Sharing the Load

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Thomas W. Day

When I'm home, which is most of the time these days, a character I've known for years used to regularly stop by the house with his motorcycle in some state of disrepair hoping that I'll drop whatever I'm doing and fix it for him. In my withering years, I'm disinclined to multi-task for anyone at any time and I ignored him until he went away. Along with the "fix this for me" chant, he regularly includes "Why don't we ever ride somewhere together?" 
 

We bought an RV a couple of years ago and I spent the summer fixing up the damn thing, getting it ready for what I'd hoped would be a 12,000 mile winter trip. By "we," I mean "me." My wife encouraged this purchase, provided the money from a normal inheritance she'd received from her father's estate, and nagged at me to find an RV until I put aside the stuff I wanted to be doing that year and researched RVs until I found something we could live in and that she might be willing to drive. The limitations were serious: has to be normal enough to feel like driving a car, costs under X-dollars, gets good mileage, can be parked in town, and has a collection of "must have" accommodations. Not many US-sold RVs met her requirements, so we ended up with a very low-mileage 2000 Winnebago Rialta. I flew to Portland and drove the damn thing back by myself because she decided, at the last minute, she didn't want to take that trip. Huge warning flags waving right then, but I am as perceptive as a sightless fish and as smart as a sightless worm. 
 
8,500 miles later and a good portion of the winter spent re-engineering Winnebago and Volkswagen's poor quality assembly attempts, and I know way more about "adaptive transmissions," VW's many quality problems, automotive computer systems, and being an RV owner. My wife, on the other hand, knows almost nothing about any aspect of our vehicle and its functions as a moblie home. I signed up for a couple of users' groups for this vehicle and a woman recently posted, "I had no idea what my husband did with our Rialta until he died last summer and I discovered I didn't know how any aspect of this motorhome worked. I had to spend nearly $2,000 doing the basic maintenance he did every spring for a few hundred dollars and a weekend of puttering around. I didn't even know how the stove worked until one of you showed me at the Nevada rally." I'm not saying my wife is incompetent. She gets around the kitchen pretty well and has sort of adapted to my "everything has a place and belongs in it" Captain Bligh routines, she took over most of the cabin-cleaning duties. I cook, she cleans up afterwards. She's a good driver and put on a few hundred miles behind the wheel on the first half of the trip and a few thousand on the way back. While she knows there is a setup and teardown checklist and can read it off to me, she would be helpless if the roles were reversed. Among our RV-aquaintances, my wife and other wives pretty much agree, "If he weren't with me, I'd sell this thing in a minute." Like motorcycling, RV-ownership appears to be a guy thing.
 
If I were to "go riding" with the wannabe co-rider about whom I started this rant, I'd be stuck in the same situation, but on a motorcycle. I have always tried to surround myself with people who are smarter than me; and that's not often a difficult task. When I go for distance on my motorcycle, I am exercising my Inner Hermit and I have no desire to babysit anyone. Since I turned thirty, my motto has been "Hermits don't have peer pressure." In fact, I'm going to have a t-shirt made with that on it; in big letters. There are some people with whom I have obligations and I'll set aside my better hermit judgment for them. There are a very few people with whom I would happily travel anywhere, anytime, for as long as they want to go. For everyone else, I'm not going there with you. I have enough problems taking care of myself. Adding you to my load is not on the menu. I've had my kids and you're not them.

Real Luxury

For most of my semi-adult life, I’ve been more than a little jealous of people who have a heated, comfortable workspace.

Two years ago, I put considerable effort into installing a “real door” between our basement and our lower garage. This was a big part of the reason for going through all the misery of disassembly 60 years of cobbled-together door frames. 3 layers of 2”x10” jack studs and headers tacked on top of each other as the water and rot ruined the last layer the previous owners just shrunk up the door by 4” and ignored the basement garage. You can see the old hobbit door at the far right against the wall in this picture.

A couple of the incredibly generous and cool guys from the Red Wing Iron Works Motorbike Club showed up this morning to help me wrestle the bike from the garage into the basement. It went as easily as I could have hoped (still not a one-man job, especially when the one man is an old fart). For the first time since I left California in 1991, I have a warm, well-lit indoor space to work on my bike for the rest of the winter. This will be the most fun spring motorcycle prep in decades.

