If you have any financial stability these days it seems there are many opportunities to take advantage of, now there can never be enough deals out there but here is one that sounds great.  Starting at $239, you can grab a room at the Hard Rock Hotel for two nights at their San Diego location but included with your stay is a Harley-Davidson bike rental.

Not everyone can pull off a tattoo, I know I can’t.  Or maybe I’m just too scared to ink up my entire arm for the rest of my life, sporting a faded and stretched color blotch when I’m 75 with my grand kids trying to guess what it once was.

Well Harley-Davidson has a solution for me (and maybe you!)

Fake it!

Harley-Davidson’s new clothing line has been designed by “Tattoo Masters” to give you that authentic tattoo look, but on a shirt.

Show your individuality with H-D Ink, a new, limited-edition brand of MotorClothes® apparel. Inked by tattoo masters from around the world and cut from the highest-quality materials, H-D Ink is available exclusively at select H-D dealerships

They’re actually quite fashionable if yer into skulls, eagles, spider webs, and dragons.  I actually think the women’s shirts are way cooler then the men’s.  The prices range from $60 to $95 USD and can’t be bought online so head over to a dealership to pick a few up before they are gone.

See the rest of the post for a fancy H-D commercial and a few pics of their apparel.  Head over to Harley’s site to see the full line.

There’s a great series running on Motorcycle.com all about getting you and your motorcycle ready for road racing.  If you are interested at all getting out on the track to be just like those MotoGP racers, you have some very interesting reading ahead of you.

The series is very extensive, it starts off with just you and your motorcycle and proceeds all the way to what you should expect, learn, know and bring to the track.  Any expenses made are highlighted in each article so you can get an idea just how much it will cost to get you on your way with this addiction.  The author, Jeremiah Knupp, took his 2000 Ducati 748 along on this journey.

Here’s 9 handy guides to help you start motorcycle road racing:

1. Introduction: Leaving the lawn chair

2. Geoff May: one man show to AMA pro – Pointers and Interview with Pro Geoff May

3. Prepping your bike for track school

4. Cleared for Take-Off: Getting Your Race License

5. Building a Supersport racer – the minimum

6. Building a Supersport racer – the priorities

7. Advanced Supersport modifications

8. Building a Supersport Racer – Stage III, the Finishing Touches

9. Preparing for your first race weekend

Even if you don’t plan on ever getting into road racing, I found the articles to be quite fascinating as to how Jeremiah Knupp (the author) got prepared for his new hobby.

Give the articles a skim at least, there’s some great pictures from photographer Holly Marcus to check out.  I’ve included a few shots below that I pulled from some of the photo galleries.

QLINK is taking online shopping to a new level with their ‘Ready-to-Ride’ delivery service.

What is Ready-to-Ride delivery?

Well, QLINK’s online store allows you to buy their motorcycles right from your computer chair.  It’s pretty surreal to be able to add a motorcycle to your “cart” and proceed to the online check out.

After purchasing a motorcycle online, QLINK will look for a QLINK dealership in your area for you to be able to pickup your new bike.  If there’s no dealership nearby, QLINK will DELIVER the motorcycle to you in a giant crate!

That’s pretty mind blowing and a pretty awesome way to help out your customers.  The bike is fully tested before being shipped and in most cases requires no assembly from the rider (except maybe attaching the mirrors).  The battery is even juiced up and ready to go.

Kudos to QLINK for this pretty amazing service they provide.

Check the rest of the post for a few shots QLINK took of one of their motorcycles being crated up for delivery.  Check out their online store to witness the whole “add to cart” motorcycle shopping.

I’ve got a lot of respect for Dave Grohl.  He’s amazingly talented and very driven.  Even after Nirvana, the guy is still kicking and in the spotlight with the Foo Fighters and the millions of other side projects he’s done (ie: Queens of the Stone Age).

Apparently he’s also a big motorcycle guy.

Harley-Davidson did a little video on Dave, featuring him drumming on a snare drum to the exhaust pipes of a Harley-Davidson.  The seven minute video goes on about how Mr Grohl bought his first motorcycle when the Nirvana album “Nevermind” started to become big.

He got his wife hooked on motorcycles when she saw a Goldwing Trike, and now they both love the thing.

To hear (and see) all about Dave Grohl and his experiences with motorcycles (and how it helps him unwind), check out the rest of the post!

Harley-Davidson was kind enough to post on Twitter a PDF of a list of things to bring with you on a long motorcycle trip.

And what a list!

It’s hard to believe you could squeeze all this stuff onto yourself and your bike.

A few interesting things in the list are:

• Duct tape
• Emergency Blanket
• Small towel
• Cargo net
• Replacement fuses
• Change of shoes
• Tool kit

I guess Harley is expecting a very long ride!  Seems like you would be ready for anything with the long list they’ve provided.

