Fuel Magazine Issue 13, About To Arrive

Fuel Magazine is one of the best looking publications out there, catering to all things on the underbelly of motorized machines. The look, the vibe and the design are top notch. Eye candy at it's best and surely another great issue about ready to hit the masses square over the head.

Order your copy today

James Bond might be quite jealous of this cover

One gorgeous Coupe

1934 Ford Tudor Hot Rod

Hustler Vintage Race Boat

Custom Lincoln Continental

Reno Divorce Featured In New Commercial With Triumph Motorcycles and Dime City Cycles

We cannot think of a better pairing than the music of Reno Divorce with Triumph Motorcycles. When we were asked if the music could be used for this particular commercial, of course the answer was yes. Damn stoked to see that Reno Divorce is resonating to such a mass audience and the fact that they were selected to be the complimentary music to the video introducing a new parts line to Triumph, courtesy of Dime City Cycles.

Get your copy of the Reno Divorce's - Lover's Leap

Find out about all things Triumph Motorcycles

Check out Dime City Cycles

Reno Divorce set for take off

Dime City Cycles Bonneville CR
New CR Product Line Allows Easy Customization of Triumph Classics

Triumph’s Bonneville-based Classics models are already well-established platforms for creating the perfect garage-built custom. Sometimes the biggest challenge is where to start. The all-new “CR” line of custom café racer parts and accessories from Dime City Cycles aims to fix that, making it easier than ever for riders to transform their bikes into custom creations right in their own garages.

By partnering with British Customs, The Speed Merchant and Progressive Suspension, Dime City put together a series of parts and accessories that quickly and easily reinvent Hinckley-era Triumph Classics (Bonneville, Thruxton, Scrambler) into unique, retro-styled café racers.

To help show off the new CR product line, Dime City created the Bonneville CR. One of the most striking modifications is the DCC Factory-fit Café Racer seat, a plug-and-play unit that installs easily and truly gives the bike that classic café racer feel. Other additions include DCC’s sleek speed bars, retro headlight bucket, low-profile gauge cluster and headlight brackets, plus DCC’s Factory-fit rearsets. A British Customs fender eliminator kit and retro-finned side covers from The Speed Merchant help accentuate the custom look.

To coax more speed from the Triumph’s already-powerful 865cc twin, the guys at DCC enlisted British Customs’ Predator exhaust system and airbox removal kit. A custom ECU tune from Triumph Twin Power makes sure all the new performance mods play together nicely. Suspension upgrades include Progressive Suspension performance springs up front and their killer 970 Series shocks out back. Finally, DCC’s Factory-fit stainless steel brake line kit adds extra bite to the Bonnie’s brakes.

Added up, the effect of the CR parts line is transformative. The Bonneville CR’s new lines are both modern and classic, high-performance and high-style. And the best part? All of the CR parts and accessories can be easily added to a Triumph Classic in your own garage. No welding, no fabricating. Just pick the look you want and start customizing. The only question left is…what will your dream bike look like?

The Dime City Cycles CR parts line is available now, thanks to help from St. Pete Powersports. For more on DCC’s Bonneville CR, and the entire CR parts line, visit dimecitycycles.com.

Mondo Posters Releases - Repo Man

Need some awesome new posters to decorate the walls? Check out the latest offering from Mondo Posters:

Tomorrow, we will release two amazing posters by Jay Shaw and Tyler Stout for Alex Cox's brilliant REPO MAN. The artwork on these posters come from the upcoming Criterion Collection Blu-Ray and DVD release of the film that will be available in stores tomorrow, April 16th. The work Jay and Tyler created captures the film perfectly. We are extremely proud of the final result and hope you like it, too. For more information on the Criterion release and to see a complete list of features on the disc, please visit the Criterion Collection website.

Please follow us on Twitter for the on sale announcement. These posters will be available online at a random time on Tuesday, April 16th.

Poster by Jay Shaw. 18"x24" screen print. Hand numbered. Edition of 195. Printed by D&L Screenprinting

Poster by Tyler Stout. 18"x24" screen print. Hand numbered. Edition of 510. Printed by D&L Screenprinting. $45

C3PO Recreated From Old Machinery and Computer Parts

Clever ideas keep us awake at night and constantly thinking "how did they do that." All the ideas and intriguing concepts we see, it fuels the ol' imagination into thinking of new ways to look at the recycle bin and what could be built. Finding C3PO has been the highlight of this perfect Sunday afternoon.

