Learning New Skills: Welding and Video Editing to Enhance My Efforts in Mobile Motorbike Repair

Making Racing Fun Again

That’s the idea anyway! I’m always torn with learning new things. Is it worth learning? How is this going to benefit me in the future? Will it benefit me at all, or am I just doing whatever it is for funsies, for the fun of it? Most things I do for the fun of it, and then it works out that it benefits me later. That’s how it often works out for me. There’s some rhyme and reason to the things I do, but I mostly try to have a good time.

TIG Welding

I started teaching myself how to TIG weld aluminum and mild steel back in mid 2022. In that time I haven’t welded a single thing for a customer, but I have welded up many things for myself. I made belly pans and sub-frames for one of my race bikes. I’ve repaired who knows how many parts for myself and a handful of my friends. I’m still not good enough at welding, in my opinion, to start soliciting paying customers, but it has been a fun ride.

I can say with conviction that if there’s 2 pieces of either mild steel or aluminum, I can join them without much fight or fuss these days. That’s an accomplishment, but my welding skills are nothing to write home about, even after 2 years of doing it off and on, every couple of weeks as the need arises.

The only way for me to get really good at anything is to do it for a living for a couple few years. I have no intention of quitting what I’m doing now to go and become a better welder or video editor. That’s not going to happen. But I still enjoy learning new skills, not just new things. I learn about new things all the time. I read a lot. That’s not enough and has never been enough. I have to get my hands dirty, too! That’s where the “skills” part of learning new things comes into play.

Video Editing

I’ve been dabbling in media since I was a kid, trying to get things published here and there. I should have taken publishing more seriously when I was younger, but I was too busy writing copy for random businesses to make ends meet to really dive into creative projects. Excuses, excuses. They’re like assholes. We all got ’em, myself included. I think the first time I posted anything on YouTube was in 2008 or 2009, as I was graduating from college.

Since then I’ve dabbled, but the tools were still being made, or that’s how it felt at the time. My first forays into video editing involved using a handful of GoPro type action cams and Windows MovieMaker to cut together videos for one of my employers. I bought a used PC tower for like $200 and quickly found out it didn’t have enough juice for what I really wanted to do, but I made it work anyhow. As best I could, which wasn’t that great. If I dug around I might be able to find those videos posted somewhere, but I won’t bother. Like I said, they were never that good.

I remember spending 17 hours, unpaid of course – this was a passion project of mine, editing a 1-hour timelapse of my crew pitching a huge tent in a field somewhere in Nebraska. Everything took so freaking long! And I was so precious about every shot, every frame. I learned how difficult it was to do my job AND run a crew AND try to get the shots I wanted for the dumb videos I was making on my own time. It’s a good thing I was young and had the capacity to run around a job site like an absolute hellion back then. I certainly don’t have that in me today! I’m getting older! I can’t run around like that anymore! It was a high effort, time consuming affair to produce really shoddy, crappy-looking videos that barely told any kind of story at all.

Technology is Ridiculous

Fast-forward to today and I’m using my old iPhones mounted on cheap tripods to capture HD video at 30fps without filling up their disk space within a couple of hours. I’m editing footage using a super powerful, free software called Davinci Resolve. It’s the industry standard, apparently. Hollywood uses it for color correction. Nothing like that existed 15 years ago. And I can do all of my editing on a $1500 MacBook. IIRC all of this cost about 5x more to get set up 15 years ago. The barrier to entry has fallen low enough to get me interested in video again.

I’ve cut my editing times for a 1-hour video down to just a couple, few hours. It takes me another hour or 2 to add the b-roll I want to include. Then as long as the video takes to record an appropriate voiceover (VO). I can have a video posted on YouTube as fast as the day after I collect the footage. Isn’t modern technology amazing? It continues to amaze me, even if using it and learning how to use it can be terrifying at times. I find the longer I wait to learn how to do a necessary thing, the harder to becomes to learn that thing as I get older and older. I really feel for adults who can’t read or write properly, who don’t know their way around computers. The world is leaving those people behind, and that sucks for them, but there’s not much I can do about other people, unfortunately.

What’s this have to do with mobile motorbike repair? I think any time we learn a new skill, it informs all of our other skills, and it makes us more skillful in general, which is always a good thing in my opinion. I don’t even think I need to reach that far for a connection here. The fine motor control TIG welding develops directly applies to all kinds of mechanical work I might want to do for myself or someone else. It’s helpful knowing what metal does as it heats up and contracts. Building things is fun! Building parts for motorbikes is lots and lots of fun!

Haters are Human Cockroaches

Here on the internet, content is king. Or so they say. I have no idea if the content I put out into the world is any good or not, but I keep doing it. People tell me they like my website and my style all the time in person. I get clowned a lot on socials, too. There’s a certain species of asshole human who takes pleasure in tearing other people down, and I’ve found it’s best to not take anything personally that those people have to say. It’s more about them and their shitty attitude than anything else! Ignoring them is pretty easy after realizing they’re cockroaches sitting in the peanut gallery at the Flea Circus.

If they had the stones they’d perform, but they don’t, so they throw rocks. That’s on them. It has nothing to do with me. Ahem. If it sounds like I’m steeling myself against negative reactions, yeah that’s me all of the time. Here included.

Whether directly or indirectly, any kind of content I post about bikes or my business helps my business. So posting videos on YouTube drives business results in direct and indirect ways. It has the bonus of being fun for me to do. I’m using my writing skills in a completely different way, by using images instead of text.

I’ve posted before about doing new things or old things in new ways to keep my life fresh and feeling new. Maybe reading this has been the kick in the pants you needed to get started learning a new skill! That would be great! But seriously thanks for reading, really appreciate it, until next time – BYE!!!