Check out the rest of the article for an image to glance at, a PDF to save on your desktop, and the full list in plain text to copy and paste into an email to send to a buddy.  Thanks to Harley-Davidson for the list!

If you are planning a long trip, bone-up on your motorcycle safety and training over at Motorcycle.com’s Rider Training and Safety section.

Adjectives fail me.  This almost seems like one of those sci-fi movies where an evil scientist tries to cross two deadly animals together to create the ultimate killing machine.

So what are we looking at?  It seems to be the deformed love child of a Citroën Xantia and a Kawasaki 1000 RX.

This custom project, called “Snaefell“, cost its creator about 15000 Euros and 10 years of part time work. I have to wonder “why?”.

I guess if you really love the thrill of riding a motorcycle but none of your friends and family do, this concept makes sense.  Or not.  Would they want to be seen in this?  Hopefully those windows are tinted.

Check out the rest of the post for more shots of this… hybrid.

Love Batman?  I mean, REALLY love batman?  Love Batman enough that you dress up like him even when it’s not Halloween?

Hey, me too!  Now you can look like Batman even while riding your motorcycle and be fully protected from the elements (and maybe falls).

It was going to happen sooner or later.  With Batman’s latest movie, The Dark Knight, featuring Batman on his Bat-cycle (or “Batpod”), you knew there had to be some motorcycle-batman crossover paraphernalia.  Actually I’m quite shocked this wasn’t out sooner.

Universal Designs are making officially licensed Batman: The Dark Knight motorcycle jackets, pants, gloves and boots that replicate what Bruce Wayne wore while chasing down that pesky Joker.  And it looks to be the real deal, with removable CE approved armor in the jacket and pants so it’s not just some fancy costume!

There’s no indication of price or when these products will actually come out.  Hopefully I can convince the editors at Motorcycle.com to try them out (mainly just to try and embarrass them).

Check out the rest of the post for features and a pic of the whole outfit.  I’m not sure about those wrist-blade thingys.  Seems like they would poke an eye out!

Maybe if I had one of these as a child instead of a traditional rocking horse, I’d be out building log cabins, competing in arm wrestling competitions, and “man’ing up”, instead of sitting at my comfy desk, looking at pretty pictures on the internet with my iMac and sipping Orange Pekoe tea.

You want to set your kids on the right path early on in life.  Starting them on a rocking horse hog could one day lead them to being the next Jesse James or Evil Knievel.

You want that, don’t you?

In the words of Jesse “The Body” Ventura in the movie Predator:

Bunch of slack-jawed f#@!#s around here. This stuff will make you a god damned sexual Tyrannosaurus, just like me.

See the rest of the post for more shots of this custom made motorcycle rocking horse.

The world is getting more and more paranoid about safety for children.  Sure, this can be a good thing in some aspects but in others it’s just ridiculous.

In America, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act became a law which allowed congress to ban products that could be harmful due to traces of lead found in them.  Sounds like a good idea on paper but it seems that this could be doing more harm than good.

Youth motorcycles and ATVs may contain a small amount of lead in some parts of these vehicles such as the alloy used to connect AZ batteries terminals.  Because of this, the CPSIA can ban all of these recreational vehicles from children. The Motorcycle Industry Council claims that this amount of lead and the way it might ever interact with a child (ie: not swallowing it) would never cause any harm.

Banning toys with lead in them was to make sure that if a child happens to put a toy car (for example) in their mouth, they wouldn’t get lead poisoning from such an innocent act (we’ve all put toy cars in our mouths at some point as kids!).

Motorsport can be and is a family sport.  I remember going to a motocross show as a kid with my friends and family, marveling at the high-flying dirt bikes.  Most, if not all of the professionals out there on bikes probably got their inspiration under the same scenario.  They saw those amazing feats and exciting races and had to get on a bike.

And they did, and at a very young age.

With the ban of these recreational vehicles catered to kids, where will the new batch of racers come from?  Can the sport even survive without giving young enthusiasts a chance to try it out?  Will youth riders start riding adult sized vehicles and be in even more danger?

My real question is: Does the tiny amount of lead found in the alloy in some small bits of metal (that will never get ingested) even matter when kids are now using cell phones, staying indoors to play video games, sitting at computers all day, eating junk food and doing tons of other things that can do more harm than good?  Would denying them the fun, excitement, experience and even the education of riding be better when the alternative might be picking up a video game controller instead?

Could the industry avoid this whole ordeal by improving and developing parts to not include that lead?

What do you think about the ban of youth motorcycles and ATVs?

The Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC) is out to stop the ban and by golly they are giving it their best shot!

See the rest of the post for a few videos about the ban.  Head over to MIC to sign a petition and read up on their cause.  Follow them on twitter to stay up to date (we have!)