Need To Know
NEED TO KNOW
IGNITION
GUEST COLUMN
WHAT WILL WE STORE IN THE OLD MENTAL RAFTERS NOW?
JOHN BURNS
My kid likes motorcycles, but he's not really into them the way I'm into motorcycles. After an adolescence spent soiling the pages of dirty bike magazines at the drugstore, I moved on to the hard stuff. I started reading Hot Rod when I was about 16 and was shortly hooked on cams and cranks and things-carb spacers, Holley double-pumper squirters, dual-point distributor tuning with different weights and springs. In the crazy hotted-up 396 Chevelle I managed to acquire when I was 18 (which seemed ill-advised even to me), you could feel every one of those adjustments in the seat of your pants and see it on the big Sun tachometer hose-clamped to the steering column (the only "electronic" thing involved). It really was applied science. Old big-block Chevys make an awesome racket as they wind up to 6,ooo rpm. When I learned streetbikes go to 11, I had to have one.
My son is 19 now, so it came as a surprise to me when I said, as we were preparing to go for a little moto on a 125 Husky the other day, that he should check the air filter. Where would that be, he wanted to know? In the usual place, I suggested, under the seat or behind one of the side panels.
Oh, I thought you said air goes in through the radiator thing on the front?
I knew it was bad, but I didn't know it was this bad. I guess that's what I get for not having the kid do his own dirt bike maintenance, but I assumed the sight of me washing and oiling air filters 500 times would imprint. On the other hand, he is able to play a movie on the Xbox and get back to TV afterward without breaking a sweat, and he did point out to me that Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad is all good, man. He is plugged into an entire world of technology and subtle code that baffles me. Why do I need four remotes to watch guys in Alaska split firewood and toss frozen salmon to their sled dogs?
But people wind up knowing what they need to know. If I hadn't known how to keep my Chevelle running, I wasn't going anywhere. I clearly remember the exact moment when my boy knew you could get hurt motocrossing: After flying farther and farther onto a tabletop at Starwest MX Park ("Scarwest") on a KX65, he overjumped the whole deal on about the sixth lap and tank-slapped into a catch fence. Gravity is not playing. After that, moto became more of a sideline.
The concept of risk/reward was made instantly clear in one failed swoop.
What I don't know about engines far exceeds what I do, but what little I learned revealed a whole awareness of things for me as a kid, the understanding that there's a lot of genius thinking behind nearly everything you touch and see, both man-made and natural.
To have gone from artifacts as perfect as the Holley double-pumper and the Mallory dual-point distributor to fuel injection and electronic ignitions that require no care whatsoever (and still outperform the old stuff) is almost as mind-boggling as the jump from the Wright brothers to the 787. All of it in the blink of an eye.
When we got to the track that day, our borrowed Husky wouldn't idle, and the one adjuster I could see on its carburetor didn't look like the right one; it had a locknut on it. While I was scratching my head and taking Keihin's name in vain, the kid stuck his iPhone in my face, with a perfect photo of the Husky carb and a little arrow pointing to the "Idle Adjuster." Yeah, that's it, Dad. Google to the rescue. We undid the locknut, turned up the idle, and roosted happily all day.
At moderate speeds. All you really need to know now is how to log on to the www. That should free up quite a few brain cells. What the kid will do with them, I have no clue.
BY THE NUMBERS
PRICE OF A GALLON OF PREMIUM WHEN I WAS 18
61,320
APPROXIMATE HOURS SPENT "TUNING" MY CHEVELLE TO RUN ONE 12.79-SEC. 1/4-MILE
CHEVELLE 4-WHEEL DRUM BRAKE INSPECTIONS DURING MY OWNERSHIP
