The Summer Snowball

July in northern Michigan is often a month of painfully beautiful weather. The 68-degree mornings are perfect for drinking coffee in the backyard. Warm afternoons spent working with the garage door open lead into mild evenings that make me finally understand why people buy convertibles. Summer should not be burdened with talk of winter. But just like that one friend you had in fifth grade, I’ve had a snowball sitting in the freezer. Except mine is not a literal one.

Early this spring, I opened the door to my shop and was confronted with a shop full of needy things. I ran a quick count: I had six different engines in various states of disassembly scattered across my three work surfaces. In lieu of staying focused and having the discipline to solve the problem at hand, my brain and hands had wasted no time diving into something else. Repeat that for a few cycles—probably over the course of the past year—and by March, all six or seven projects had stalled. Hard.

I felt a little defeated. My tired old race bike, the XR250R, needed to be converted to street-legal. The engine of the XR600R was a giant pile of clean, ready-to-assemble parts—minus a few critical components. The big KTM adventure bike needed an oil change and a clutch refresh along with some annual check-up items. The engine and the transmission of the Corvair were still sitting on the floor.

I hatched a plan.

I’ve got a surprising amount of time to dedicate to my garage-dwelling hobbies, but funds are harder to come by. Having two projects going at once is the fastest way to grind both to a halt, because purchasing resources dry up twice as fast. Should both projects need only time, it’s not a big deal, but when each project needs a few hundred dollars thrown at it, and you only have a fraction of that to spend for the foreseeable future, which project gets the money? Answering this question was where I had stumbled most, spreading my meager spends so thin that all projects inched along at a glacial rate, absorbing all my money but surprisingly little of my time, since each project was waiting on something to be purchased or funded.

Even small amounts of money can be powerful when focused, though. Years and years ago I heard a talking head ramble about the snowball method of paying down debt. The strategy didn’t make sense until years later when I was paying off my student loans, but once the idea grabbed, and I stuck to the plan, it was only a short time before I was out from under the monthly payments—four years ahead of schedule—and frivolously putting that same money into the pockets of motorsport race promoters around the country.

The strategy was shockingly simple: Pick the lowest hanging fruit, and only the lowest hanging fruit, until all that was gone, then move up. Basically, just focus. I focused my monthly payments on one loan, paying the minimums on the others (there were four in total, one for each year of school) until the first was paid in full. I then snowballed that same payment amount to the next smallest loan. I paid the same amount each month for years, but the amount of principal that I paid off grew like a snowball rolling down a mountain.

This spring, after a long afternoon cataloging what projects I was in the middle of and what each needed, my plan was fully formed, and I could finally start making real, measurable, noticeable progress. I completed the machine work on the XR250R cylinder heads, rolled on to final assembly of both engines, then built a test stand and broke both in. I kept the momentum going by assembling the XR600R engine, then absolutely crushed a service on the KTM 950 Adventure S and sorted out some long-running but minor issues with the Corvair.

It was tough to see my Honda XR600R dual sport project sitting still while I spent hundreds of dollars on the XR250R heads, but I had to trust the process. I knew that by the time I got back to the XR600R, I would feel like a steamroller—and I did.

A list alone tells you what is to be done, but without a plan of attack, a list is intimidating. Using the snowball method for my projects has rolled up a lot of time and money over a few months, but the spend has never felt like a waste. Focus means progress arrives quickly, and I feel as though each dollar and minute is invested rather than spent.

The best part is the payoff. There is no to-do list at the moment. I’ve spent the summer enjoying the spoils of my now melted snowball: Dusty and dirty trail rides on the motorcycles, and early morning drives in the Corvair. My project bank is now full, and each time I walk through the door to my shop, I make a very enjoyable withdrawal.