As I’ve mentioned many times before, I don’t have a huge garage. I need to spin my bike sideways to get it to fit in there with my car. So this weekend I built a motorcycle dolly.
It’s not too complicated. It’s a platform on wheels. Unfortunately they cost $400+ if you buy them online or in a store. I had a bunch of leftover wood from the entertainment center that I built for the theater project. The basic design is two large pieces of 3/4″ MDF laid end to end with about four smaller pieces screwed in underneath for some reinforcement and to join the two top pieces together. I also had some 2×4’s that were ripped in half lengthwise and I placed those along the bottom for extra support. The whole platform sits on six strategically mounted 2.5″ caster wheels. Three of the wheels are placed under the three contact points of the bike (two wheels and a kickstand.) Each wheel is held on by four 5/16″ hex bolts. To get up on the platform, I’m just using another piece of 3/4″ MDF as a ramp. It’s not pretty, but guess what, it works and it’s surprisingly solid. Once the rainy season starts back up, I’ll be able to shove the bike in the back of the garage and keep my car out of the rain.
That’s another project checked off the list.
(The picture is a bit deceptive with those strips of unpainted wood, but you get the basic idea. Motorcyle on wood on wheels.)
[UPDATE] I gave this dolly away and upgraded to the Park-N-Move. Check out my post showing a video of the new bike with the new dolly.
I started a finished the second project on my list. There are now shelves in the garage. Thanks to a Home Depot housewarming gift certificate that arrived in the mail, it was pretty simple. Hopefully they'll stay up for a night or two before everything comes crashing down.
I officially sold the arcade machine today. I've had the word out on the street for the past couple months and finally had an interested party. He got a great deal out of it, but I'm just happy to have it off my hands. It was a 
If you're not playing fantasy football, you should be. No excuses. For those people who are in my league, I've set up a nifty little RSS feed that I think you'll enjoy. I wrote a program that logs into Yahoo every once in a while and pulls the latest standings, transactions, and scoreboard for our league and spits it out into an RSS feed. The URL is 
Rainy Day
It's a pretty gloomy day here in Jersey, but that's ok since I haven't had much time to look out the window. I've been too busy answering my phone and email. Apparently there was a patch applied to a bunch of servers and it simultaneously destroyed every one of the applications I support. Yada yada yada…
But on to more serious issues. I find myself bored at home. This is the first time in quite a while that I haven't had a project. Going back to the spring of 2004, here are the projects I can work on (the big ones that I remember anyway): the arcade machine, moving to the new house, the home theater, [break for a couple months for skiing], car iPod setup, motorcycle license, and the Ticawa shirts. I've been thinking for the past couple weeks and I just can't come up with a new project that really grabs me. I have a couple programming ideas but nothing that has really grabbed my attention yet. Poker has been a good diversion but I only play that for an hour or so every night. (I started with $50 and I have about $62. Not bad.) What I really want is some snow. I want to ski! Last year the first day we skied was December 18. Assuming a similar start date that means I have 4 months to wait.
Anyone have an idea for me?