The Nearly Lost Art of the Kickstart

The nearly lost art of the kickstart

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

I SHOULD HAVE BEEN PULL-STARTING the Homelite rather than kickstarting a motorcycle on Saturday morning, removing the box elder that fell on three sections of wood fence in our yard last week. One of the unheralded joys of living in the country is that you become a nearly full-time unpaid forest ranger. Chainsaws-R-Us.

Anyway, I averted my eyes from this fresh disaster of mixed branches and pine kindling because they were not quite completely blocking the driveway and went straight to the garage for an early-morning ride. The weather was too nice to ignore. After a hot, rainy summer, the mood change of autumn is upon us in Wisconsin. The sun is still warm, but the air has that springwater-cold edge to it, with fields turning pale gold, squash vines blackening in gardens and the sky a brilliant Battle-of-Britain blue.

Speaking of battles-and Britain-I was about to face up to the sometimes daunting task of kickstarting my Vincent, with its antique Amal carbs that have separate float bowls sticking out like Sherlock Holmes’ pipe. I’ve had this bike for more than a month now, and I ride it every day, if possible. But sometimes it starts sooner, and sometimes later. On Saturday morning, it was later.

I played with throttle openings, carb ticklers, piston position and varieties of compression-release synchronization with my lusty great kicks of the long lever, but to no avail.

First my helmet came off, then the jacket and gloves. A few minutes later I was soaked in sweat, splayed in my corner garage chair like a boxer after eight bad rounds, slamming down a Diet Mountain Dew, panting and staring at the bike with glassy eyes. Nothing I’ve ever done, except rock climbing, is as exhausting, per minute, as kickstarting a reluctant bike.

“You’ve got one more chance,” I said, approaching the bike again, “and then I’m taking the Guzzi.” I gave the Shadow one more fast kick with the throttle wide open and it started running instantly. Perfect tickover. Must have been a little flooded.

I put my stuff back on and took off for what was possibly the best ride of the year; 140 miles of backroads, farms and forests reeled in with the twistgrip on a day so perfect it should have been bronzed. All that kicking vindicated.

Anyway, I am finally getting better with the Vincent. First, I took the seeping cork seals out of the petcocks and boiled them in water to swell them up (the first symptom of British bike ownership is cork boiling-an ancient Druidic ritual), then I took the old Amals apart this week and stared at the internals laid out in a cake pan like an oracle divining owl entrails, put them back on the bike with the float caps off, admitted fuel and finally realized that the ticklers are extremely sensitive. They need just the slightest touch, not the fuel-drowning gush that my Triumph requires to light up. Anyway, I’m moving closer to Oneness here. It’s fun dialing this stuff in.

Strangely, I realized the other day that of the four motorcycles I now own, three have no electric starters-only the ’79 Guzzi has an electric leg and no lever. My Triumph 500 nearly always starts first kick (unless the battery is touching the seat pan again), and the ’81 Ducati 900SS usually takes just a couple of prods while I figure out how much pumping of the Dell’Ortos it likes.

The last “modern” bike I owned with both kick and electric starting was my 1981 Kawasaki KZ1000MKII. In fact, the very presence of that vestigial appendage was one of the reasons I chose this particular bike over several others.

This was exactly the period during which motorcycle engineers began saying to themselves (or each other), “Hey, wait a minute. Cars don’t have hand cranks any more, so why are we putting

kickstart levers on our bikes? More weight, more cost, more parts to wear out. Another oil seal to go bad. Let’s leave ’em off and see what happens.”

All very well, except most cars are driven daily. Motorcycles more often sit for days, weeks or months between rides. And some of them (BMWs and my Guzzi SP come to mind) have electric clocks ticking away. Also their batteries are relatively small. A recipe for trouble? Sometimes.

My Kawasaki battery went semi-flat within a year-lost its will to live during the rainy winter months back in California-but I didn’t care. I simply kickstarted the bike for another two years before I got around to replacing it. As long as internal continuity was not broken, the bike worked.

Meanwhile, I would go over to pick up my friend John Jaeger for an early Sunday-morning ride and he would get all dressed up and hit the starter button on his BMW R90S (a famous charging system underachiever) and his starter would go, “DIT DIT...dit...dit” like a faint telegraph message. So we’d put his bike on the charger and go play guitar and swill coffee. Fun, but no ride. Sometimes we’d jump it from his car and make big sparks. A kickstarter would have been easier.

I don’t miss kickstarters much on well-tuned modern bikes, and yet... every bike I’ve ever had without one always ends up needing one, usually more than once. There’s always bumpstarting, but this can be tricky business with a larger, heavier bike, especially if you’re alone. But there’s more to it than just the convenience of emergency starting.

There is, I think, a real satisfaction to having an engine bark to life with a lunge of the foot rather than a press of the button, as most dirt riders will tell you. To have felt that piston through the arch of your boot as it hits compression and fires up a big streetbike is one of those distinctly 20th-century tactile pleasures that is drifting away from us, like hitting a well-oiled typewriter key or pulling through the wooden Sensenich prop on a Piper Cub.

Seems worth doing, even if we have to utter the occasional dark oath and boil cork now and then. It’s these many small rituals, in the end, that make motorcycling something more than just steering.