Infamous Drawer of Useless Dead Weight

Infamous drawer of useless dead weight

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

WHILE STANDING AROUND MY GARAGE the other night waiting for spring, I decided to kill some time by mounting the new license plate on my Ducati ST4S. I took the plate out of its envelope, approached the rear of the bike and realized I’d failed to perform a time-honored ritual.

Stuck between the saddlebags on the rear fender of the Ducati was a heavy steel license-plate bracket, bolted over a steel strap whose sole purpose was to hold two small plastic side reflectors. The reflectors are invisible with the bags in place, and were no doubt bolted there grudgingly by Ducati workers to meet some arcane federal law.

This would never do. Never has.

So I grabbed some wrenches from my toolbox, removed both brackets and hefted them in my hand. Heavy. Surprisingly heavy. I then drilled two small holes in my license plate and mounted it directly to the rear fender with small, gold-anodized 6mm bolts. Now you’re talking. Elegant minimalism.

After a moment of quiet admiration, I scooped up the cast-off parts and carried them over to a red Craftsman storage cabinet whose large bottom drawer is used exclusively for superfluous parts taken off motorcycles over the years.

As I laid the license plate frame to rest in the drawer, I looked down and noticed there were three others exactly like it. Each had come off some Ducati I’d owned in the last 15 years (900SS, 998, ST2). I always saved these “original parts,” planning to bolt them back on the bike if I ever sold it, but I always forgot and the new owner never seemed to care.

Or maybe I saved these things because I always picture some outraged museum curator far in the future saying, “I can’t believe this idiot threw away the original license plate bracket and reflectors!” Sort of like the Indian Chief fenders everybody tossed 50 years ago because they were so heavy and weird, and now everyone likes them because they have a period charm, like the tailfins on a ’59 Cadillac.

In any case, the Ducati brackets went into my special drawer, which is the official Elephant’s Graveyard of weighty, useless parts.

Looking deeper into the drawer, I noticed that most of the other pieces had come off my Suzuki DR650. These were substantial: license-plate holder, inner rear fender liner, right-side mirror, passenger pegs, fork reflectors, bar-end vibration dampers and passenger grab bars.

One night, just before a dual-sport trip to the South Dakota Badlands last fall, I’d gone nuts and stayed up into the wee hours, stripping all this excess mass from the DR. I’d thrown the parts into a box and weighed it on our bathroom scale (the scientific way, with me holding the box and then not holding it) and found it to weigh just over 7 pounds. This doesn’t sound like much, but when you heft the box it feels like a lot of extra weight to accelerate, stop and turn. It’s like having our cat, Duffy, as an unwanted passenger. And Duffy eats a lot of cat food, when he isn’t sleeping.

Since then, weight removal from the DR has been a work in progress. I’ve acquired a set of tiny, faired-in tumsignal lights and a virtually weightless LED taillight. One of these nights I’ll get out my soldering gun and put all this stuff on. The next and most obvious step, of course, would be to find a lighter aftermarket exhaust system.

The weight of most stock exhaust systems, whenever I’ve removed them from a bike, is astounding. They feel like the submarine-shaped lead Linotype “pigs” I used to cast at my dad’s print shop when I was a kid.

I’m not quite sure where this compulsive need to remove weight from machinery comes from. Some of it originates with roadracing and off-roading, of course, where the benefits of light weight are immediate and obvious. But mostly, I think, it’s just a gearhead’s state of mind, an instinctive way of looking at the world.

It’s always seemed to me that there are two types of motorcyclists: those who remove things from bikes, and those who add stuff. Some of us will spend $200 on a carbon-fiber front fender to remove a few ounces of unsprung weight, and others will spend that same $200 on chrome-plated eagles. Some rejoice over using titanium licenseplate bolts, while others add flag holders designed for the stems of motor yachts.

And then there are those of us who can entertain both these concepts, schizophrenically, within the same brain. A few years ago my garage contained both a Road King (whose

designers apparently had not lost one moment of sleep over the weight issue) and a Ducati 996 slathered with carbonfiber, so there you go. I guess it all depends on the spirit and purpose of the bike.

Still, I’ve never bought a chromed eagle, and I would like to have lightened even the Harley, if it hadn’t been such a daunting prospect. So I guess I’m still firmly in the weight-reduction camp.

Even as a kid, I was always taking the fenders, chain guard and reflectors off my bicycle, stripping it down. And the Harleys and Indians of my Fifties boyhood always looked better to me as bob-jobs. I would have been the first to throw away those art-deco Indian Chief fenders.

So the beat goes on, and now I have a deep storage drawer, filled to the top with Suzuki parts and old Ducati license-plate brackets.

I suppose you can carry this weightreduction thing a little too far, however. I recently showed my wife, Barbara, the very trick and lightweight LED taillight I’d bought for the Suzuki, at no small expense.

She hefted it in her hand for a moment and said, “So, why didn’t you just skip lunch?”

So now I don’t know whether to go jogging this evening or get out that soldering iron. My bike lost 7 pounds last fall and I gained 10 this winter, so maybe I should do both. Spring is always a good time to lose a little sprung weight.