According to every news cast we are in the biggest Recession since the Depression.  I don't know about you but for us little people, you know the ones who work for a living things are just about the same as before the Recession.  The big change I see is people might have some money to spend on their passion but if they are spending their hard earned and somewhat scarce money they want a good value for their money. 
Most of the people that are in the motorcycle business, got into this business, _originally_,for the sheer love of motorcycles and the freedom that they offer you when you are out on the road.  _Most_ of us that took the life altering step and got into the motorcycle business did not get into the business to become millionaires.  Rather, we just wanted to be around motorcycles and the people who ride them, everyday of our lives.  I mean everyday, 24/7 and 365 days a year and every waking minute, never tiring of be totally immersed in the life of motorcycling.  During the boom of the 1990's and the early years of the millennium the HD dealerships got larger and became Walmarts of sorts designed to move as many motorcycles as possible and to efficiently accumulate as much money as possible from as many customers as possible.  Then to increase their bottom line, HD started to shop over seas, especially in China, for suppliers for more parts for our "American Made" iconic motorcycles.  The "Made in China"  stamps became more and more prevalent on parts that cost hundreds of dollars.  Made in China and Made in India are even more prevalent in the Motor Clothes section in the Multi Million Dollar HD Wally Marts.  Who wants to pay $500.00 for a official HD leather jacket made in China?The owners and staff become focused on the dollars that could be made rather than the sheer love of motorcycles.  It became a matter of quantity over quality in respect to product, service and customer service for many of these HD Wallymarts. Owners became millionaires and customers became a pain in the rear that _had_ to be dealt with to maintain the almighty flow of cash it takes to now operate the huge stores.  Customer Service became an exception rather than the rule.
It is the time we get back to our roots so to speak.  The small, qualified independent shops that are still in business are in the business for the love not the millions of dollars.  They will go that extra mile for you and your motorcycle.  Now is the time to spend your money with the shop that appreciates your business.
Buy American.  Be an American.
Ride them if you got them.
Ugly Gene

These days everybody has to watch their bottom line and make some hard and fast decisions on where to spend the little bit of money they have left after paying those bills.  Most times these decisions are made based on what the return is for each dollar spent.  For many of us we need to make the house payment, health insurance, car insurance, car payment, and so on.  If you are reading this you probably have a motorcycle sitting out in the garage and more than ever a lot of us are asking ourselves, "Is this a necessary Expense?" I can only tell you how I have felt about this for the past 36 years I have been riding Harley-Davidsons.  My feeling is that it is _NOT_ a luxury but a necessity of life.  If I add up all of the things that motorcycling has given me compared to the cost, my return has been so much more than any other investments I have made in my life.  Now that we have decided to keep that motorcycle out in the garage that is patiently waiting for us to take it out for a ride let's examine some ways to save on the up keep and maintenance of our investment.. 

In 1975 President Gerald Ford signed the Magnuss Moss Act.  This law protects all consumers from being forced to service any purchased products, such as motorcycles, at the originating dealer or any franchise of the manufacturing Company.  This type of coercion is still being employed by many big dollar Motor Company Boutiques in our country.  The truth is that we as consumers reserve the right to maintain our own vehicles ourselves or a qualified mechanic of our choosing.  There are many very qualified mechanics out there that are not found in the high dollar dealerships that will maintain your pride and joy for a substantial savings to you just for the fact that smaller independent shops do not have the huge overhead of maintaining a HD Boutique.  The things you have to remember is in order to retain your warranty is that you should have documentation that the services were done at the appropriate intervals.  It is also unlawful for any manufacturer to require you to use only their recommended brand of oil, spark plugs, filters, etc.  The only service that the manufacturer can require you to return to a factory authorized dealer is for a repair that they are willing to pay 100% of both parts and labor.  Any other services that are performed on your motorcycle are left to you, the owner's discretion of where these are performed and what products are used.

Small, independent shops can give you and your motorcycles more of a one on one, personal service experience which could very well be lacking at your local HD Boutique.  The small independent shops will often treat you and your Hog more like a friend or at least a valued customer and not just another number on the VIP club list or imposition if you have a specific problem or question. I encourage you to do a little shopping around and spend your motorcycle dollars where  they will go the farthest and that very will might be your local independent shop.

