My name is Matias and Im an undecided freshman here at JMU. Im Huntington, NY on the north shore of Long Island. Motorcycles are my passion and I figured this may be the place to meet some people with the same interests.
I currently Ride a 2012 Ducati Panigale 1199S and drive a 2016 Jeep wrangler unlimited. Over the past year alone I've owned 6 motorcycles(my father has had another 5 individual bikes, so 11 bikes total this year.) I started riding when I was 5 years old and rode dirt and some stealthy street riding(illegally) until I was able to get a license.My first street bike was a 2013 Ducati Hypermotard 821 with a termignoni exhaust. I traded that bike for a 2015 s1000r which I rode throughout the snowy winter of 2014-15. The bike was fast, but too many upgrades were needed to have it handle well under high speeds. So, that bike was traded for a 2015 Ducati Panigale 899, which i added a ducati performance seat, Ducati performance bar ends, and a newragecycles FEK. I had put a thousand miles on that bike in only a few weeks until I was hit making a left in Huntington. With the clip ons, clamp, and possibly the forks bent and a thousand dollars in fairing work I sold the bike. I had a concussion and a slight tear in my labrum as well as problems with my meniscus. Eventually June of 2015 came around and I was back in riding condition. I bought a 2015 Hypermotard SP, i put on LightTech rear sets, and anodized axel sliders, 6 days later the bike was stolen with only 450 miles on it. With the insurance money I got a 2015 MV agusta. I hurt my hand in a battery explosion and couldn't ride for most of the summer, but when i could I rode that bike a lot. 3 days before leaving for JMU I had come home at 3am after a highway night run, a mile from my house I hit a deer at over 65mph. I managed to control the violent tank slapper and I didn't go down! The bike had 4k worth of damage and about 6 months of ordering parts from italy. This past week the dealership offered me a great deal on my current 1199s and i couldn't resist. The bike rides great and is pushing 200hp with the full Ti Termignoni exhaust and Termignoni Racing Evolution upmap. Anyways, sorry for the rambling, here are some picks.

Hey y'all I have been thinking about maybe having an MM get together at my farm south of Bridgewater. Maybe have it early in the semester in January or February when nothing much else is going on. I could get a fire pit going out on the patio for smores and maybe have a turducken-esque kind of potluck where everyone brings beverages and foods to share. I could make an entree and a desert. Any thoughts on this? Yay? Nay?

Anyone know the last location of the blue Eastwood fender roller? It was in a silver case.

Would be cool to see it show up at the Turdunkin party this weekend if so!

Thanks,
Peter

Sorry about your face man. Hope you have a quick and relatively easy recovery. :thumbup:

I am going through my garage and house trying to get a bit more organized. I found a table of memories in the garage.

The Madison Motorsports Beer Pong Table first created by Scotty I beleive before my days. I remember picking this thing up from Adam Lee in Pheasant Run with fellow MMers in an ex-gfs Focus Sedan while we "held" it on top hoping like hell it wouldn't catch the wind and fly. We used it for 3 years for tons of parties with lots of good memories. From beer and cornflakes tossed everywhere creating a concrete mix (poor Adam cleaning it up too!), to girls crying on their phone underneath it whilst a party going on, to 9AM drinking on the lawn, to taking apart turbos and cylinder heads in the kitchen. This table has lived through a lot in just our 3 years during college, and I am sure has provided the same to those before and after.

After our senior year it disappeared to some current students and about a year ago I was told it had no home. I didnt want it thrown away so I offered to keep it till we found someone. I don't think anyone realizes I have it. I am hoping the current students jump in and want it. I will be at Turducken and can deliver there. Keep this table going!

The only images I could find quickly for the table :lol:

SOLD!

Everyone can chime in on this and tell me what you think but Sam and I always had the idea of renting out Shenandoah speedway since its not that expensive and just have an MM Funday. Weekends are more expensive but Fridays from 12-6pm are only $600. It's not a small amount but if everyone pitches we can cover that easy and guarantees enough of participating to make a for a really fun day. BRR-SCCA offered me a ton of cones at the college solo and so I took them of course. Now we need to put them to use at least once.

So.... Sam and I would ofcourse have to look into it a little more to make sure $600 covers everything (like insurance and that kinda stuff) but assuming this all pans out nicely, who would actually be down to try. If we get 20 people that's $30 a person and we can bring the grill and get some food. We can use the cones to setup games, maybe not timed races but like little top gear obstacle courses that don't involve contact with anything lol. So like drive to one end, switch drivers, run through some obstacle course, grab something off the floor kinda thing and the place is big enough where we could set it up that we have 2 courses so we can "Race" against each other to finish the course fastest. This would be great for freshman MMers to be able to just hop in any car and part take and have fun.

I can't find just one big picture of the whole place so look here and they have some photos <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/98242301@N05/">https://www.flickr.com/photos/98242301@N05/</a><!-- m -->

So what do y'all say?

So the s2000 normally gets the garage for the winter (well really always cause it doesnt get driven but anyways) but it's broad fenders means that people think it makes a great seat and they've been kinda f'd up because of it. Plus I enjoy having the garage space to hang out in or do some occasional hobby work. And with a motorcycle and jetski and s2000 and two work benches...etc. there's not much space left.

So anyway, what's everyone's position on car covers? Any good? Waste of money? I'm not overly concerned about the paint because it's definitely not show quality. Mainly worried about the new top. I mean I also enjoyed having it in the garage because the brakes don't get all that rust build up and everything which I know a cover can't help.