I have a bunch of new parts (chain and sprockets, back tire, oil and fluids) to swap out and a couple cool mods to make and the WR will be ready to go somewhere when it warms up.

The Easy Way or My Way

The day started simple. I just need to replace the V-Strom’s front tire. Nothing to it, should be no more than 10 minutes of really hard work and 30 minutes of easy stuff, put the tools away and to back to screwing around for another day of simple retirement. Of course, I had to reorganize the back of the garage to make it so it would be easy to put everything back when the tire job was done. That took about 45 minutes, but now the back of the garage is organized.

As expected, pulling the old tire off was the hard part and it took about 10 minutes to break the beads and pop the tire free from the wheel. The new tire went on easily and quickly. The wheel balanced right up, with 4 weights (28grams) which is about twice what I’m used to needing. The tools went back hassle-free. I got the garage cleaned up and rode the bike back to the lower level garage.

That is when everything went to hell.

Trying to horse the bike into the garage, over the loose gravel driveway, I lost control of the bike and it dropped into the retaining wall. Total damage: one brake lever, one hand guard, and one turn signal. After wrestling the V-Strom back up, I started stripping off the body parts to get to the portion of the fairing where the turn signal piece lives. That didn’t go too well, so I disassembled the hand guard to evaluate that broken section.

I decided it was time for me to learn how to use my Harbor Freight plastic welding rig. I’d played with it before, but only with throw-away plastic bits. The hand guard break was clean and clamp-able, so I gave it a shot. It welded up pretty well. I wouldn’t call my weld “beautiful,” but it is strong and could be repainted to look fairly decent. The ABS weld material is white and the V-Strom parts are all black, so the weld will definately show unless I decide to paint it. Next is the fairing bit that holds the turn signal. This is a piece that I broke when I crashed in the Yukon in 2007 and cobbled back together with Gorilla Glue. Nothing on that fairing piece is cosemetic, so a big strong weld could be better than the original design. I also cracked the front fender in Alaska and have been ignoring that for a decade. That repair was next and it went badly. The fairing isn’t ABS, but some cheaper, crappier sort of plastic that refused to accept any of the plastic material that came with my rig. Just like 2007 in Alaska, I ended up gluing that piece back together. After that failure, most of the rest of the repairs were taken care of in a similar half-hearted manner.

However, the rest of the repairs went about as well as you could expect, knowing that my mood was dark and my patience expired. I’d turned a couple hours work into two days of fumbling around and my V-Strom looks a little more beat-up for the experience. The good news is that it all hung together for the 800 mile trip and so did I.

#123 Unnecessary Evil?

All Rights Reserved © 2012 Thomas W. Day

In a recent long, sometimes emotional, occasionally irrational discussion about the superiority/inferiority of belts, drive shafts, and chains, the comments from a few of the MMM regulars illustrated how much we humans dislike maintenance. It's messy, it takes time away from riding and other more exciting activities, and it is boring. At my age, maintenance is also painful. Getting down on my garage floor to inspect low-lying components like the chain, oil-drain and filter, wheels and tires, and practically everything below the height of the seat is a gamble. After every service interval, there is a good chance that I'll be squalling, "Help! I'm a turtle and I can't get up!"

I teach a class called "Studio Maintenance I." In the class introduction, I introduce the concept of maintenance to people who have often never touched a tool and describe how that practice effects a recording engineer's performance and economic success. That discussion breaks studio owners' maintenance attitudes into three basic categories:

• Maintenance is something I only do when things break and I can’t get out of calling a tech.
  
• Maintenance is something I do to prevent equipment from failing at critical moments.
  
• Maintenance is what I do to add value to my studio’s sound quality and reputation.

