jimmuller 

I wonder if the real Cinzano folks knew what kind of product placement they would be getting.

junkfoodjunkie

I am heavily addicted to jelly belly's and Dr. Pepper.... and snickers, and fast food. I actually have changed my diet quite a bit over the past years, but I still really enjoy these things.
My avatar is my 3yr old daughter helping clean up an RD.

Jake

SJX426 

SJX426 - Supercharged Jeep eXperiment 4 2 6 liter. While I was unemployed a few years ago, I designed a super charger kit for the Jeep 4.0 liter engine that would make it perform like a 6.0 liter. Set up an LLC to market it, built a prototype, then found a job. It sits in the garage.





The pic is the head tube of my recently purchase '83 Superissimo. Not very creative but I went OCD on pics.

gitarzan

Gitarzan was the first 45 I ever bought with my own money. (I also bought "In The Ghetto" at the same time, what a name that would make)

I choose that name for my moniker on AOL. I was a charter member. I've used it everywhere since about 1989. If you go somewhere and see a Gitarzan posting, It's a real good chance it's me.

The current avatar was seen recently on a deck of cards, as a joker. I loved it, went home, found an image and used it.

txvintage

Mine's a secret, hehehe.

Actually it comes from my first submergence in Vintage 2 wheeled machines, off road European and Penton motocycles from the late 60's and early 70's. It has been my user name for a group since about 1998 or 1999.

It just seemed a natural carry over for vintage bicycles.

I recently bought the first guitrar I could honestly call vintage, a 74 Giannini 12 string. It should get to come home in the next few days after the Luthier finishes my preferred set up. My wife is so very happy.

EDIT: The avatar is Wylie Coyaote. I put it up after getting back on my feet after last years fractured femur and knee debacle.

luker

cool thread. unfortunately, I haven't got a very good story to contribute. My username, is, um, my name. I suppose I should get busy some day and put up an avatar.

fiataccompli

Mine's a name that stuck a long time ago when a friend asked me if when i'd finished restoring one of my Fiats, it would be a "Fiat Accompli"...since then i've had various incarnations of a Fiat enthusiast, market-tracking, vanity, etc. site with that name, use the domain for my email address, and as an ID in general. The funny thing (to me, at least) was when I googled to find out how often people mis-spelled "fait accompli" to say "fiat accompli". My avatar is meaningless except that other than the rain it does portray something that I did quite by accident riding through a parking lot a few days ago (pure coincidence on the avatar, however).

gomango

Thanks!

The feeling is mutual.

I'm loaded with Mopar memories.

I am the offspring of a bonafide street racer. The first car I remember was our 65 Fury III with a 383 "Commando" V8. I used to ride in the back window on road trips, like to my Grandparents' dairy farm.

Nowadays the Highway Patrol would arrest my father for child endangerment.

I'll never forget new car shopping with my dad. This happened about every other year.

I think it was about 71 or 72 when Dodge offered a Dart with a 340. God, what an engine!

Dad took one out for a test drive with the whole family buckled up for self preservation.

I'll never forget the looks of horror on our faces when he floored it at 65 mph and promptly spun the car on I-94.

Golly, was my mom po'ed.

We of course bought the car immediately that day. That was the car I learned how to drive in, and the first in a very long line of accident stories that we probably shouldn't tell our kids about.

WNG

Username is a play on my initials.

As for my avatar, it's a '74 Normandy high flange rear hub. It was my intro to high quality bicycling components.
The hub belongs to a set of factory Peugeot wheels that we were given to me by my best friend in the late 70s. He always had the good stuff, and upgraded to a Raleigh 531 racer, and tossed the Pug. I rebuilt the wheels by swapping the steel Rigidas for New Mavic Module 3 27" rims. I enjoyed many years of trouble-free miles on these wheels. It wasn't until I could afford Campy Record/Ambrosio Elite 19 Durex wheels in the early 80s, did these wheels get retired.

A strange and upsetting incident befell the rear wheel. A buddy who helped build my new set of Italian wheels, wanted a favor in return. Asked if I had a rear wheel I no longer needed and if he could borrow it. I felt obliged, and lent him my old French hoop. Turns out he wanted the wheel for an insurance claim against a driver who had struck him while riding his Romani. He took my wheel and taco-ed it and mounted it on his bike for the assessor. After he got his money, he handed me back the wheel and said thanks. I was struck with utter disbelief that he would do this to my wheel.....and to me, someone that was supposedly a good friend of his. Needless to say, that friendship soured rather quickly and I never kept in touch with him again.
The wheel got torn down and I salvaged the hub and tossed it into a tool box, where it stayed till I rekindled my passion for bikes nearly 25 years later. After rediscovering it, I overhauled it with a Maillard 6-spd axle, but its Simplex QR was lost. I polished it up one winter and took a pic of it for my avatar soon after joining Bike Forums. It's a good symbol of my humble beginning, passion, and rebirth. I hope to put the old hubs back to use on a worthy C&V rebuild.

Glennfordx4

Great thread,
my user name is from one of the second forums I joined which was for Ford trucks and at the time I had owned four of them so GlennFordx4 has stuck and it is the user name I try to use on any forum I join.
I am a motor head and have had tons of cars and trucks and what I started working on that lead me down the road of being a mechanic in different fields is bicycles. I have been repairing bicycles since I was about 11 when my uncle first showed me how to true a wheel and that led to motorcycles which led me to go to school for small engine repair where I got to head a project building a Chevy 6 cylinder engine with 327 flat top pistons for the teacher.

