The Motorcycle Adjacent Podcast: Episode 1

Hello, my fellow motorcycle enthusiast! I’m excited to announce that I have dipped my toe into the world of Podcasting. The Motorcycle Adjacent Podcast: Episode 1 is a shotgun blast of topics ranging from Developing a Podcast, to Designing a new WaltInPA Logo, to Analysis Paralysis.

Please consider showing some support by checking out my first episode. You can watch the video (Above) or listen to the Audio (Below). If you want to be notified of new content, you can Subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts.

Listen to The Motorcycle Adjacent Podcast: Episode 1

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Below you can find a rough transcript of the Episode

This episode of the Motorcycle Adjacent Podcast will be a shotgun blast of topics. I planned to record content for future videos but scrapped all of it. I thought this video could serve as a recap for my earlier ride and touch on a few other things I wanted to talk about. However, I didn’t feel like it made a whole video about these topics all by themselves.

Analysis Paralysis

The first topic in this shotgun blast of stuff is analysis paralysis. I don’t know about you, but I find it agonizing anymore to decide where I want to go on my motorcycle. Over the past year, I only cared about putting miles on the bike.

I wound up putting close to 4000 miles on my bike last year, and  I felt good with the accomplishment that I had made, but you know it’s set out to put miles on the bike, and I felt like I did a great job doing that you know it made me feel like I was getting my money worth out of the bike if that kind of makes sense.

Unfortunately, last year I happened. I mean, the trend seemed to be to ride the crap out of all of the local roads, and that’s the trajectory of every single ride last year. I was just getting out on the bike. It doesn’t matter where I go, just get out and ride. I must have hit the same roads over and over and over and over again. While it was still delightful, I came into this riding season in 2022 wanting to get on the bike with more of a purpose.

I wanted to see more places. I didn’t want to ride it just for the sake of riding. I wanted to get out and check out new local businesses. So I tried to get out and see the sights. I’ve been running through this mental checklist every time I go for a ride. What does this ride accomplish?

I will go out anyway, but I’m just running through the gambit of checklist items in my mind, and it never fails. I always get to the part where I ask myself, where will I go? What am I going to see? and I just draw a blank. I don’t know where to. Go, I don’t know what to see.

I was pulling on my phone. I go through the list. I have 100 plus things I want to see and do this year. Today was no different.

I had to force myself to stop thinking about getting on the bike and going in a given direction. Then I said, you know I’ll figure it out on the way, and that’s pretty much what I did. I hopped on the bike and started heading east towards Philadelphia.

I thought you know what would be cool – stopping it Top Shelf Cigars. It’s a cigar shop that’s in the little village of Skippack. It’s been there for a long time. I mean, like, I don’t know the early days of the business, but I know that I’ve been stopping in there for over a decade, and it’s been owned by the same person. His name is Jim, and he’s a nice guy. He’s got a great selection.

Now, if you’re unfamiliar with Skippack, it’s like a quintessential little town that gets tons and tons of foot traffic. So they’ve got lots of these little shops – you know, little food shops,  they’ve got little antique shops, they’ve got like, I mean, I think it went past the place that sold like kitchenware. So like these, lots of tiny little Mama pop shops line the streets in this little village.

It’s become a pretty popular place in the area. It’s a little highbrow, but it’s a cool little place, and Top Shelf Cigars are nestled in amongst the shops. So I thought, you know, it’s been years since I’ve been down there see Jim’s shop.  I wanted to do that, so I ran down and stopped in.

I didn’t have much time, so I was only there for a few minutes. I picked up some cigars, and then I got out of there. I picked up the Top Shelf Signature Select, Jim’s house blend. When I started going there, he must have had three different combinations. He had a green label that Don Pepin Garcia made before he blew up and became a household name in the cigar industry – before My Father cigars became like this massive thing.

Don Pepin Garcia used to make small house blends for many different places, and Top Shelf Cigars were one of them. I thought it was a fantastic cigar, loved the corona, and eventually, things fell apart. Then, Garcia got huge and gave all the little guys the axe.

Guys like Jim down a Top Shelf kind of took that as a bit of a slight. I would have to, you know, if the guy came into my shop from nothing, like just trying to get his business rolling, and we worked together for several years and all of a sudden like he’s too busy, too big for me. 

