Behind the Scenes: Get Schooled With Sideburn

I try to evolve Sideburn all the time. We've increased in size four times in 24 issues, first adding more pages, then increasing in size, increasing in size again, then adding more pages again - always forward, never backwards.

We've added regulars too, Trophy Queen has run since issue 2, while the Who, What, Where interviews have been in the magazine since issue 3.

While some magazines are happy to print any old dross emailed to them, without checking it for accuracy, spelling, grammar or plain old interest, we try to serve up quality reads from a variety of sources. It often hard work, but it's the only way we want to do it. One of our most recent regulars is the riding guide called Get Schooled, and it's a good example of the process we go through.

The idea is an amateur dirt track racer (normally Dave Skooter Farm, sometimes me) interviews a pro racer for tips on a specific aspect of racing. It involves us tracking down a racer, and extracting some learned-the-hard-way knowledge out of them, then writing it up, then sending it to illustrator, Ryan Quickfall who does further research, even photographing to get the positions right, sending sketched ideas back and forth to me, then producing the final coloured artwork. And that produces two pages of the the 116 we serve up four times a year.

These are the subjects, and experts, and the issue they appear in...

21 Get the Holeshot with Johnny Lewis
22 How to Crash with David Aldana
23 Draft to Victory with Bryan Smith
24 Short Track badassery with Briar Bauman
25 Body English with Chris Carr

If you like magazines made with love and care, perhaps think about buying Sideburn magazine from sideburn.bigcartel.com. We'd appreciate it. G

Preliminary sketch sent from Ryan Quickfall to Sideburn HQ.

Follow-up photo, accompanied by note asking, 'Is this what Chris Carr meant?'

Final artwork before final inking.

Not For Aircraft Use & Velocitas Patch

Our new T-shirt does not suck.
£15 plus post. We ship around the world.
Sizes: Small to Triple XL
Printed in England on a Gildan Ultra, so this is an American style roomy T-shirt.

We finally found someone who could recreate the Death Spray Custom designed Velocitas Sinistro logo, that he did for us back in MMXII.
It features Dwayne the Dirt Track Dingbat (as created by Kar Lee) and the Latin translation of go fast, turn left.  £5 plus post.

Buy from sideburn.bigcartel.com

Wood Rotax Scam

If you're thinking of buying a bike or expensive bike parts online, read this. Sideburn reader John from London, learnt the hard way. To be clear - this is NOTHING to do with Ron Wood Racing. 

My name is John: For some time I have been dreaming of building a street tracker and it was at DirtQuake 2 that I decided now was the time to start.

On taking advice I decided on a Wood Rotax chassis of which there are about 500 in the world. I placed a 'Wanted' ad in vft.org and flattrack.com and waited.

The replies came in pretty quickly, I was offered complete bikes and various chassis most of which were not Wood at all. I am indebted to Elliott at Ron Wood Racing for helping me with the identification.

Then came a response from Spain, a complete Wood Rotax with photo which Elliott identified easily as a unique Wood. The guy was breaking the bike and still had the chassis, forks and wheels. Sounded the answer to my prayers so I duly paid money on Paypal. The seller then advised me of a tracking number which I duly checked via the courier website. 

Next day I was advised by the seller that the Paypal transaction had failed and he was arranging a refund of which Paypal notified me, some time later, by email. In order to secure the deal the seller then advised me that I needed to send him half the amount via MoneyGram which I duly did. Mug I hear you say...

24 hours later I got a mail from Paypal saying the refund had failed due to insufficient funds. I immediately raised a case with Paypal for non delivery of item. I contacted the seller who indicated that the Paypal account was being sorted and I had no need to worry. Unbelievably the seller then provided me with the log in details of his Paypal account so I could 'sort it'. I did a quick check and sure enough the account was 'limited' by Paypal and short of funds by $100. Next thing I get an email from the fake courier company saying I needed to pay 300 Euro in customs duty... Amazingly this needed to be paid in cash also. At this point I knew I was in trouble so played along saying I would pay the customs duty as soon as the refund arrived from Paypal. 

