Intro to Motorcycles
I’ve been wanting to get into the world of motorcycles with my leatherwork for quite some time, but I wasn’t sure how to get my feet wet. So many aspects of bikes are geared toward leather. (There's a bad pun in there, I'm sure.) Leather seats, tank covers, saddlebags, leather jackets, and of course patches for those jackets to make them even more badass. I was overwhelmed with options and just didn’t know where to start.
I had an idea to go visit the really large Harley Davidson store in my area. There are always tons of people in there buying bikes and it seemed like a great place to start asking some questions. But for the most part, the folks in there weren’t looking for custom leatherwork, they were looking for official Harley gear (nothing wrong with that). I believe there was someone in their shop that did that for the store anyhow, so I knew I had to look elsewhere.
I found out later that one of my old high school friend's husband actually owns and operates his own custom bike shop. He was looking for some place to get some leather so he could make a tank bib for his own bike. I knew where to find it (and had several hides already in my workshop) so instead of just cutting him a piece to let him tinker with, I offered to make him a custom tooled bib instead. He let me take some measurements from his bike and we made up a quick template of what size and shape he needed. As of this writing, I’m not quite finished with it yet, but it’s looking pretty awesome as my first introduction into bike gear. (It also helped that his logo was a really badass skull and fun to carve)
-TLG