I would also feel slightly insulted, but neither here nor there. The green label eventually went away. Next, there was a black label which I thought was good. It was probably my favorite of the bunch. Then, there was a red label that was good and a blue label that was good but wasn’t my favorite. Finally, black was my favorite, probably followed by red and blue. I believe all three of those were made by Tropical Tobacco / Aganorsa.

And then, at one point in time, you also had a white label, which Abe Flores made from PDR, Pinar Del Rio cigars in the Dominican. And these days, I think the vast majority of them have gone away, and the only one left is the blue label. Now his blue label is different from the original blue label in that Consuelo Gomez makes this.

She started in Cigars Cigars, a local chain multiplying since it started. They’ve got way more stores than they used to have. she started rolling cigars for them in their humidor and eventually branched out and did her own thing.

She’s got a shop out in Bethlehem where she sells cigars like a general cigar like a regular cigar store, and she also rolls her own and sells her product on the premises. I’ve never been there, but I hear it is a fantastic little store. 

I want to get out and visit, so that was pretty much the entire discussion on the bike today. Like that story, in a nutshell, you know. I’m just riding around. I was trying to tell it, but I wasn’t feeling it. So I scrapped it.

New WaltInPA Logo

So when I came home from that ride, I noticed a box on my front porch. Right here, and immediately I knew what it was. I was excited because I’d been waiting for this for a while. But before I unveil what it is, I’ll give you a hint. If you know that logo, you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of what this is. But so let’s start. Wow, just kind of glancing up at the timer on this video. This thing will probably get long, so bear with me here.

So as you know, last year in October, I put a deposit down on this bike. Technically, it wasn’t this bike. It was a 2021 Mt 09 SP, and I had made plans to trade in my 2018 Honda CB650F. after five months of delays the initial order I placed was changed over to a 2022 Mt 09.

I had waited about five months by the time I put the deposit down on the bike and when I took ownership of the bike. And while I was waiting on this bike to come in, I was presented with a potential problem.

Being around WaltInPA, you’re probably familiar with my logo. It’s a circle. It’s got a bike in the middle, says WaltInPA. However, you may not have noticed that Honda CB650F.

When I designed that logo, I told the guy that this is what I ride. This is the bike that I want in the picture. So model the image after the bike, and then when I do my end screen, you know I worked in photos and animated logo, you know it’s all of the CB650.

So, of course, when I got the mt 09 now, I was thinking, what do I do? Do I keep the same logo? Do I keep the CB650F in there and hope no one notices? Do I just call it a generic thing and run with it?

Now let’s say two years from now, something comes out that I want, and I wind up trading this in, or something happens to it, and I can’t replace it. So now I’m stuck with a logo specific to the bike, so will I update the logo yearly, or, you know, bike after bike after the bike? Or do I want something a little more broad? Is it less motorcycle specific? Something that I can use long-term regardless of the direction the channel goes?

So I more or less polled the guys in discord and said, hey, this is what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about updating the logo because new bike, and at this point, they knew long before the general public because they’re in my discord that this new bike was coming. And I pretty much laid out the issue with them. So I want what I should do in this position, and the consensus was that I should revamp the logo to make it less specific and more long-term so that it wasn’t explicitly modeled after the mt 09.

But the consensus was that we should probably shift away from the CBR650F since I don’t own it anymore – unless I wanted it to be an homage to the bike that got me back into motorcycles. So and jumped on Fiverr, and I got in touch with the guy who did my original logo. And I spelled out basically what I was looking for. I had some sample logos that I had seen in his catalog. Some stuff that he had done for other people and I went through, and I said, look, I like this logo, this logo, and this logo.

I want you to model my logo, my new one after these taking these elements and this over here and this over here, and I want to change the color scheme to kind of blue to like blue and black. To kind of be along the lines of the new bike. I’ve never really been a fan of red anyway. My  Bike just happened to be red. So that’s why my logo became red.

So I wanted to get into a color scheme that I was into, and I said I sent him a picture of this bike, and I said look, the objective here is to have a generalized motorcycle on the logo. So I didn’t want him to like hear that and think, alright, well, I’ll just grab a Harley-Davidson and slap that on the logo. It needed to be a naked bike since that’s my thing. It’s what’s ridden, so I sent them this. I sent them a picture of this bike and said look, I want you to use this as the inspiration for the bike and the logo, but I don’t want you to get specific. I don’t want you to have to include the gold forks. I don’t want you to include the blue accents on the wheels, like the color scheme on the tank, which can be different, like all of that is fine.

