Scoot Richmond

Since I inherited it in 2004, I have logged over twenty five thousand miles on my little yellow Honda. In that time she's had to spend a little time in motorcycle shops, both in this state and others, due not only to wear and tear, but also to the fact that the original owner took her in a direction just south of that special redneck variety of incompetence. Let's just say that there's been some necessary "re-working" needed. It has been my experience that most motorcycle shops are a huge pain in the ass. I have a suspicion that most of the motorcycle clientele out there are arrogant hard-heads or swaggering loudmouths, I don't know, but I have been patronized, ignored, barked at, second-guessed and my little yellow Honda has been hacked-up, half-assed, and landed in the back of the hopper ever since I started frequenting these places. I'm not a tough guy, I'm not a mechanic and don't count motorcycling among my intellectual pursuits, but I love Thumper (yes that's the name), I've done a lot to keep her, and I ride the ever loving shit out of her.  All this is to tell you, friends and neighbors, that Scoot Richmond may be the last shop my motorcycle ever goes to. Sure they're a scooter shop. In the last two years, they've handled stuff both mundane and extraordinary, and I've never come away feeling like an asshole. They've gone back and worked with stuff that I've done, not charged me too much and even been nice about it. Here's an example:

Since I've had the thing, it's always seemed to lack a little something, granted it's got a 750cc engine that will never have the same amount of ass that bigger bikes do, but it seemed to run at less than it's full potential. After having asked about this for years and told nothing was wrong, I just wrote it off as I needed a bigger bike. Then last spring it died and I realized we had been running through batteries at a rate of about one a year. I loaded it up in the truck and took her down to Scoot. Here's where the story get's interesting-- the sales associate actually listened to me when I told him what was going on and seemed to actually consider what I thought was the problem.  He wrote all that shit down on the ticket. In a day or so (less than two days! can you believe it??) he called me back and said yes it needed a new battery, but the mechanic had done some snooping online and in a forum I had visited myself, found what seemed to be a critical error with that model's electrical processes. Dude had eliminated my suspicion that the no-name, aftermarket, good-old boy pipes were messing up the jetting in the carburetor, and being that he was a BMW certified carb guy, I took his word for it. Anyway, a week and maybe three hundred dollars later, bang, Thumper rides home like a completely different machine. The proper term I believe would be "runs like a scaled dog." Nine months previous to this I had handed the exact same scenario over to the dealership, they shoved yet another new battery in it, charged me whatever they had always charged me for it and let me get on down the road.

Here's another for-instance: about two years ago a friend of mine, a woman, complains to me that her Bonneville is running funny yet she's loathe to take it to the Harley mechanic she's been dealing with for years. Apparently the last time she took it to him he laughed and diagnosed the problem as being that since she's a female, there's no possible way that she rides her bike frequently enough to keep it running properly. I immediately said "Fuck that guy, take it to Scoot. They'll be nice to you." So she does and a week later she calls and says the problem is fixed, didn't cost that much money and everybody was really nice to her. UNBELIEVABLE.

So yeah, Scoot Richmond is awesome. I love Scoot Richmond. If I could marry Scoot Richmond and give it a happy life til the end of my days, I would but unfortunately I can't. The End.