It was a beautiful New England Winter day, towards the end of February.
I was riding to a friends house (the friend will go un-named for now) and we were to ride our scooters to Lumpy's house. I arrived at AA's house (short for Armor-All), and he was putting the finishing touches on his scooter, while his wife and young son looked on. He had just finished washing and waxing it and it looked great, even his tires were shining. His scoot always looked great and considering that it's 18 years old, WOW. I was shooting the shit with his wife while he dug out his helmet (unfortunately he lives in MA and MA has a helmet law), donned his chaps, leather and gloves and after the usual "ride safe", from his wife, we were on our way to Lumpy's.
We had decided that we would take the highway most of the the way and do some serious back roads riding after we picked up the Lump. We were about two miles from his house and as usual AA was in the lead as we made a right hand turn to come off of the rotary onto Rte. 2.
All of a sudden I could see AA leaning farther and farther into the turn (we were only going about 30 MPH). The next thing I saw were sparks flying as his exhaust hit, which bounced the scoot back up about 4 inches, only to have the rear tire slide out from under him for good. AA was sliding in front of his scooter when he came to a halt, although his scoot wasn't quite ready to slow down yet. It decided to keep sliding until the front end had pinned him to the pavement.
As I was riding by I yelled to him, "Don't move, I'll be right there." I pulled over the big Ultra, hit the kill switch and left it on it's jiffy stand right in the middle of the right hand lane of the highway. I ran back and lifted his scooter off of him and tried to determine his health first and then once I determined he was okay, try to find out about the health of his ride. It was actually in pretty good shape. The right side rear turn signal was hanging by the wires, the exhaust was scraped up and the throttle grip had all of the rubber chewed off of the end. Other than that it looked okay. We pushed it into the gas station, I got my scoot outta there too, and gave it a good going over. Everything looked good, a lot of gas had leaked out while the scooter layed on it's side and it didn't want to fire up. While AA tried to start it up, I called Lump from the pay phone and gave him the news and told him that AA may not be coming out due to his... stupidity.
Finally it fired up and we rode the 2 miles back to his house to better inspect his health. On the ride home AA could tell that the front end got twisted, so we rode VERY slow. Once back at his place his back started getting a little sore and we noticed that he had some minor road rash, right through his leathers. We re-counted both our versions of the crash and then AA said "I guess I didn't wipe enough of the Armor-All off the tires." I think I laughed so hard that I was in tears. Of course Lumpy and I have had a lot of fun with him over this and we at first gave him the name Crash, until Lumpy's wife nicknamed him Dumpy, and I guess that one's going to stick. Luckily Dumpy is okay and he made the trip to Daytona with Lump and I, although he had to rent a scooter from my friend Stephanie at Iron Horse Vacations in Orlando, FL.

Now you know why not to put Armor-All on your tires.

OneEye

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