I was hoping that the seller/fraud team would not contact Paypal within the 10 day response period and I would get my money back from Paypal. All the time I was in dialogue with the seller but thankfully today Paypal settled the case in my favour so now I am just £600 down and not £1800.

Please take my advice and do NOT under any circumstances pay cash for an unseen item. Amazingly in the last couple of days as the scam played out I had an email from a guy. Not unexpectedly the courier web site was unavailable today.

Please read this and learn from one guy's error. I attach a picture of the bike (which bizarrely was cut and pasted from the Sideburn Blog) and of the fraudulent courier website. The Wood Rotax in the photo is owned by another Sideburn reader and nothing to do with the scam. The Scammers just googled the bike and found it on our site). 

The scammers :* *Gillen Statham: gillstath1999@gmail.com* *Jose Willmon: carterclark07@yahoo.com* *Lilian Bestman
The attempted scammers:* *Jensen Sorensen: *srjensn@gmail.com *Mark Garret: gar.mark4@gmail.com 
Thanks John

Town Moto Tech Night

Town Moto, one of our stockists in Canada, holds monthly tech nights for locals who have just bought their first motorcycle, or might want one, to learn the basics. The next one is about buying. Great idea. G

TOWN MOTO
132 Ossington Ave.
Toronto ON
M6J 2Z5
Canada

Thanks to Nick for this.

Flag Drops

Every order from Sideburn gets a free sticker. We're currently sending out Flag Drops Bull Stops. Investigate what we're selling at the Sideburn shop. G

Tips from the land of Mule

If you're building lots of custom battery boxes, why not have wooden batteries to build them around? Good thinking from Mule Motorcycles. G

The season can't start soon enough

T-shirt weather and a ton of interesting bikes and people turned up at the Ace today. I'll post photos this week. At the end, I spoke to Anthony Co-Built who echoed my feelings. He said 'It's been good today, but since Rollerburn all I feel I've done is stand around talking about bikes when I really want to race them.' Amen to that.

First 2012 UK practice next weekend and Daytona isn't far away either. G

Engineering flowchart

I love this. Thanks to Eastie for sending it. G

Flat track yoga

There's a lot of flat track racing going on this weekend (including the two-day meeting in Ammanford, Wales). Novices, if you haven't started your flat track yoga yet, now's the time. Side lunges are crucial. Gpaddock pilates

The Wisdom of Carr

Chris Carr emailed with some advice for me before this weekend's Scunthorpe race...

'Good luck this weekend. Don't worry about finding your limit, your limit will find you. Sorry, couldn't resist. Be safe, go fast, turn left, but most importantly, HAVE FUN! It's too dangerous not to enjoy.'
Chris

Photos: From Daytona 2011 courtesy of AMA Pro Racing

Before it's too late...

I feel terrible today, like my head's in a vice, but it looks like Spring outside. So, if you don't already own a motorbike, buy one. G
Above: Is Marcus Moto Design's Sporty 'Daily Dirt', on sale in Sweden.
Below: Suzuki GN400 board track-style street bike on Uk eBay. Thanks to Mike for the tip-off.

We should add, when Sideburn links to bikes on sale we have no connection with them, we're not vouching for them and we often know nothing about their history, we just find them interesting. OK? Buy beware and all that.

At The Printers

The East German sheet-fed printer is the business.

Plain paper in this end. That's a huge stack of it on that pallet. Each station is a different colour, plus a fixer and machine in the middle to turn the paper to print the other side.
Sideburn! You're up.
CMYK.
This fella loves printing and motorbikes. He gives Sideburn special attention. His desk scans the colours and shows the parameters on the computer screen. Then it's tweaked till it's as lush as possible without being over-saturated.