Ride them if you got them
Ugly Gene

This year we needed to find a new location for the starting point for our 28th Rogue Valley Toy Run.  We had started our event at _another_ location for 9 nine years in a row, but due to several changes in circumstances one being we had out grown the _other_ location we needed to move on.  Sometimes change is a scary thing especially when you have reached a stage of life where it is really comfortable and things are going along good, it is very easy to become stagnant especially if things are going along _OK_.  But, thankfully, life sometimes will step in and turn things upside for you and it is up to you to sort it out.  Anyway Life happened and we needed a new starting point and the local Yamaha dealership, Naumes Oregon Motor Sports had a huge parking lot which is probably almost 2 acres that they enthusiastically cleared of there inventory of trailers, ATVs and motorcycles and welcomed Lori and I and about 1000 of our closest friends to have the toy run at their location.  Not only was Naumes a great host but some one upstairs smiled down on us and gave us a beautiful clear sunny day which is rare in December here in Oregon.  Also new was our sponsoring TV Channel KDRV 12 and  radio Station The Drive 103.  Both of these sponsors went above and beyond the call of duty by creating some great commercials and dedicating a lot of air time to get the word out about our Toy Run and the new location.  All of our sponsors, Appliance Depot, Star Collision, Thunderstruck, Betterview Glass, Breeze Financial, Starbucks, Paper Trail Book Keeping, Southern Oregon HOG, all made substantial cash donations to our cause which is the Children's Miracle Network at the Rogue Valley Medical Center in Medford, Oregon.  We had more volunteers for this year's event then ever before. With all of the obstacles that were presented to us this past few month's including the loss of both of our jobs we persevered and changed these obstacles into opportunities to make this event even better with record setting attendance and a huge show of support for Lori and myself.  Thank you Rogue Vally.  Thank you Thank you Thank you. Just remember When Life seems real easy the Wolf is at the door.

It is really getting very crowded out here in the virtual world of the internet.  Do they still call it the virtual world?  I do not know, I have a very hard time keeping up with the latest terms and additions to our language and the what is new and cool.  Speaking of cool I was very glad to see that cool still means what it did back in the 60's and 70's when I was using it in almost every sentence.  But I am getting a little off the track.  I have been asked a lot lately, "Why do you call your blog the Real Hawg Blawg?"  Well the old saying is that the best ideas are stolen or borrowed and that is the case in point.  I have had Roguehawg.com up and on the internet since 1997 providing a service for others, like myself that own and ride Hawgs because it is at the core of our very being,not a hobby, not an investment but a requirement for life that is rooted somewhere deep in our DNA.  Have you ever watched a small boy 2 or 3 years old playing with a toy motorcycle and suppling his own soundtrack of what that toy, if it was the real motorcycle, would sound like?  Have you ever watched the eyes of a boy or girl when they see a motorcycle parked in a lot or in a showroom.  Their eyes open wide with wonder, they become hypnotized by the coolest thing this side of heaven, a motorcycle and they _have_ to touch it.  Have you ever asked yourself how do they know how magical it is to be on a motorcycle.  But I am wandering off the trail again, any way I started my website in 1997 about a year before I started to work for the local official HD Motor Company Store.  I was very new to website building but with the tremendous support and help from my lovely bride, Lori, we got my website up and running and back in those early days we set up different pages for different sections at Roguehawg.com, there was Hawg Pen which was the front page and gave everybody a idea what was going on with my website.  Our mission statement was and still is to provide a great place to sell those old parts you do not need anymore to other enthusiasts who do and to be stand up and honest and do what we say we are going to do at all costs. It is all too rare today to find people and more importantly businesses that will do exactly that and be true to their word but here in the Hawg Pen and at Roguehawg.com we will be true to our mission statement.  The other sections on the Hawg Pen were the Hawg Parts section where the parts and later motor cycles were being sold, Hawg links where you could get your website link posted if your website contents complemented our purpose.  The decision to use the word Hawg was a deliberate one because we did not want our website to be confused with the Harley Owners Group, H.O.G., which is owned nationally by the Harley-Davidson Motor Company and locally by the franchised HD company store.  In fact we have a disclaimer at the bottom of all of our pages just to make sure our visitors would not be confused.  We are not endorsed by the Motor Company, we are just huge enthusiasts of the product especially the antique ones.  We set a precedent on our website in 1997 using the word Hawg in prefix of all of our sections, but back in 1997 we had not heard of a blog.  If you would have asked me what a blog was back in 1997 I would have guessed a swamp filled with logs or a really wet tree log or an expression first used on the Seinfeld show.  You know Blog, blog, blog or was that blah, blah, blah?  But I digress again, as the years marched on the blog was invented so that people could put their 2 cents in on and about any subject so we at roguehawg.com saw the value in this option and added it to our website but the local HD Motor Company store decided that not only did they want to offer their own blog feature but they wanted to call theirs the Hawg Blog for the very same reasons that I mentioned before.  They did not want to associate their blog with H.O.G..  Does that sound right to you?  The dealership owns a H.O.G. chapter but does not want to associate their blog with H.O.G.?  So the dealership decided to name their blog, Hawg Blog.  I guess I came up with a good idea if, in fact, imitation is the highest form of flattery.  So please friends, do not be fooled by imitations get the real thing here at THE REAL HAWG BLAWG.
Ugly is a Good Thing
Ugly Gene

