We be swappin'

One of my favorite aspects of old motorcycles is going to swap meets. I love digging for gold, so I am usually one of the 6 a.m. guys digging through dudes' shit before their truck is parked. This past weekend, me Watermelon Pete and Demo decided to be retarded and hit two swaps, one in southern Minnesota and the other in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We left St. Paul on Saturday morning and on the way to the first swap we stopped at this old motorcycle graveyard to poke around quick. It was crazy cold out so we didn't dig for long. Then we jetted to the first swap, put on by the Flying Dutchmen Motorcycle Club. They have an incredible spread in New Ulm, Minnesota, with over 40 acres that includes a dirt flat track and a huge hillclimb area. The clubhouse was really badass as well. The swap turned out some good stuff too: I picked up this frame for SUPER cheap, it is a stretched cone shovel frame with what appears to be a Ness hardhead front section and a Donnie Smith fender strut combo:



I got a crazy frank fender last week for a really good price, so I am going to put together another cone shovel similar to the bike I traded to Harpoon, Unknown Pleasures. We loaded up and started for Cedar Rapids, which was about 4.5 hours from where we were. On the way there, I remembered that Luke from Uncle Pie lived about an hour from Cedar Rapids, in Davenport Iowa. If you don't know about Uncle Pie, well, I feel sorry for you: http://unclepie.blogspot.com/. We rolled to Luke's dad's place and hung there for a while. Luke's dad, Wally, is a super cool dude and has two incredible knuckleheads that he built and painted himself. Luke was putting his awesome '59 pan back together, Wally had recently laid down some beautiful gloss black down on the frame:




We spent a night taking in the many pleasures of Davenport, including the best strip club in America, SoCo. We woke up crazy early the next morning and rolled out to the Cedar Rapids swap. It was a decent swap, although the vendors were real ball breakers on prices. We saw Noot, some of the Lords of Loud guys, Jeremiah, and some other familiar midwest swap faces, including Bald Paul, AKA Big Sexy. This swap ended like most swaps for me: finding tons of small shit that you can get for dirt at the swap but cost a grip at the last minute:



Shit, primary belts are like $70 at cost, I paid less than that for three. I picked up a neat Mikuni Solex two-throat carb with a Branch intake, a Cycle Electric 12 volt generator for $40, a magneto body. . .great scores. Pete ended up finding the correct cam cover for his '40 knucklehead motor and Demo got a good starhub and some other stuff he needed. All in all, it was well worth driving all over the place. I love swaps.