I think you can apply those statements to motorcycle maintenance with a little modification.
Maybe it's because my life was permanently altered when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Maybe it's because I worked as maintenance tech, manufacturing and design engineer, manufacturing manager, and tech services manager for more than half of my life. Maybe it's because I have a mental disability that prevents me from walking by broken stuff without feeling a compulsion to fix it (Unless it's plumbing. I hate plumbing.). Whatever the reason, I can't help but think something vital is missing in a culture (or cultures) that does not feel the need to do basic maintenance. 

One of the key consumer features of all modern products is the disposability of those products. Most electronic devices are completely impractical to repair under all conditions. Car dealer service techs regularly yank an in-warranty motor and replace it with a whole assembly rather than fool with complicated diagnostics and repairs. Years ago, I discovered that motorcycle manufacturers dump their inventory of critical spares as soon as those parts cost more to store than they make from sales. When I reviewed the Honda 2011 Honda VT1300CT Custom Interstate last fall, I was astounded to see that Honda had entirely scrapped the idea of a tool kit because they considered the entire motorcycle to be "not user serviceable." Because of the market that bike was intended to "serve," their other assumption was that those users would be too incompetent and lazy to perform the most basic maintenance.

That's a pretty strong statement Honda and others are making about us. If they are right, we're not far from losing our right to claim we are a "tool using" species. No Wilbur, tapping "whr r u" on your smart phone does not mean you are either a tool user or smart. There is a pretty good chance that Honda's bet will backfire on them, too. One of the activities that has formed and inspired the best young engineers and budding scientists is learning how to maintain machines or all sorts. If motorcycles become maintenance-free, in a few years the fools who mismanage the world's manufacturing companies may find there is no one who can actually build them. If we were to wait for an MBA to build something useful, we could be stationary for centuries. In fact, just before we all starve to death, it's possible that the world might discover that scientists and engineers are the primary "job creators" worldwide.

Knowing enough about our machines to recover from the average minor breakdown is an absolute necessity for anyone hoping to make use of an "adventure touring" bike. You aren't going to suddenly develop those skills after your bike tosses off bits of your "maintenance free" drive belt after the rear tire spits a small rock into a pulley. In fact, if you aren't already in the habit of doing fairly major maintenance, you won't have the necessary tools available to repair the simplest problems on the road. One nasty side-effect of doing your own maintenance is accumulating a collection of tools. Unlike the sometimes-small odds that you'll experience headaches, birth defects, insomnia, anxiety, and/or tremors with prescription medications, you will contract tools if you do maintenance. Owning tools isn't evidence that you are a tool user, but not owning them proves you aren't one. 

I can't disagree that cleaning and lubing a chain is sometimes an unrewarding task. Checking and adjusting modern bucket-and-shim valve lifters is about as exciting as homework. Balancing injectors or carbs is mundane and uninspiring. For some of us, just cleaning a bike is painful. Carefully looking over every fastener from the footpegs to the wheels to everything holding the motor together and to the frame is the kind of work many of you would assign to the step-child you want to leave home first.

You can argue that you can't have a major mechanical problem because you never ride more than fifty miles from home. There is some truth to that. You pick your poison and you live or die with the results. Lucky for me, most days fiddling on a bike in the garage by myself is the best part of the day. Rolling out of the tent early in the morning and going through my maintenance routine is part of how I figure out how the rest of the day is going to go. When I stop for food or fuel, I go through a similar checklist while the bike is warm and the tires are hot. At night, before I settle down for the evening I have a different schedule of things to check. When all of those processes are working right, I ride almost fearlessly. I feel closer to my motorcycle and more like we're in this together. When something screws with some or all of my routine maintenance, I am clinging to the bars worrying about what is likely to fall off or blow up until I stop and do the work.

Your mileage may vary. Apparently, it likely does.

Book Review: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

by Robert Pirsig, 1974

All Rights Reserved © 2012 Thomas W. Day

In 2014, Zen (or ZAMM) will celebrate its 40th year in publication. It is one of the best read books in history. Google returns 2 million hits for a search on the book's title. There are dozens of guidebooks for readers: study guides for high school and college students, anniversary editions with introductions and explanations, primers for the less-than-literate, me-too copies, and lots of philosophical analysis. For a book so often despised by academics, ZAMM has inspired an incredible amount of examination and deconstruction.

