent 5 1/2 of those in one workshop dealing primarily with Yamaha. The shift late last year to BMW was very sudden and it threw me a little. To be honest it threw me far enough under the bus to provide the impetus for this change. I had really needed a bit of a kick for a while to get myself out of the rut I was running in. My mental health can be a bit up and down sometimes (something I think most people would say if they were honest) and I'd noticed, or rather my partner noticed and very carefully informed me, that it was significantly more down than up.
I love working on bikes, all sorts of bikes with all sorts of problems and one thing I'm really looking forward to is getting back to repair and diagnosis work. It's what I like, and it's also what I'm good at.
And so, with a week to go where I am, it's time to look to what's ahead.
That's how it should be.
See you all out there.
*Quick end note for you all. I've had problems with depression and anxiety for years (decades) and it's really only fairly recently that I've acknowledged how much of a mess it's left. I have a tendency now to talk about it VERY openly. Too openly usually. I'll probably post stuff, look at it the next day and delete it, then repost it again after someone says it's ok. Then I'll edit it to include end notes like this since I read the post above and noticed that it was less than inspiring for a first real post on a professional page. The balance of probability is that I'm not completely crazy and if nothing else I'm still allowed out unsupervised so that's a win.