Learn more about Gabriel Dishaw and his zeal for recycled materials

Can't afford an authentic movie prop? Get something even better, a C3PO head made from scrap computer parts

Memory boards and old keyboards turned out to be a great combination

Got any scrap computer parts laying around? Well, then get to work making something as cool as this!

1975 Honda CB550 Custom That Ups The Ante

There is nothing quite like seeing a bike that just makes your jaw drop. Some builds feel dated as soon as they are coming off the bike lift and others reside in a nether region where era and craftsmanship come together to breathe new life into a ride that will surely turn heads wherever it may roam. This particular bike crafted by Kevin Dinsmoor of KDI Cycles proves that melding different time periods together can work quite well.

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"For a one-man band, Kevin Dinsmoor has had remarkable success. Based in the small town of Colchester in Connecticut, USA, he’s carved out a reputation as a builder of finely crafted vintage customs—like this Honda CB550F.

“The concept was hatched a couple of years ago,” says Dinsmoor, who runs KDI Cycles. “I wanted to prove to myself that I could build a bike from swap meet junk.” With $450 in his pocket, Dinsmoor bought a tired 1975 Honda CB550F, a swing arm, two wheels and a tank—all from different vendors.



Despite the budget nature of the build, Dinsmoor decided to avoid the retro café route. (“I have so many old café racers that go way too fast for the tires and brakes—and I like to ride fast!”) Instead, he decided to take the resto-mod approach.

Work started on the engine. It now has a crankshaft lightened by six pounds and balanced by APE, allowing the revs to spin up much faster. Dynoman big bore pistons bump capacity up to 605cc. Dinsmoor also swapped out the stock CB550F cylinder head for a Mike Rieck special—complete with 1 mm oversize valves, titanium retainers, and heavy duty springs.



A Web Cam #358B ‘hot street’ cam was dropped in, and a Keihin CR29 carburetor bolted on. Gases now exit via a custom Yoshimura-style exhaust. Other uprated parts include a Pamco high performance electronic ignition, a Motogadget speedo, a Barnett clutch and a custom-made transmission output shaft. The starter motor has gone, saving a few more pounds, with the space now taken by a crankcase breather.

The stock CB550F suspension has been replaced by newer components better able to handle the extra power. The front end is now from a 2003 Honda CBR900RR, and the swing arm from the swap meet, a 1995 VFR, has been modified by Pro Kart.) The rear suspension, steering damper and brakes are all from a Suzuki GSX-R750. The wheels are Marchesini, now shod with Michelin Pilot Power sportbike tires.



Dinsmoor has excelled at the bodywork, with a keen eye for matching parts or creating his own. The tank is from a 1976 Kawasaki KZ400, but the seat unit is hand-made from aluminum. The fairing comes from Glass From The Past, and sports a Honda Accord fog light. The powdercoating was handled by Competitive Edge Coatings, and the paint by K&W Custom Auto. They’ve both done a magnificent job.



And if you detect a Ducati Paul Smart influence in the colors, you’re right. “That came from my visit to the Barber Vintage Festival, where I saw some amazing Ducks,” says Dinsmoor. The number 16 on the tail? “I raced WKA Karts for ten years, and my last number was 16. Kind of fell in line.”

For more on this lovely CB550F, head over to this build thread on the Do The Ton forum. And follow KDI Cycles’ news via Facebook."

Images courtesy of Ron Agnello, © Strongbox Photography Studios LLC. Shot at the New England Air Museum.

Enjoying Music Is Deeply Rooted Within Brain Actitivity... Say What?

Don't let folks fool ya into thinking that you are supposed to like a band because everyone else already does. That is just brain washing. Ummm errr... wait a minute, maybe they are onto something and don't quite realize exactly what it is they are trying to sell you on. Read the article below and learn exactly why it is that certain pop music could be so damn über popular.