I have owned a copy of this book since the first year it was published (1974). I have reviewed more than 100 books, several hundred music CDs, and written hundreds of thousands words since I first stumbled upon Zen and, before now, I have never found the confidence or arrogance to write about one of the books that shaped my life. Recently, I found a digital copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and was amazed to realize that a popular book published in my lifetime has gone into the public domain. I am probably on my 20th copy of the paperback version of this book, having loaned and lost each of the previous copies I've owned. At the minimum, I've read ZAMM twenty times. For almost forty years, every time I have backpacked into the wilderness or travelled by motorcycle for more than a couple days I have brought a copy of ZAMM for those quiet moments that are the reason I venture into unfamiliar and isolated places. Of the few good things I know, Robert Pirsig and Colin Fletcher (The Complete Walker and many other wonderful foot traveling stories) and John Muir (Keep Your Volkswagen Alive; A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot) are responsible for at least 50% of my life's accumulated knowledge.

When someone I respect a lot told me he'd tried and failed to read ZAMM to the end, multiple times, I restarted the self-evaluation experience that always accompanies my exposure to Robert Pirsig's insights; just to see what might make this book difficult to read. When I discovered that all but one novel, Catch 22, from the collection one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, Joseph Heller, had been purged from my local library system, I felt compelled to write about ZAMM to slow Pirsig's disappearance into the flotsam and jetsam of our trivialized and drug-and-attention-disordered Facebook and Twitter'd world.

When my father discovered my teenage interest in mechanical and electrical concepts, he told me, "Anything you can do for yourself, someone else can do better." When I was a young man, in his "Chautauqua" Pirsig told me, "A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself." Pirsig's description of the mechanics who botched his bike repair illustrated a world I wanted to avoid, "At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. . . They were involved in it (technology and their work) but not in such a way as to care." I knew that the only person who would care about the things I wanted fixed or built was me. Pirsig convinced me that I could learn to do the work.

I grew up in a very religious family and community where "rationality" was avoided whenever possible. I was the family black sheep, green monkey, or whatever label you use to identify and whack the prominent nail. I desperately sought rationality and ZAMM is packed with it from the first to the last page. The confluence of technology, logic, and reason, and the possibility of a career nestled between those concepts was revolutionary. It still is.

Surrounding the practical aspects of ZAMM, Pirsig pursues the concept of "quality." All of us are involved in this search, but many of us are distracted by the sparkly lights advertising uses to convince us that quality is something we can purchase. ZAMM flies against the whole "lifestyle" theory of product marketing. One reason the counter-culture so readily accepted ZAMM is that Pirsig validates the philosophy of questioning authority. From a traditionalist's perspective, Persig's dissection of romantic and rhetoric philosophies was a cold-blooded evaluation of the gaping holes in emotionalism and formal argument. More than a few academics, who live and thrive on emotionalism and rhetoric, fought back from the ramparts of their gloomy institutions while five million of us took refuge in the streets armed with a new way to look for Quality in our lives.

From a hopeful writer's perspective, ZAMM is inspirational. Rejected by a record 121 publishers and selling 5 million copies worldwide, ZAMM is a beacon of hope for authors of all stripes, even though few of us can hope to approach Pirsig's brilliant combination of formal and contemporary style and content. From a life-long student's perspective, Pirsig taught me that in a world full of irrational people, insane cultural garbage, and what seems like universal foolishness, there can be small outposts of rationality and calm. You just have to find them; or make them for yourself. Maybe this is just another version of Dylan Thomas' "Rage, rage against the dying of the light," but ZAMM makes the effort seems more like an attempt to build something than just a rant about death. Pirsig told me, "Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things." I needed to read the book through to that point, multiple times in my life. I did it again, this spring, and I believe it is going to get better now. As it always does.

Book Review: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

[One more book review that attracted little-to-no interest from my MMM editors.]

by Robert Pirsig, 1974

All Rights Reserved © 2012 Thomas W. Day

In 2014, Zen (or ZAMM) will celebrate its 40th year in publication. It is one of the best read books in history. Google returns 2 million hits for a search on the book's title. There are dozens of guidebooks for readers: study guides for high school and college students, anniversary editions with introductions and explanations, primers for the less-than-literate, me-too copies, and lots of philosophical analysis. For a book so often despised by academics, ZAMM has inspired an incredible amount of examination and deconstruction.

