Leanings
LEANINGS
Modern stuff without which I cannot do
Peter Egan
HANGING AROUND CHINO AIRPORT last week, I was watching some guys hook up test equipment to a beautiful old P-51 Mustang. One of the mechanics picked up a roll of duct tape, ripped off a small piece and taped one of the test wires to the fuselage, just to keep things tidy.
“I don’t know what we did BDT,” he said, smoothing down the tape.
“BDT?” I inquired.
“Before Duct Tape. It’s a major division point in world history. Just like BSB.
“What’s that?”
“Before Scotch-Brite.”
I went away chuckling to myself. I’d never formalized these watersheds of modern technology before, or given them names, but everyone who spends time working on machinery has probably had that same thought: “What did I do before they invented (your favorite product here)?”
Duct tape, of course is a pretty obvious one. I can’t even remember when this magical substance made the transition from sealing the joints in basement heating ducts into the world of racing and speed, where it also became known as racers’ tape or supertape.
I bought my first roll of the stuff in 1973 when I began racing sports cars, and since then I’ve used it for such diverse purposes as securing the fiberglass nose on a Formula Ford, insulating breather hoses from hot engine parts on cars and bikes, making an instant, late-afternoon sunshade along the top of my helmet visor, wrapping the toes of roadracing boots and leathers worn through from “curbfeeling” and falls, preventing the loose ends of tie-down straps from flapping in the wind, keeping the sliding side door of my Chevy van from squeaking and driving me nuts, and for a few thousand other improvised repairs.
Our friend the P-51 mechanic is right. I really don't how the human race got along BDT.
Another revolutionary product, especially for those of us who own bikes of a particular nationality, has been silicone sealer. This stuff does a remarkable job of filling in low spots and small gaps on mated surfaces, and when those surfaces have to come apart, it’s easy to clean up—unlike some of the crusty glue formerly used as gasket cement.
The only trouble with silicone sealer is that amateurs sometimes overuse it. Orange or blue silicone sealer oozing sandwich-like from the edges of a cam cover has become the very symbol of sloppy workmanship in the mechanic's world. It has also come to symbolize the likelihood of bearing failure, because that gobby cam cover probably has just as much sealer squeezed inward, where it likes to separate and go slithering through the oil system, looking for arteries to clog. Silicone sealer will never be a substitute for good machine work, but used sparingly, as the directions say, it’s great stuff.
Likewise Teflon tape. Before Teflon Tape (BTT), most thread sealers seemed to have come down to us from medieval times through the plumbing trade, and were either messy as roofing tar or incompatible with the fluids being contained. Teflon tape, of course, also belongs outside an engine’s oil passages, but if you clean and wrap your threads right, this doesn’t seem to be a big problem.
A third godsend for those of us who work on old bikes that vibrate just a little (or shake like a freezing, wet dog, in some cases) is threadlocking compound, or Loctite, in its most-common commercial form. This is essentially a liquid resin that hardens (to varying degrees, according to color and grade) in the absence of oxygen — i.e. after applied to threaded fasteners which are then tightened down. I use Loctite so often that I always have two small bottles of it, regular blue and red Stud N' Bearing Mount, stuck with velcro patches to the socket tray in the top of my tool box. Before velco (BV), the bottles always fell over and leaked. And in the days Before Loctite, I seemed to spend a lot of time searching for Whitworth bolts and Lucas taillight lenses along the roadside.
Outside of sealers and lockers, the handiest garage fluid to come along in recent memory is contact cleaner in spray cans. This stuff is sold, presumably, to clean small traces of oil off electrical contact points, but of the gallons I’ve used, only an ounce or two has been sprayed on points. The rest has gone to clean up oil drips on the floor (apparently I need more silicone sealer and Teflon tape), to remove oil mist around fittings and gaskets and even to degrease small parts before painting.
Contact cleaner actually seems to mingle with oil and then carry it away, angel-like, as an evaporate. Where does it go? I imagine a future medical study will reveal that it goes straight into our livers or lungs. This stuff works so well, there’s got to be a health hazard. Everything good has one.
What else?
The list goes on. There’s a whole family of plastic polishes and surface protectants that didn’t exist until fairly recently, that works wonders on scratched fairings or face shields, and is great for quick cleanup of shabby bikes.
My personal-favorite late-20th Century product, however, may be waterless hand cleaner. Are you old enough to remember “professional” hand soaps that didn't actually remove any grease or dirt from your hands, but left them covered with an oatmeal-like grit that was supposed to remove the dirt but didn’t? I am.
In fact, the inside of the door between our garage and house has a large collection of dark hand prints on it, which my wife Barbara tells me dates from the years BG. Before Goop.