Link to post on yahoo

Diagram of the human brain from ISRC.edu

"Activity in certain regions of the brain can predict whether you'll like a new song enough to buy it, whether it's indie rock like Florence + The Machine's "Drumming Song" or experimental electronica like Ratatat's "Neckbrace."

Those are just two songs used in new research that explains how new music rewards the brain. The study found that the more active the nucleus accumbens (a small area deep in the brain), the more likely people are to shell out cash for new music. This willingness is especially strong when the nucleus accumbens interacts with a brain region that stores memories of old music.

The study helps explain how something as fleeting and intangible as a string of musical notes can be so rewarding, said study researcher Valorie Salimpoor, a doctoral student at McGill University in Canada. [Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind]

"It's all happening in your head. You have nothing to show for it," Salimpoor told LiveScience. "But somehow, because we have the cognitive resources to be able to process and appreciate these temporal sound patterns, we can experience really intense emotions from them."

The Draw Of New Music

Music seems a uniquely human phenomenon, and it appears across cultures. In fact, a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December 2012 found that even across vastly different cultures, people express primal emotions through music in strikingly similar ways.

Music is known to engage emotion-processing regions of the brain, and Salimpoor and her colleagues had previously found that music perceived as pleasurable triggers the release of dopamine in the brain, a neurochemical associated with feelings of reward. Food and sex, which are necessary for survival and reproduction, also trigger dopamine release.

That earlier study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, found that people didn't only receive jolts of dopamine at their favorite parts of a song; they got dopamine boosts right before, too. The finding suggested that anticipation is a major part of the pleasure derived from music, but it wasn't clear from where the anticipation was coming.

"Are you anticipating your favorite part because you know it's coming up, or is it the case that you have some general knowledge of music based on all your previous experiences?" Salimpoor said. To find out, Salimpoor and her colleagues recruited 126 participants and whittled them down to a group of 19 who had very similar tastes in music — they turned out to be lovers of electronica and indie tunes. The researchers used music-recommendation programs to find new songs these participants had never before heard, and then had them listen to those songs for the first time in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI). [Brain Mixtape: List of Songs Used in the Study]

Rewarding Notes

As the participants listened, researchers used the fMRI to track blood flow to various brain regions; this blood flow, in turn, is correlated with activity in those regions. After hearing a song clip, participants could choose to buy the tune with their own money, bidding to spend either 99 cents, $1.29 or $2, depending how much they'd liked it.

The researchers found a strong link between how much a person was willing to spend on a song and the nucleus accumbens, in that a busier nucleus accumbens was related to more willingness to drop some cash. This brain region is known to be associated with reward, particularly forming expectations of reward.

"It's really cool, because it's suggesting that as we're listening to new music, we're constantly making predictions," Salimpoor said. "This really links back to our previous study of anticipation and why it would play a role in music."

What's more, as people were willing to spend more money on a song, their nucleus accumbens showed greater co-activity with another brain region called the superior temporal gyrus. This is an auditory region that essentially stores sense memories of music heard in the past. If you've heard a lot of Western music, your superior temporal gyrus will have a different "library" than if you grew up listening to music from East Asia, for example.

The study suggests that when you hear new music, your brain flips through this library, building expectations from templates of music heard before. If those predictions are confirmed or pleasantly subverted, you may find yourself loving the new tune.

"We can look at music as an intellectual reward," Salimpoor said, adding, "It's essentially pattern recognition, and this is something humans are very good at."

Several other brain regions were also linked with finding music rewarding, including the emotion-processing amygdala and two higher-level emotion-processing regions found in the frontal lobe of the brain. Another frontal lobe region, the inferior frontal gyrus, was also linked to finding music pleasurable. This area handles advanced thought, working memory and pattern sequencing.

The fact that the brain recruits these advanced brain regions may explain why humans seem alone among animals in appreciating music, Salimpoor said.

"We're able to obtain pleasure from a sequence of sound that has no inherent reward in itself," she said.

The researchers report their findings Friday (April 12) in the journal Science."

Old Indian Motorcycles Never Die

Old Indian motorcycles never die as this one demonstrates. Brought back to life after 40 years at Kiwi Motorcycles Riverside California 2010, this 1948 classic ticks over like a vintage clock.

Biting Elbows Drops One Gnarly Video

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George Carlin Talks On The Pussification Of America