Ride and Rally: Fuel Cleveland 2023

Welcome to Ride and rally with Fix My hog. My name is Steve Noble and we're heading to one of the coolest Midwest bike shows. Fuel Cleveland, fuel Cleveland has evolved into a full weekend event. The bike shows two days and Friday night. There's a pre party this year. The pre party is at Skid Mark Garage. A community motorcycle garage right in midtown Cleveland. I had a moment to talk to the owner of Skid Mark. Brian Saffron about the pre party and the garage itself here at Skid Mark Garage. Getting ready for the fuel pre party. This place is really cool. It's hot Community Garage here in Cleveland, here with Brian Saffron, the owner of the garage. So Brian tell me about Skid Mark and what exactly it is? Skid. Mark Garage is a do it yourself motorcycle garage. So think of a gym membership where you pay a monthly membership and you get to use all their workout equipment at skid Mark. You pay a monthly membership or a yearly membership and you get to use all the tools, all the welders and the, the access to all the other members to help you fix your problems? Fantastic. So, even if I have basic maintenance or even like an in depth pro project. Yeah. Yeah, you can do absolutely basic maintenance, uh, regular oil changes, that kind of stuff. Uh, but there's plenty of people here that are building bikes from the ground up, tearing something down to the frame, doing some welding and putting it all back together over a year's time coming and going sometimes every day, sometimes once a week and taking care of everything they got, they gotta take care of and getting help from all the other very knowledgeable members. Right on, man. I hear it's all inclusive space too. So all are welcome. Welcome. All I believe is what the sign said. It is. It is a safe space for all and, and uh that's been a tremendous boost. Fantastic. Glad to hear it and love to hear that that's going on in the motorcycle culture. We need more of that around me, but tonight I understand we're having a fuel pre party here. Uh I believe it's a band that's showing up already starting to set up. Now, uh Got some beer, I believe going on. We're gonna raffle off a bike should be good. Wild time. I don't. We pre party. We have everything from modern M eight Harley's. You got a few sport bikes thrown in there, way back to things like this. Flathead Harley here got a whole bunch of shovel heads, some cool rigid frame, chops, anything you can think of. It's somewhere here just in the parking lot, let alone what's going on inside Skid Mark or at the fuel show tomorrow down at Hale Farm and Village. So we're going to head down there from Cleveland and we're going to go down through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. This is the country's newest National Park. It was converted over in 2000 and there's a lot of cool hiking down here. There's a historic railway, there's rivers, the actual Cuyahoga rivers down here, there's parts of the Ohio Erie canal that are still here that you can walk on. And there's some great windy roads that go along the river and the railroad tracks to make for great motorcycling. A matter of fact, they even have an historic railway down here if you can take rides on it and lo and behold, we got stopped at the railroad tracks. Now, in the realm of trains to get stopped by the historic one is always a pretty cool thing to see after the train is gone. We'll finish our ride right down into Hale Farm and Village. So fuel Cleveland is held down in Hale Farming Village. Hale Farming Village is in one of those vi working farms, historic working farms. You go down there and there's petting zoos. There's blacksmith demonstrations, glass blowing demonstrations, kind of like a whole pioneer town thing. It's pretty cool even if it's not a bike show it's still kind of a cool thing to stop by and see. But today Fuel Cleveland is taking the whole thing over and they got a bunch of cool custom bikes down in here. So, on our way to go check it out. Hey, so I'm here at Fuel Cleveland. Mikey Reel, one of the main organizers of this event. Mikey, what is fuel? And how did it start? Fuel Cleveland started in 2015. I was hanging out with Jesse from gas box and we were talking to Tyler and we said, man, we're in New York City. We're at Brooklyn invitation. Like, man, there's only shows on the east coast and on the west coast, there's nothing in the middle. Really? Mama tried. I think it just started like a year prior his infancy. It was, it wasn't its huge show yet that it is today which no one was starting, starting shows in the Midwest. You see a small run here of that, but none of these midwest builders who sit in their garages for six months out of the year because we're winter babies. You know, we sit in garages. No one's showing these bikes off. If you do, you have to go to the west coast or the east coast. Said, man, Jesse, let's put some of your bikes. Some of my artwork maybe get some other guys, I'm in town and we'll get a warehouse and do it. And that's when it was born. In 2015, we got a small warehouse, brought 25 bikes in, I think, 15 artists and it was a bitching first show, 1000 people showed up and it's gotten to be where we are today, where we're in a 35,000 square foot venue of stuff and they can grow because there's 90 acres here. This is a great venue. The outdoors, I love the old historic buildings in this place. And you guys have always had cool venues. There was a mountain bike park, I believe Ray's mountain bike one we did. That was the second year we did Ray's and that was interesting. Hot as hell. There's no ventilation in that business in that building. I don't know how anyone rides BMX all day in there. But Ray's is a great place. You've never been to Cleveland. We loved being there for that. And then after that, it moved to Ingenuity Fest building where Skid Mark Garage was at. Big Shout out to Skid Mark Garage and they've been a supporter since that show. So the third show, Skid Mark has always been with us at different shows, bending or helping with pre parties and love Brian and everything they do with moto go and all that stuff. Absolutely. Yeah, we had a great time at the free party. It was their film and yeah, and they did the pre party for this year. A great event. Yeah. And the Hale Farm and Village here is a really cool event. You got some cool sponsors here, you know, White Knocker and WW and BMW and Bill. Well, don't, well, I'm sorry, Bill Wells almost forgot about it. They're hanging out in California. They couldn't make it, but their full support is fully appreciated. WW. Flew all the way in from Germany for this, which I'm super excited. White Knock Horse here from Columbus, Ohio and BMW. They got a bunch of their stock bikes and they actually brought some antique bikes for them here, which is really cool too. So super stoked all that. And they sponsored the wet ride that we had yesterday. All right. Yeah, I saw a couple clips of that people getting soaked, but it still looked like good times, like 60 70 people and our route, we pre planned the routes every year and we changed it up a bit and this year because of the rain, it flooded the route and they had to turn 60 dudes in the wet rain around. Hey, everybody, let's go u turn time. All right, cool, man. I'm gonna go check out some bikes, maybe get a bite to eat. So you got some food trucks here. Yeah. If you, if you've never been to Fuel Cleveland, this is the place to be. We're doing it every July. Hopefully every July forever. As long as it's called Fuel Cleveland, it'll be free. All right. Fantastic, man. Good to hear it. Thank you. Very much. Thank you for your time. I'm gonna go check out some more of the show. The organizers of Fuel Cleveland have really done a great job of putting an awesome event together. Not only is it free? Of course, there's a bike show, but there's also tons of vendors, local national. Some of them are even international and they even have a custom van section. How cool is that? Fuel Cleveland has a big thing about how the show will always be free. There's free parking for motorcyclists. It will cost you nothing to ride down and check the show out.