I have owned a copy of this book since the first year it was published (1974). I have reviewed more than 100 books, several hundred music CDs, and written hundreds of thousands words since I first stumbled upon Zen and, before now, I have never found the confidence or arrogance to write about one of the books that shaped my life. Recently, I found a digital copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and was amazed to realize that a popular book published in my lifetime has gone into the public domain. I am probably on my 20th copy of the paperback version of this book, having loaned and lost each of the previous copies I've owned. At the minimum, I've read ZAMM twenty times. For almost forty years, every time I have backpacked into the wilderness or travelled by motorcycle for more than a couple days I have brought a copy of ZAMM for those quiet moments that are the reason I venture into unfamiliar and isolated places. Of the few good things I know, Robert Pirsig and Colin Fletcher (The Complete Walker and many other wonderful foot traveling stories) and John Muir (Keep Your Volkswagen Alive; A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot) are responsible for at least 50% of my life's accumulated knowledge.

When someone I respect a lot told me he'd tried and failed to read ZAMM to the end, multiple times, I restarted the self-evaluation experience that always accompanies my exposure to Robert Pirsig's insights; just to see what might make this book difficult to read. When I discovered that all but one novel, Catch 22, from the collection one of the greatest authors of the 20th Century, Joseph Heller, had been purged from my local library system, I felt compelled to write about ZAMM to slow Pirsig's disappearance into the flotsam and jetsam of our trivialized and drug-and-attention-disordered Facebook and Twitter'd world.

When my father discovered my teenage interest in mechanical and electrical concepts, he told me, "Anything you can do for yourself, someone else can do better." When I was a young man, in his "Chautauqua" Pirsig told me, "A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself." Pirsig's description of the mechanics who botched his bike repair illustrated a world I wanted to avoid, "At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. . . They were involved in it (technology and their work) but not in such a way as to care." I knew that the only person who would care about the things I wanted fixed or built was me. Pirsig convinced me that I could learn to do the work.

I grew up in a very religious family and community where "rationality" was avoided whenever possible. I was the family black sheep, green monkey, or whatever label you use to identify and whack the prominent nail. I desperately sought rationality and ZAMM is packed with it from the first to the last page. The confluence of technology, logic, and reason, and the possibility of a career nestled between those concepts was revolutionary. It still is.

Surrounding the practical aspects of ZAMM, Pirsig pursues the concept of "quality." All of us are involved in this search, but many of us are distracted by the sparkly lights advertising uses to convince us that quality is something we can purchase. ZAMM flies against the whole "lifestyle" theory of product marketing. One reason the counter-culture so readily accepted ZAMM is that Pirsig validates the philosophy of questioning authority. From a traditionalist's perspective, Persig's dissection of romantic and rhetoric philosophies was a cold-blooded evaluation of the gaping holes in emotionalism and formal argument. More than a few academics, who live and thrive on emotionalism and rhetoric, fought back from the ramparts of their gloomy institutions while five million of us took refuge in the streets armed with a new way to look for Quality in our lives.

From a hopeful writer's perspective, ZAMM is inspirational. Rejected by a record 121 publishers and selling 5 million copies worldwide, ZAMM is a beacon of hope for authors of all stripes, even though few of us can hope to approach Pirsig's brilliant combination of formal and contemporary style and content. From a life-long student's perspective, Pirsig taught me that in a world full of irrational people, insane cultural garbage, and what seems like universal foolishness, there can be small outposts of rationality and calm. You just have to find them; or make them for yourself. Maybe this is just another version of Dylan Thomas' "Rage, rage against the dying of the light," but ZAMM makes the effort seems more like an attempt to build something than just a rant about death. Pirsig told me, "Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things." I needed to read the book through to that point, multiple times in my life. I did it again, this spring, and I believe it is going to get better now. As it always does.