A couple weeks ago I made what will hopefully be a yearly trip to Birmingham for the Barber Vintage Motorcycle Festival. If you like old bikes, you have to go to this. There is a giant swapmeet, vintage bike races, dirt bike races, several bike shows, auctions, blah blah blah. You could spend three full days there and not see it all. This year the motorcycle forum I am on, DoTheTon.com got together with Dime City Cyles out of Florida and the producers of Cafe Racer TV to put on a cafe bike show. Since Nixon is nearly finished (they're never really finished are they?) I decided to enter my bike. To save you the suspense, I didn't win anything, but I had a great time.
A couple days before the show, I had to do some last minute work and apply the brushed finish to Nixon's tank. This took several evenings of sanding to get it to a point I was happy with. I didn't have time to rebuild the carburetors or seal the tank, so that will had to wait.
Friday afternoon I put the tank back on, loaded it in the trailer of my Dad's truck and headed off to Birmingham.
Kanticoy, one of the DTT members was gracious enough to let some of us from the forum camp out in his yard a few miles from Barber Motorsports Park. When I arrived it was dark and as always happens and any vintage motorcycle get-together, there were several bikes being worked on by flashlight. One of the members, xulf13, had taken a spill riding The Dragon on his way to Birmingham the day before. He had already gotten a new set of forks and was replacing his front end. Kanticoy helped me unload my bike from the trailer but when I tried to fire it up to park it with the rest of the bikes, it would only run on one cylinder. I decided to wait until morning to diagnose this problem and just pushed it over there. I set up my tent and had a few beers with some of the other forum members I was meeting in person for the first time and some I had met on our trip to Tennessee in July.
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