Welcome to the real Hawg Blawg.  I  am amazed at the impact of the internet has had on our society and the way we communicate with each other.  In 1997 I started my humble web site , roguehawg.com slightly before I was aware of ebay or possibly before ebay existed.  I started out with text only ads and if someone wanted pictures of what I had to sell I would take some shots with my 35 mm camera, [remember film ?] and send the pictures via Snail Mail.  But it was not long, with encouragement from my wife Lori, that I made a big step to speed up the information exchange by taking the pictures with my camera then taking the prints and scanning them, saving the file and uploading the shots to my web site and after becoming more adept with email, again thanks to my very smart and patient wife, I was soon emailing with the best of them or at lest trying to.  I was still learning about pixels, gifs, jpegs and file sizes but I kept at it all along dealing with a dial up line and aol.  What a combination that was, first when we signed up for aol the standard monthly fee allowed 120 minutes of internet use then they would charge for the minutes you went over which was a lot because back then on a dial up connection you would spend what seemed like hours to down load a page that had any kind of pictures on it.  I am serious, I would go to a page and it would be grinding away trying to upload a picture which would load in strips one strip at a time until finally, if you had not lost your phone connection by now, you would see a picture on the web page.  It was then that I figured out I wanted my page to load as fast as possible so I stayed with mostly all text in my ads and if someone wanted to see some pictures I would then email them some.  What few pictures I had on my page were gifs which were very grainy and lacked a lot of detail compared to jpegs and bitmaps.  Around 1999 I discovered ebay and my hobby/second job changed from swap meet season being a couple months in the early spring then a couple months in early fall to year round.  I got to go to a swap meet everyday sometimes in my underwear.  Ebay changed the swap meets though the change took a while because most of the older, hard core vintage motorcycle enthusiasts were not computer geeks at first.  In fact I was, if it is proper to honk my own horn, on the cutting edge of blending the technology of the internet and computers and old greasy motorcycle parts that antique motorcycle owners needed, wanted and were desperately searching for.  With my discovery of ebay I also discovered to be a player on ebay I desperately needed a digital camera so I went a made a fairly major investment on a new Cannon digital camera which was touted to be the best and would take the most highly detailed pictures known to man at a 1.2 mega pixel maximum.  It sure sounded like a lot to me back then and the pictures were great compared to what I had been doing with my old film camera.  The dial up connection was still a challenge and the challenge was how big to make my pictures so they would load fast enough on ebay, not lock up my computer or loose my dial up connection half way through the upload.  But I persevered and jumped into the ebay pool which sometimes filled with sharks and gators but for the most part just people like me looking through one man's junk for our treasures.I have been able to finish my restoration projects thanks in no small part to ebay and I have passed on parts I did not need to others who did and pay for more parts I needed.  The one thing that ebay will never provide is the human interaction that happens at a swap meet.  The tall tales that are told, the bartering, selling , buying, learning and teaching about the intricacies of our passion, the antique motorcycle.  Motorcycles have been as close to a religion for me as anything I have experienced on this earth in my 52 plus years.  I have had a pair of handlebars and a motor under me for 40 of those years and I hope I got at least 40 more.  Ugly Gene