I found my first moped being 14 old age and since then things have changed in my life. Got an empty garage and slowly build my little bikes empire. Majority of the weekends and summers were spend riding and building field bikes and expanding friends circle with the same mindset. There was a particular town in Lithuania called Vilkablauzde where things started to get more serious than just field rides.
Few years later in 2004 we decided to create a simple website with a photos gallery and a small forum where we and other people could chat and share technical experience and also make new friends. There already was a few biker clubs and motorcyclist communities but we wanted to create something for youngsters who don’t have driving licenses yet and just enjoy field rides and fiddling with cheap bikes. In Eastern Europe there were a lot of Soviet Union and Czechoslovakian bikes left and they were (and still are) ideal to start your motorcycling career.
We called it Moto-Zone. At the time there wasn’t any popular social sites and all we had was an Internet Relay Chat – mIRC. The website and chatroom started to fill with new people and forum threads very rapidly. The community started to strive, more and more people started to attend to bike meetings and sport events and the Moto-Zone name became well known.
I personally would think that this is the bike which I owned since 2003 was the milestone of our movement start. It was seen in many videos we made as well as bike events. It was well known for its endurance to withstand a lot of heavy riding never breaking down. During the years the only maintenance I did was changing spark plugs and wheels. Bike had a name “Liepsniukas” which means “Little Flame”.
The community went through its golden age times during 2005 – 2010. Myself and my mates were building project after project and actively engaging into running our little movement. Here is some vids of those times:
After school I went to Kaunas University of Technology and studied Mechanical Engineering so had some access to machinery and expanded various manufacturing processes knowledge which came handy later on. Spent countless nights at various workshops and garages plotting and building stuff.
Sadly things started to slow down after I graduated university as well as other my friends who were running community all together. Somebody got jobs and left motorcycles aside and I unexpectedly moved to the UK. Left two freshly built motorcycles who still sits in a garage after 7 years of being built. Also social sites like Facebook started to gain popularity so old fashion forums and lack of updates slowly faded out our site and community popularity.
However two (or three) wheeled vehicles with internal combustion engines became not just a hobby but a disease and simply I cannot forgot them. After a year or so settling down in the new country I started looking at the eBay and local ads hoping to find a motorcycle to fiddle with in a spare time. This is how I discovered countless bike events all around and British motojumbles. The latter ones were mind blowing and pushed me back to motorcycling really badly. So I bought one project bike, then another, and another and this is how I spent another 6 years with more project bikes.
Engineering job also gave a valuable experience in manufacturing industry and I started to see various mechanical workings in a different, more understandable approach. Therefore, I could play with engines in a more sophisticated ways than I used to. Also gained extensive knowledge in using various lathes.
After 6 years of living in UK I followed my dreams and took an opportunity to move to Australia. Now settling down and slowly discovering Australian motorcycling lifestyle as well as… anime. There will be some historical and also Australian life blogs on this site.
