On Messing About With Motorcycles
ON MESSING ABOUT WITH MOTORCYCLES
UP FRONT
Allan Girdler
What percentage of motorcycle owners do all, part or some of the care and feeding of their machines. I don’t know, but when I become King, messing with one's motorcycle will be required for all. On the grounds that firsthand involvement with the bits and pieces is good for the soul.
Mostly this is on purely emotional grounds. A Robert Grossman cartoon in Rolling Stone not long ago had a panel in which his mythical creatures are explaining their evolution. One picture is of a bug, the wheeled kind, which evolved from a bug, the insect kind. It’s your standard VW-type motor vehicle except for the eyes in front and a valentine-style apparatus in the middle.
“Note.” says the caption, “how the creature is propelled forward by the beating of its little heart.”
I wish I'd said that. For five years now I have relied on the 250ec heart which propels my creature. Never has it failed me and I think, nay believe, that this is because our concern is mutual.
How it works begins with the Monday after we rode the Old Spanish Trail. I took the bike to lunch and then to the neighborhood car wash, where all the mud and grime were hosed away. While giving the bike a close inspection I found the cush drive was a bit loose so 1 bought new cushions, rode the bike home, removed the wheel, etc., and put everything back together. The sprocket no longer rocked back and forth on the hub. Vital? No. My cynical friends tell me a motorcycle with a flabby cush drive can go on for years. But I didn’t like the idea.
Now. Upon arrival at the office the next morning, the engine didn't wish to idle. I removed the spark plug and was distraught to see oil on the tip. Dismay. Depression. According to how I understand the rules of this technique, when you take care of the machine and treat it to extra care, it doesn't respond by having more go wrong.
Turned out the rules were being observed. When I stepped back and looked at the fuel tank and realized it was a dull green instead of its usual yellow. I recalled that the last part of the ride was done with my four-stroke running on pre-mix. that being all we had left. The plug was oiled because the fuel was oiled. A fresh couple gallons took care of that albeit soon as I replace the throttle cables, maybe trim the bars back an inch on each side and replace the swing arm bushings 1 believe I will remove the engine and do a top-end job on it. Always something, in other words. If you ride a motorcycle a lot. best you take care of it a lot.
Right, there isn’t much logic here. Ever drive a rental car? Sure. Ever drive a good rental car? 1 thought not. See. a car in a rental fleet is like a babv in an old-fashioned orphanage. The food is nutritious and the rooms are clean and the roof doesn't leak but the babies don’t grow quickly and they don't smile much. Sometimes they die. For no reason, it was thought, until science learned that if little people don’t have somebody who cares enough to pick them up and cuddle them, they curl up and die.
My theory is that rental cars get fuel and run through the car wash on schedule and aren't allowed to destroy themselves for lack of oil. but because all this is done bv hired hands, nobody cares about the car and it turns into a dead motorcar while still running.
Having strongly implied that those bikers who don't tinker with their machines are liable to have awful things go wrong with said machines, perhaps I should amplify. Messing about is enough. One need not be able and willing to rebuild the transmission or the engine, or true the wheels or shape the ports for more power. Nothing like that. No need for all the service shops to become parts stores. There will always be something beyond the skills of even the most skilled owner, if only because few of us can afford our own lathe or boring bar or welding rig.
What’s recommended here is simply that every motorcyclist take the time and trouble to fiddle with the mechanism. Adjust the chain, perhaps, or replace the fork seals or the shocks. Do the simpler parts of the tune-up. especially with a Single or a Twin where there isn't that much to do wrong.
Something else, perhaps a bit more deep and philosophical.
1 once read a puzzled observation by a trained accountant. He had gone into accounting deliberately. He'd done all the courses and learned all there was to know about keeping books and making the figures do his bidding.
But, he said, all this was done because he assumed his business problems would be accounting problems. They weren't. They were instead people problems.
Strikes close to home. I can't speak about other businesses but my years in publishing have surely taught me that there are no publishing problems. Only people problems. Actually producing this> magazine is easy, in the technical sense. Where we have trouble is when the test bikes don't arrive or the track didn't know we were coming or the photos were sent to the wrong place or . . . the list is endless.
What I have done for years when this occurs is slip out the back door to the shop, where I mess about with motorcycles, mine or a test bike, no matter as long as I can adjust the cam chain or search for that elusive rattle in the new exhaust pipe.
1 never understood exactly why this works until a chance conversation with an unlikely mechanic: a middle-aged woman, a physician whose specialty is handicapped children.
She works hard. She puts all her heart and mind into the kids. Sometimes you use science, she says, and sometimes you use folk remedies. You do all you can do and sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
She owns an old British machine. At the end of the day she goes into her garage and messes about with the motor. What she likes about machines is that every time you turn the wrench to the right, it tightens. Turn to the left and it loosens. Every time you have the valves opening at the proper time, the spark arriving when it should, the fuel and air mixing in proper proportion, why, the machine works.
Messing about with motorcycles is not like real life.
Therefore I recommend it highly. 0