The colours are super-rich and you can see individual MetalFlake flakes on the Krook Street Racer's tank and every weld on the Metro Racing Outlaw. That's down to the paper and the print quality. This is a 32-page section before folding, binding and trimming. There are three 32-page sections and a cover in every 100-page issue.

I called in at the printers yesterday. I've worked in publishing for 15 or 16 years and I've never seen a magazine I've been involved with being printed. It's a good feeling.
We could easily get Sideburn printed for at least 20% cheaper than we do, but the printers we use now are brilliant, miles better than our original printers (in our experience). And we have to pay for that. But after spending six months on and off, working on the magazine and a lifetime to regret cutting corners we're willing to do that. With this in mind, the photo below made me laugh. G

The Wisdom of Rupert Paul

A thought to end the year with. I've been doing quite a lot of work with Bike magazine in the last few months and I found this short piece while I was doing some research. It was written by one of my favourite bike journalists, Rupert Paul (above). As the former editor of Performance Bikes (in its late-80s, early-90 cultural heyday), Rupert was instrumental in reinventing British bike mags. He also helped me get a job once and wrote about Mablethorpe beach races for Sideburn 3.
Anyway, I like this a lot (I retyped it, so if there are any mistakes, they're mine not his). G

It was the Buddha in one of his far from idle moments, who said that a meditation on death is the greatest meditation of all. Only when you are aware of how fragile and transient your time here is, can you truly and fully engage with life.
Riders love a risk or we'd live in jars packed with cotton wool. But are we that aware? Control freaks, more like. I love riding fast — don’t know anything else, really— and the kick comes from endlessly balancing skill against risk. But whenever I’ve crashed, the two or three seconds before show me who I really am - a very fragile, very mortal bag of skin, muscle and bone feeing deeply, deeply regretful. Thus, as the trajectory towards the car/ditch becomes obvious:
Myself (to imaginary omnipotent being): Could we start again, please?
Omnipotent being (in the guise of reality): Crunch.
Equally revealing is that, as soon as we feel able, we forget how scared we were and put on the bravado again. I once crashed in a busy street while carrying a giant thermos of tea in my rucksack - with the result that, as I got up, gushes of brown fluid splashed onto the floor. A small girl was horrified: ‘Oh look, mummy – blood!’ In seconds I went from total panic to laughing out loud as I explained.
The truth is, we kid ourselves that it’ll never happen. If we didn’t, we’d never get on a bike. RP

B is for BSA

From Gregory Mild...

My boy now 21 months old is doing both numbers on the loo. If you have children you appreciate how tricky it is.
I wanted to thank Sideburn as it was the only thing which made my boy sit on his bum for long enough to do the thing.
It is very educational, he can now recognize letter B thanks to BSA, as you can see on the picture.
Thanks a lot!
Greg
PS downside is that the number 5 is in shreds now, so need to order new one.

Good advice

Spotted in Brighton. What's Britain come to when people need to be ordered NOT to sleep in a wheelie bin? This isn't a one-off, it's on every bed-sized bin in the popular seaside resort. GI

German Architecture

Damning the wisdom of those with more of it (especially Jan Leek) headstrong I went and bought some secondhand 19" BMW snowflake wheels today, for my CCM tracker conversion. Couldn't resist these /7 series nut-less handlebar clamps either. A sort of cherry on the top of a cake still in the mixing bowl. Saturday I'm taking the bike and assorted bits to CoBuilt in Oxford, for some jiggery pokery to fit some of their lush yokes mated with Yamaha R6 forks. About bloody time. BP

'In meetings my mind wanders'

Says Mr SR500 project. Nice sketch.

Then I found this here. GI

One Arm Is Enough

Jason Griffin lost his arm when he was a nipper, and yet he still became a pro-class flat tracker. His story immediately relegates our half-baked efforts as totally poofy. Another SB#4 teaser... BP

Wise words

From Rouserworks

And Birmingham Small Arms via Poppawheelie