For 25 years I was away from riding and repairing bikes until my health took a turn for the worst and I needed something to get me back in shape and to feed my need of being able to learn and wrench at the same time.
My avatar at the moment is the bike that led me here ( Condor Pacer S/S) when trying to find info about it and is the first bike I started to build into something I could ride on the road with since all I owned until then was MTB's.
Glenn
BTW my first mopar was a 66 charger with a 383 four speed and it was stolen and striped to the frame, my last was a 72 Polara 2 door 360 with the police package,rolled it at 60+mph and all of us walked away.

jimmuller 

Sounds like you were right to dump that friend. Those are pretty good hubs, to judge from my limited experience.

Barchettaman

My wife and I owned a Fiat Barchetta prior to the kids coming on the scene. To those of you in the US who haven´t heard of it, it´s a hand-built Italian roadster, similar in size to a Mazda Miata, but front wheel drive and with an early VVTi engine. Great fun, but since getting into bikes I don´t miss it at all.
The first forums I joined were motoring ones so I use the same username all the time.
Here are some pics of our little blue beauty:

Kobe 

My first "10 speed" was a Kobe Capri that I bought with my grass cutting money. I was 12 at the time and $150 seemed a huge amount to pay for a bike.

I still have that bike 35 years later, it is set up as a 7x1. Unfortunately the head badge in my avatar is not mine. My head badge was lost years ago when my brother was keeping my bike for me decided to repaint it robin egg blue.

jhefner

In regards to Mopar; my first car was the "Bluesmobile" - a 1974 Plymouth Fury III with the 360 V-8. I was tall and skinny in high school, and my best friend at the time was short and fat, so when the Blues Brother movie came out, we were on a "mission from God" from that point forward; the cigeratte lighter disappeared at the same time....

Had quite a bit of fun with it, and did some silly things with it. Did you know the rear end of a '74 Fury can be supported by it's gas tank alone, and no harm done....

I just got the body on it looking great, and a new AM/FM radio and tape deck installed; when I put it in the shop to have the A/C fixed. They put the dash back in wrong, and the wiring caught fire on the test drive.

It was an ex-company car with 90,000 miles on it, but in excellent condition when my dad bought it for me. The A/C shop gave him the same amount for the wreck that he first paid for it - $600.00.

Owned several Mopars in a row after that; most memorable after the Bluemobile was a 1990 Dodge Spirit; it was the first car I paid off, and put over 200,000 miles on it before I sold it; it needed some work, but the new owner drove it off; and I never heard from them again.

-James

HSean

Hsean- I am a big anime fan and have used this user name for many many years, it's short for Hanyou Sean. lol wich is also my email. I think Bicycles are bigger then anime to me though.

Ultraslide

Most of us in the US who know about Barchettas, know because of Rush. lol

Ultraslide

I play slide guitar, lap steel and pedal steel. At some point in the 90s a friend suggested my superhero name should be "Ultraslide". It has stuck with me since.

Ex Pres 

Started off as vpiuva - still use that on ebay. I graduated from both: vpi in '80, uva in '85

Changed to Bob Barker - taken from a TTT (team time trial) team competing in the AL state championship I officiated a few years back. They all rode "fixed" (on a flat 40k course); the team name was from Bob Barker's consistent request on his show asking you to spay and neuter (fix) your pets.

Then changed again to Ex Pres, as one of the former US presidents has my name.

Current avatar: (edited out)

Edited Apr 2012: now my avatar is different, and probably will continue to change

bigbossman 

Me, too.

From the 1959 De Soto (413 hemi) that my dad had as the family car when I was a small child (slept up on the rear package shelf, too!), to the Chrysler 300 drop-top, the Belvedere, and the 1969 Imperial Le Baron, lots of good times.

Especially the Le Baron, as the parents had that when I was in High School. What a date car that was - 440 Magnum motor, quad 8 track stereo, power everything, auto-locking doors and about 3 acres of leather interior. It was a sad day when my older brother took out 50 yards of freeway divider fence with it. He and his goofball pals walked away from the wreckage, but the Le Baron was history.

cobrabyte

I went with cobrabyte as a play on the word bite.
My avatar is a vintage traditional tattoo flash art peice of a cobra, by Sailor Jerry

BlankCrows

The links in my signature explain both my screen name and avatar.

old's'cool

Any questions?

coldfeet

Didn't we have this thread somewhere else? Foo, maybe?

Oh well, I live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I try to ride through the Winter, do you need more explanation?
The Avatar is a blue footed Booby, which, I just discovered, is a kind of Penguin.

Rocket-Sauce 

My Mopar story is also one of the biggest regrets in my life. When I was 17, I had saved up enough money to buy a "beater" car. I poured over the classified ads and the local Pennysaver. I was looking for a cool car that I could afford (I had ~$1000). I saw an ad for a 1970 Hemi 'Cuda at a local used car lot for $750 (!!). I went to the lot fully expecting to buy it even though I was saving for alate '60s Camaro or Firebird. It was a 426 Hemi, Dana rear end, shaker hood, ran strong and had 75,000 miles on the odo (it was 1987). It needed some suspension work and a new muffler but all in all it was in good shape. No rust but I hated the color -sublime green. I am still kicking myself over that one!

I did buy a car at that lot that day: a 1963 Cadillac Hearse. I wish I still had that car too!

Poguemahone

For years, I read your name as "Lurker". My GF, who works at a school for dyslexics, tells me I have a "processing" issue. Hm.

My avatar is from the old Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos comic book. I keep meaning to replace it with Fearless Fosdick for a while; before that I had Wonder Warthog.