I want this to be a little more generic, but you know, a naked bike is what I want. This is the kind of seedling that’s going to create the logo. The design for the logo, so after a week, he got back to me with three design concepts, and I hated all three of them. It’s no fault of his own. What I gave him in my head made a lot of sense, but when I saw it come to life, I didn’t like it. It is it was painful. It looked like a poorly represented image of that bike. It was like someone tried to redraw it, except they didn’t know what they were doing, picked the wrong colors, and changed the bad things. It just looked like it was kind of painful to look at. The motorcycle rendition of that bike in a more generic form, and there were some other issues I didn’t like.

 So basically, we went back and forth a lot, and at one point, I just came right out, and they said, look, I’m just not happy with any of these concepts. It’s not your fault. I think I handcuffed you with my design ideas. I don’t think I’m giving you enough creative freedom to make this work. It’s just I don’t like it. It just feels lifeless. I’m not happy with this, so let’s scrap the three design ideas. Let’s not do any further revisions because the package I purchased had unlimited revisions.

So let’s kind of go down a different path. Let’s scrap the round logo altogether. If you feel something else would be better, let’s go in that direction. You know, as an example like here is here are some images from the visit Pennsylvania website. Like the keystone is our thing, we’re the keystone state, so if you wanted to make the logo keystone shaped, I’m cool with that.

If you think that a square logo would look better, like we can go down that road. or if you think we’re just utilizing the circle wrong, you know I’m cool. But let’s open up our options to look at various things. So that was one design idea I wanted a covered bridge in the background of the image. It just didn’t look good because I wished for a three-quarters view of the bike with the bridge in the background, and I thought it would just be cool.

But it just wasn’t quite working, So what we wound up doing was we took the keystone shape, we made the logo keystone, and then instead of having a bridge in the background, we put the inside of the bridge in the keystone because I thought that would be an excellent idea. So I sent them some pictures of covered bridges that I had of the inside of the covered bridge.

Then you know, we put the three-quarter view of 2022 mt 09 right up front, and I just to,ld them look I realized I told you that I didn’t want to go specific, but I’m not feeling the way this is going.

So what I want to do is I want to make it specific to this bike. Match the colors, so we have a 2022 M09 in front and the Walton PA text that matches the previous logo across the bottom.

And that’s the new logo. I’ve had it for quite a while but haven’t used it. I don’t want to change my channel art to utilize it.

I’m not Looking for. But I. know when I see a logo that looks this way with this sort of font and color that it’s Weston Super Moto Vlog. I know what the guy does for his thumbnails, so when I see something like that, it’s probably Phil, and I’m going to click on it.

But suppose Weston’s super Moto vlogs suddenly decided to change how his thumbnails look,  change his logo when I’m looking for what I perceive as his thumbnails, and suddenly things were different. In that case, I may miss a dozen videos before it finally dawns on me that I’m missing his videos because something has changed. So I don’t want to be in that position where I create and make too much of a change. So at some point, we will transition over to the other logo. We’re just not there yet.

I’m unsure what I will do with them, but I wanted to start utilizing them and what’s in the box. OK, I’m sorry, I was hoping I was like, I ordered a custom hat with the new logo, so I don’t know about the rest of you guys. But, still, when I go when I wear a full-face helmet, and I’m riding for a couple of hours, and we decide to stop and eat somewhere, you know I get off the bike I pull my helmet off I go walking in the place of my hairs like sticking up in every which way.

Custom WaltInPA Hat

So I thought it would be kind of cool to get a hat a custom embroidered hat so that I can throw it on my head and cover up the helmet head. Umm, and this is something I plan on doing for a while now. I was going to use the old logo quite a while back but couldn’t find anyone to do custom hats at an affordable price. So I was looking at a bunch of different places online, and sites like lids kept coming up. where they don’t know if they remember them as being the hat shop in the mall where you could, you know, walk in, go up to the little kiosk, and have them make you a custom hat.

You know you were going to pay for the hat, you were going to pay for the custom roller, you were going to spend a setup fee, and when you walked out of there, you might drop 75 bucks on a custom hat.

I didn’t want to spend anywhere near that much money on a custom hat, and I kept seeing these setup fees, and it’s just that they seemed to get expensive. So I’m scrolling through different options on Google, and suddenly I see the Queensboro website list as an option. And it made me remember a story that a friend told me.

