1993 Kawasaki Vulcan Rebuild

The timing was really perfect. I had just broken my femur riding Motocross, my last time on a sport bike at a race trick I'd been clobbered and re-broken my colarbone requiring yet another surgery to attach it all together... and my last ride on the street I'd gotten the gnarliest road rash of my life, and a few rides before that I hit a deer. Hard to picture that timing as perfect, but when it comes to a nice and mellow cruiser that gets amazing mileage, is far from sporty, and needed some basic time and attention... it had come at just the right point of my life.

I sold some other motorcycles, and picked this up as part trade towards one of the other ones. It needed a fair bit of work, but it wasn't all that big of a deal really. The first motorcycle I had owned was an EX-500, and oddly enough I was back on a bike that had the same engine grafted into it from the manufacterer. It's a relatively small bike by cruiser standards, but from the sport and dirtbike world it was a clunky gutless wimp of a motorcycle... exactly what the kid with shit tons of badluck on motorcycles needed... a cream puff of a bike to take him to the coast once and a while!

Thus began the story of myself and the Kawasaki EX-500. I was high as a kite on pain killers, I had to have my girlfriend load the bike up on a trailer for me, but I was going to have a working motorcycle to be old and stale on when my leg got better, and this was going to be it!