HFoS issue #1 in the making...

head full of snakes promo from Aaron Cuthbert on Vimeo.

Aaron from Fuel Tank TV came in yesterday and filmed us hard at work. We've been here basically 24 hours a day since I got here on Monday. It's nuts! Still a lot of printing to do! But, fingers crossed, we'll have this sucker done for launch on Saturday!?

Cheers Aaron!

Printing, printing, more printing...

We've been doing some seriously long/crazy hours printing this thing. It's pretty slow going, but the piles are building up. It's the 4 colour pages that are obviously taking ages as we're doing one colour at a time and have to wait for it to dry before putting the next colour one. Looking pretty fuckin cool though! And we have Christian's bike parked up outside to remind us why we're doing all this... sweet sweet bike...

Printing HFoS #1!

In Melbourne right now printing issue #1 with Stuart. Doing some kind of launch at the Modern Motor Cycle Company on Keele St at about 3pm this Saturday... will be having a bunch of late nights before then!

Ivan Mauger short doco

A great little doco on Ivan Mauger here... made in the 70s. Couldn't embed it so you'll have to bugger off to Youtube to watch it...

That link again is:

http://youtu.be/ZC1cWGMWG2M

Skool

Aaron and I both bought our bikes to school today. We are easily the coolest department in the school right now.

Flexidiscs are here (Paul Elliman recording)

The flexidiscs to go with our first issue arrived yesterday and I'm pretty damn happy with them. I'd wanted to make a flexidisc right from the beginning of thinking I might make this mag, and then when Paul Elliman was here he made a proposal to me for the first one. Paul has made a recording of a 1952 Vincent Black Lightning that is 4 minutes and 43 seconds long, mirroring Richard Thompson's song '1952 Vincent Black Lightning'. The black on black label was Paul's idea, and he's releasing this under the pseudonym Can Robert. The records sound great (thank God, I've had a lot of trouble with getting vinyl made in the past) and are such interesting artefacts. These were made by Pirates Press in San Francisco and I'd highly recommend them. 

Aaron Beehre's CB100

Watched the MotoGP at Aaron's lastnight, and then made Nadine go sit on his bike because I really wanna get her onto something like this. Aaron's only just got this going again after about a year and half off the road. He got this little CB100 about four years ago and it was pretty screwed. I think it's a 72 or 73. He bought a new Chinese engine for about $400 I think? A Loncin 150cc single and had that put in by Joe at Rocky Point garage. At the same time Aaron did the bike up a bit. It's looking pretty cool now and seems to be going good too. Apparently a lot of the bucket racer guys use these little Loncin engines? Anyway it made me really excited again about getting a small bike for round town and for Nadine to learn on. The MotoGP was great too, crazy crash right at the first corner which took out four bikes including both the Ducatis, one of whom was Rossi. Had a great finish between Spies and Stoner, with Spies looking like he had come from 4th to wrap up the finish, just to be beaten by about an inch by Stoner on the final straight. Those Hondas are fast!

HFoS: the business end...

Stuart was here last week and we finally got stuck into things. I had actually organised for Stuart to come over to examine some of my postgrad students, which was great because the uni paid for it, but not so great because the whole first half of the week was taken up with marking etc.

First up we made some business cards on the riso. We were both just really keen to 'make' something tangible... quickly. I think. That was pretty satisfying, and also meant we purchased www.headfullofsnakes.com and got email addresses too. The cards were (obviously enough I guess) based on the 'calling cards' you can see here a couple of posts ago.

We then got busy with the actual mag. We're still waiting for some content, but hopefully it'll all be in this week, and we got a lot of layout sort of stuff done anyway. Stuart doesn't fuck about and procrastinate over every small decision like I do, so having him here really pushed it on a lot! I'm planning to go to Melbourne so we can print the thing together at the end of November. We'll also hopefully do some kind of launch while I'm there. It's good to have a deadline in sight now...

Despite being pretty busy we managed to fit a quick ride in on the Friday night. Went to the Brewery in Woolston and then over to Lyttelton where we couldn't get a table and had to come back to town for food. Stuart rode the Norton and Nadine and I went on the Triumph. Was great to see someone else riding the Norton, to see how it sits on the road etc. It's still running a bit shit, but John's loaned inlet rocker cover seems to have taken care of a good deal of my oil spill!