He owns a cleaning business – sparkling facility services, they do commercial cleaning, and we were talking about logoed shirts one day because I told them I’m picking up some more for my business. So he was telling me about this company that uses Queensborough. They’re affordable pricing now for my company stuff. I use screen printing. So much of his is embroidered, and he told me that Queensborough is fantastic for colored clothing.

So because it came so highly recommended from him, I decided, well, let me check out what Queensborough has to offer, and then you know I’ll place an order. Queensboro if you’re not familiar with them, there’s no invoice. This is just a shipping label. I wanted to see exactly how much I paid for this hat, but if you click on the about me page or about the company it’s, it’s pretty interesting. They tell you that they will not charge you a setup fee, and in a nutshell, their objective is to introduce you to their company without spending an arm and a leg because they know that new customers only want to order one thing and they shouldn’t have to pay these hefty setup fees. What they want to do is they want to provide you with a product that you are pleased with so that you become a return customer.

So you know they absorb that setup fee in hopes that you will continue to do business with them because they produce a quality product. So I was pleased to see that there was no setup fee involved. I don’t think I paid to ship either. So this hat was like $36 or $37 for custom embroidery.

You can’t beat that. I think that’s fantastic. It’s cheaper than what I saw from places like lids and the other custom hat places. It fits, and it looks damn good too. Oh, so there’s a there’s item number 2. logon’s been redesigned; I’m still on the fence about when I will use it. New hats are in or new caps. I’m not selling them. I just bought one for myself. What else do I want to talk about?

I talked about the cigar shop visit. I want to talk about the bike, but I’m looking at the timer on this video, and it’s been super long, but I think I will do it anyway.

Changes to my 2022 Yamaha MT-09 SP

So anyway, I’ve got a lavalier mic, so I need to take my phone off the holder here and walk you over to the bike, so hopefully, none of the audio gets all janky when I do this.

I don’t m, and my little desk there, but this is my 2022 Yamaha Mt 09, and you’re probably wondering, have you done anything to the bike? Well, you may notice that the seat looks a little bit different. So I went out, and I ordered a comfort saddle with a story that I’m not happy with, and before I go putting the company on blast before I have it resolved, we’re just going to leave it at that there’s a problem with this seat. And, um, story for another time.

I’m in the process of getting it resolved. That’s why I say story for another time. I did the tank grips, which I did a video on. I added a  torque mount for a 360 camera down here on my frame slider so basically, I can have this thing kind of sticking off to the side, and it works well for me. I like these torque mounts better than I like U bolts from ram. So whenever I can use them, I do use them.

I install the quad lock – I’m not crazy about the wiring job; I may pull that wire and run it the other way. There’s a bunch of stuff on this side of the bike under the seat that I want that I was trying to avoid. So that’s why I came around this side. Only I’m not really thrilled with the way it looks.

Oh, I put my ASV levers on, and I wish I had bought the Shorty levers. So it didn’t make sense for me to record a video on installing the SV levers since I used blockhead tape to install my ASV levers. He did a great job with it, and it just didn’t make sense to do an install video on them that it’s already perfect. So go check out blockhead’s video for installing your ASV levers.

 As far as the levers go, I’m delighted with them. The fit and finish are excellent did use I I went with less expensive levers because the only difference from what I can tell is the finish. So if you want solid colors, black, and whatnot, I think they’re the F threes. they come in solid colors, but if you wish to like the gold plated, you’re not gold plated. Still, the gold color lever arm with different color configurations for the dial, you need to buy the more expensive lever that I don’t remember what the item number is.

 But I wound up using the less expensive stuff because I just wanted straight black with gold gold gold accents on the dial, so I didn’t need I didn’t feel compelled to spend the extra money on the additional colors because I wanted black. I wound up going with full-size levers because I feared the shorties would be too tight, but it was probably not the phrasing I was looking for because the lever is shorter. They require more force to operate when they’re faster. 

I think that’s going to do it anyway. As I said, this video is a bit different from the norm. I want to do more of these this style video, or I’m just sitting out in the shed or the garage and talking to you about random stuff that I can’t turn into a video, and this is kind of fun. So hopefully, you enjoyed it, and if you did, do me a favor and hit that thumbs-up button. It lets me know that I’m on the right track and producing content you enjoy. anyway, that’s going to do it thanks for watching. As always, ride safe, and I will catch you in the next one