It'll knock you down and steal your lunch

[tugrik]

So, I'm taking the already-somewhat-brutish GS dualsport to Burning Man this year. I need to deck it out, desert-warrior style. Think 'mad max on a motorbike'. I've already got an older helmet I will be putting a supersize mohawk-and-feathers on, as well as doing up the tankbag/panniers in old leather scraps, straps, and fur. I may even be able to scare up a baseball-bat scabbard or other 'self defence device' holders to mount in the right places, complete with thong-straps bearing beads, small animal skulls, and the like.

This is a plea put out to my creative friends: help me think up things I can do to the bike to pull off a credible post-apocalyptic presence attack. Be it just a few 'you should try (...)' written suggestions, or a sketch, or whatever ... please, pitch me a few ideas! :) The only real limitation is that I need to keep it road-legal, so no welding on giant swords of death sticking out the front.

This weekend I'm going to re-watch all the road-warrior-esque movies in the house's DVD collection. It shouldn't be all that hard to find some cool ideas. If done right, driivng up on the bike will look like I had just rolled in from Bartertown.

Comments

Hey ToolBoy...

[smackjackal.livejournal.com]

I thought that you weren't going to BM this year? Hope you can carry all the f00dz and w4t3rz you n33dz on j00s b4d 4$$ GS. :)

[amilori.livejournal.com]

Oooh. An excuse to go digging thru the leather & fur scraps & look at the bone & shell beads in my collection. Got any plans for Sunday? You could come over & raid the collections....

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

No plans for Sunday so far! (sorry I've not been in touch much lately. I tend to only keep up with the folks who're on the same realtime chat/muck areas I am, and you're not. I'll be better about emailing!)

[amilori.livejournal.com]

How about stopping by for lunch around noon-1PM and we'll go from there?

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

Still up for lunch tomorrow? I know I have your direct email around here somewhere, but I can't find it! Hopefully the LJ-response thingy will email this to you for me. :) I was hoping a little more afternoonish if so... or maybe you could join me for the 11:30a matinee of K19? Give me a call when you can... or I'll try to call tomorrow morning. :)

Glad we managed to get hooked up

[amilori.livejournal.com]

This coming weekend is devoted to "Getting Things Done Around the House", so give a call Friday-Sunday if you want to come over & pick up the beads & baubles or want help with any of the basic assembly. Glad I managed to dig out all of the leather, denim & canvas scraps for you.

Promise you'll take pictures of the finished bike at Burning Man!

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

Leather. Fur. Any original metal still visible should be painted in camoflage. Metal spiky-bits everywhere. At least one incongruous piece of electronics.

It's more important to dress yourself than the bike, though. And the above description works great for you, too.

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

excessive and gratuitous chainmail, the more rusted and tattered the better.
have any SCA fighter friends to hit up?

[paka.livejournal.com]

There are a number of companies out there that make plastic replica animal skulls, but all I could find quickly was http://anatomical.com/cat_disp.asp?CAT_NBR=2&SUB_CAT_NBR=5&sid=GT426.

My idea would be buying cheap fur commercially and wrapping it with leather bindings about the handlebars as much as you can without fouling the handbrakes, etc; and attaching some sort of animal skull to the fairing. If you can get paint that you can remove later, you could try painting markings on the bike.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Rust and duct tape. I bet you can find some kind of faux rust paint somewhere out there.

A big question is: are you willing to do permanant things to the bike? Or is it just a costume that will be taken off? I'd imagine that you'd be taking a somewhat junky bike out to the playa, rather than a beautiful, pristine, new one.

An idea that popped into my head a while back for general vehicle decoration, that might be appropriate here: you know those stylized flame designs people put on vehicles? Carefully mask things off, and then spray the flame area with some kind of rust-inducing factor. Rust flames. There are sure to be problems keeping the phyical integrity of the vehicle, and keeping the rust constrained (unless you can find some sort of faux-rust finish)... but it's such a beautifully incongruous image.

Strapped-on extra gas cans, because gas is scarce in the Bleak, Post-Apocalyptic Future. Random strips of leather or vinyl wound here and there, with little charms or beads dangling from them. No, not heart charms - crudely-carved animal fetish type charms.

Drive around the playa some before coming in, if you can, to get that ground-in desert look. Or, again, some kind of faked finish.

A cowcatcher over the front wheel, so that if someone falls out of the gas convoy you're raiding, you can just drive a little to the side and knock 'em out of your path with impunity.

Shrunken heads.

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

I am willing to do some permanent things to the bike, as long as they don't affect the safety and longetivity of the bike. Much of it will be 'costume' however; things that can be strapped/bolted/velcro'd on, and removed later. Depending on how stylishly desert-retro this ends up being, I may leave most of it in place.

This is, for all intents and purposes, a new bike; I bought it in March. I don't have a rat-bike, and even if I did, I'd still want to take the GS out to b'man as it's the one best suited for the terrain. I'll be plenty dirty/dusty once I get there anyways, as I plan to take the dirt-roads route from Truckee up through the Sierras and down behind Pyramid Lake. I'll be travelling with a few other experienced offroaders who know the routes.

Oh, and there are such front-wheel guards for desert bikes, commonly down in Aussieland. They call 'em "roo bars" instead of cow-catchers, though.

Would a huge rhinoceros-like horn on the 'duckbill' of the bike be too much? FYI, the bike in question to be modified:

[amilori.livejournal.com]

"Would a huge rhinoceros-like horn on the 'duckbill' of the bike be too much?"

hmm. Wonder how hard it would be to make a cone from some of the left-over galvanized roofing tin & then bend said cone into a rhino-horn curve...of course, making a very small cone & then successively larger rings to form the curve might work...but then we need to make sure we make a tail...possibilities, possibilities.

chortling to begin now.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Not all that much room to attatch Stuff to the bike, it looks like. So much for my suggestions of insane paintjobs.

The proper look for a post-apocalyptic wheel-guard is not one designed specifically to go on the front of a bike and sold for that purpose; it's one ripped off the front of a train rusting in a railway museum and welded awkwardly onto the bike. The ethic is very much DIY - ugly but functional, and probably broken and repaired several times.

A rhinocerotic horn would fit into the look and with the rider.