So what's everyone think? If they are worth it, what brands to lean towards? Which ones to avoid? Fitted vs generic?

Discuss. Flame. Troll. Whatever.

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

Hey everyone! I'm Petze, and I'm currently a freshman majoring in ISAT, who's originally from Charlottesville VA. I drive a 2002 3.0i BMW X5, she's mostly stock other than the tires, windows, white lights, and sound system. My second car is a 1968 Corvette with a L79 engine, rebuilt in 2008, pushing over 350 hp.

So I've had this idea of cobbling together a racing simulator setup on a shoestring budget for quite a while now, and kinda like when you go down a weird-porn rabbit hole, I got to the point where I wasn't going to be able to get it out of my head until I bought the goddamn thing and gave myself some release, even if I regretted it later.

My initial idea was to build a decent PC that could support 3 monitors and build a dedicated rig in the basement so I could play it without irritating Lauren, but because I don't have much PC equipment to speak of I was looking at at least $1200 no matter how I sliced it. So I decided to throw something together to work with my PS4 and if I end up getting really into it I can always go nuts later on.

Anyway, it all started when DJ had 2 1/2 black E36 seats taking up space in his garage that he couldn't get someone to buy. Most of it was trashed, but one of the front seats was in decent shape, just a bit dirty, so I took the torn up shit to the dump for him and kept the decent one for myself.

I gave it a decent cleaning, and stuck it on some 3" heavy duty furniture casters with brakes. Then I bought an AC-to-DC power converter for $18 that outputs 12V @ 7.5A, snipped the car plug off of it and soldered it to the power leads for the seat so I can adjust the height and angle just by plugging it into the wall.



Selecting a wheel became far, far more complicated and expensive than I expected, largely thanks to planned obsolescence fuckery from Sony. Basically, the darling budget-friendly choice of most sim racers, the Logitech G27, is not an option for PS4 users because the PS4 has some little piece of software that requires a chip in the controller which the G27 does not have. The G29 does, but it is essentially the exact same model as the G27 with a $260 price hike. Because fuck you, video gamer.

There's a company that makes a converter to get around the software chip but after shipping and getting a wired controller that it needs to work properly you're spending over $100 for it and the end result isn't going to be very good because it's filtering your inputs through a regular controller with some sort of black magic coding.

So my two options simmered down to dropping $460 for the G29 + Shifter (because it comes with a clutch pedal but no shifter standard?!?), which I couldn't make myself do on principal because it's just a $200 G27 with a special chip in it, OR I could go for the $350 Thrustmaster T300RS, which is widely regarded as the best sim wheel for the price, but it doesn't include a clutch or shifter, because that's a $250 add-on, why wouldn't it be.

After reading some reviews I went for the T300RS because if this does become a big hobby for me, I shouldn't ever need to upgrade the unit itself because it also works with PC, and I can get different wheels, a shifter, and a different pedal box if I want, so there's "room to grow".


Now I just needed something to bolt it too. I looked at some cheap, <$100 ready-made wheel stands but I really didn't like the bulkyness of them and it seemed like you really needed to spend $150+ to get something decent. I poked around to see what other people did, and PVC seems to be a favorite construction material for it's price, lightness, ease of assembly and relative strength. So I got about 40ft of PVC, plenty of fittings, some PVC solvent cement, a 2x2 piece of particle board, some furniture grippers and a nifty racheting cutter tool to easily cut it down to size.

I started by putting together a basic frame with a raised support for the pedal box that could be hinged up for storage.



Then cut the particle board to size and made mounting points for the wheel/pedals.



This sort of worked but it was rickety and slid away from me every time I hit the brakes, even with furniture grippers on the bottom of it. So I added 2 horizontal crossbars for strength and made two braces to come off the pedals and rest against the TV stand.



There's still a little bit of flex in it, but it's not really noticeable when you're actually playing, and I still haven't glued it all together. I think the cement will help give it some rigidity in those t-fittings on the sides of the base, which seems to be the only place it wiggles. I might also try flipping the rear verticals so the horizontal bar is a little closer to the base and see if that makes it a bit stronger before I glue it all up.

But, that's pretty much that! Getting the wheel properly configured for the game is a lot more trial and error and math than I expected it would be, but someone pointed me to this site with specific configuration profiles for every car in the game as well as recommended global FFB settings and I've got it to a point where I'm pretty happy with it.

I'm doing a career campaign in a cute little Renault touring car with a penchant for ridiculous lift-off oversteer. The FFB is more convincing than I expected it would be. You can genuinely feel the tires go light over a crest or that disappointing scrubbing feeling of understeer.

I've also dicked around with some of the really high powered cars and decided that my brain isn't fast enough for even a digital F1 car yet (I hit the brakes for a corner when I think it's time and come to a full stop 100ft from the apex), and an Ariel Atom V8 on the Nurburgring is really scary. :lol:

When I get some time on a weekend I'm gonna throw a coat of black paint on my little stand so it doesn't look quite so ghetto, and zip tie my wires a little bit so I don't freak out any cord nazis that visit the house.

If you have a PS3/Xbox 360/Decent PC lying around, add a G27 to your Christmas list and I highly doubt you'll regret it. If you've already thrown out your older console in favor of one of the Xbone or PSwhore, you're kinda screwed into buying a more expensive one like I was but hey, for $350 I can race a digital car in my underwear on a saturday morning and crash as much as I want to. Hell of a lot cheaper than a real track habit. :thumbup: