Thursday, July 16, 2009

A Knight Reborn

Wow, I am feeling a sense of overload at the thought of recalling all the stuff I want to bring up in this post. I'll try to get it all in. I went on this scooter ride with a bunch of kids from that Scooter Lounge place and had a lot of fun so I joined there scooter club: Brighams Bees. Well on one of our trips I noticed a scooter that was all red with no decals or anything. I thought it looked so cool so I decided I would take off all the decals on my scooter. I ran over to the Scooter Lounge and they were nice enough to let me use their heat gun to remove all the decals. When I got them off though it left this horrible residue that was to be expected. What wasn't expected was that the residue would be cursed by satan and that it would be unremovable. I used gasoline, deisel fuel, alcohol, vinegar, soap and water, Goo-gone, carbureator cleaner, brake cleaner, WD-40, and probably 3 other chemicals to try and get it off but to no avail. It was going no where. Now I had this sticky stuff all over my scooter and dirt and leaves and all sorts of crap was getting stuck to it. In a last fit of rage I took some sandpaper to the side panel just to see what it was going to take to get it off. Well, after making it look plenty worse with the sandpaper I gave up and decided I was going to be stuck with a ghetto-booty scooter till it died. Well on one of my random trips to the Scooter Lounge I was offered a job by the very generous owner of the store, Dave. I gladly accepted and began my new job selling scooters and accessories. During my time trying to get the residue off Lady Laser I got a lot of input from Jake Everitt, a total stud who also works at The Scooter Lounge. Around my second day there he noticed that I still hadn't taken care of the mess. He told me to "just repaint it, man." At the time I thought I knew a thing or two about my scooter but I had never even taken it apart to see what it looks like from the inside out. I was pretty intimidated, I didn't even know quite where to start. But Jake and the other mechanic Cam helped me the whole time and I was finally able to get all the panels off that needed painting. After 25 bucks worth of paint and sanding materials I was able to scrub down the panels and prime them for some flat black paint. Jake helped me with the first coat of paint and left the rest to me. He's a great instructor and I'm very proud of the work I did on the rest of the panels. It was a lot of fun to paint the scooter. Well after I got all the paint done and the panels back in place, it was time to move on to the next part of the job. Taking a tip from Dave I decided I would take off the "rabbit ear" turning signals in front and use the Euro light alternative that my scooter just happened to feature. With some quick handiwork from Dave we got the contacts out of the old lighting fixture and into the new one. Dave even threw in some gnarly sweet white LED lights to finish off the coolness. I still had the yellow lenses in the back to take care of. Jake made a trip to Eco Moto in Salt Lake and picked me up some smoke colored lenses while he was there. What a sweet heart! Haha, anyways, I got those bad boys on there and I thought I might be finished. Then some guys in the shop started joking about making the scooter "KnightRider" themed. I thought the idea was hilarious so the only thing we could think of besides some sweet decals were some scrolling red LED lights to decorate the front of the scooter. I also got rid of the gray carton box on the back and got a black one to match everything else. That's about all I can think of at the moment. Time for a picture!