The Importance of Working on Your Motorcycle

[Hugh Janus]

Kevin Cameron (Robert Martin/)

I’ve written about this before but it’s a message that bears repeating.

We live in a time of marvelous, highly capable motorcycles in every category, but the old tradition of at-home maintenance has grown thin, that of dads who on certain Saturdays confidently changed the oil in the family car’s engine, or replaced noisy wiper blades, or changed a fan belt. More than one woman has told me, with a certain ironic look, that “Today’s guys know mainly two things: How to do whatever it is they do at work, and how to watch sports on TV.”

When, during the 1970s and ’80s, I modified cylinders or machined heads for more compression for club racers, I wasn’t asked for carburetor jetting specs. When I’d offer, riders would say, “I’ll handle it.” During the ’90s that changed, and so did the population of people going racing. The older “man in a van with a plan” was being replaced by box trucks filled with bikes that were increasingly professionally prepared. People picking up custom pipes or altered cylinders from me wanted carb jetting specs, and they wanted to be guaranteed their engines would never, ever seize. Eventually I stopped doing that work because a day was clearly coming when I would need something like doctors’ malpractice insurance.

How do you become comfortable with machinery? More people used to grow up on farms, where if you couldn’t fix broken equipment yourself, you did without. More people had manufacturing jobs at which they worked with machines; manufacturing is now down to 8 percent of the US GNP. The armed services were great places to become familiar with tools and equipment, but increasingly, service is now performed by manufacturer’s reps. My middle son, asked by his officer to round up a working mine roller, was told hands off—the maker’s reps were the only ones authorized to touch that equipment. When he bypassed the hydraulics and got one working, he was nearly in big trouble. Fortunately his officer showed up.

The spoken or unspoken message today: If you’re not an expert with documents to prove it, don’t dare touch equipment. You might wreck it! I don’t like to hear that, because there has never been a better time to take an interest in mechanical work. I’ve listed the reasons before. Here they are again:

1. Huge numbers of used bikes, engines, parts, and sub-assemblies are easily available, cheap, on the Internet. So cheap!<br/>
2. Tool sets in fitted plastic carrying cases are also cheap and can be at your door tomorrow.<br/>
3. Illustrated service manuals exist and are for sale, also arriving tomorrow.<br/>
4. If you get stuck, you have hundreds or thousands of potential online colleagues on brand-and-model forums who have hit the same problem you have, and they have uploaded their solutions, often with video.<br/>

Yes, you need a place to work with decent lighting and heat. A work surface. Containers for parts. A drain pan for oil. People do good work in all sorts of improvised work areas.

You can start with easy stuff like an oil change (the spec for oil and filter is in your owner’s book). Or you can adjust hand and foot controls to suit yourself. Ever get a cramp in your ankle from trying to keep from pressing a brake pedal that’s set too high? Annoyed by excessive slack in a throttle or clutch cable? Fixing these things is common sense.

Yes, there’s fear, because things are unfamiliar at first. When I was seven, my mother had a worn-out car engine brought to the unused side of our two-car garage. It took me considerable staring time to get over how strange it was, up close. Andit filthy with leaked oil and caked-on road grit. Gradually I got used to it, as I would also to clocks and watches. Lots of just staring until the sense began to emerge. Finally I began to unbolt things and stare at them, too. I was in new territory. Teachers don’t teach so much as they create situations in which people can’t help but learn. Teaching yourself teaches best, because the knowledge gained is all yours.

Twenty years later I found myself still staring at parts when new race bikes arrived in the spring. I’d walk up and down with a cylinder or piston in my hands, staring, trying to see what was new, trying to make sense of it. I’d make bad instant coffee and walk and stare some more, sipping.

Two years ago Cycle World wanted some videos made of what’s inside a late-model sportbike engine. The not-exactly-princely sum of $150 summoned a 26,000-mile CBR600 engine from the teeming parts marketplace. Lots of people think nothing of laying out similar money to put a framed art print on their wall or go out to a nice dinner for two. Buy a used engine and treat yourself to the instructive experience of taking the thing apart, tracing out its systems, and getting familiar with all the parts and how they look. Your hands will become familiar with the forces involved in loosening fasteners (this is the origin of “common sense” in such matters). More staring, plus reference to a service book, brings everything within the range of human understanding.

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