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up with an imagined train of causes for manifest symptoms and judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a stock mental library, not of natural kinds or structures, like that of the surgeon, but rather the functional kinds of an internal combustion engine, their various interpretations by different manufacturers, and their proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire. If the motorcycle is thirty years old, from an obscure maker that went out of business twenty years ago, its proclivities are known mostly through lore. It would probably be impossible to do such work in isolation, without access to a collective historical memory; you have to be embedded in a community of mechanicantiquarians. These relationships are maintained by telephone, in a network of reciprocal favors that spans the country. My most reliable source, Fred Cousins in Chicago, has such an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European motorcycles that all I can offer him in exchange is regular deliveries of obscure European beer.

There is always a risk of introducing new complications when working on decrepit machines (kind of like gerontology, I suppose), and this enters the diagnostic logic. Measured in likelihood of screwups, the cost is not identical for all avenues of inquiry when deciding which hypothesis to pursue—for example, when trying to figure out why a bike won’t start. The fasteners holding the engine covers on 1970s-era Hondas are Phillips head, and they are always rounded out and corroded. Do you really want to check the condition of the starter clutch, if each of ten screws will need to be drilled out and extracted, risking damage to the engine case? Such impediments can cloud your thinking. Put more neutrally, the attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand, but a strong pragmatic bearing on it (kind of like origami). The factory service manuals tell you to be systematic in eliminating variables, but they never take into account the risks of working on old machines. So you have to develop your own decision tree for the particular circumstances. The problem is that at each node of this new tree, your own un quantifiable risk aversion introduces ambiguity. There comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. Any mechanic will tell you that it is invaluable to have other mechanics around to test your reasoning against, especially if they have a different intellectual disposition.

My shop mate in the early years, Thomas Van Auken, was also an accomplished visual artist (he is the illustrator of this book) and I was repeatedly struck by his ability to literally see things that escaped me. I had the conceit of being an empiricist, but seeing things is not always a simple matter. Even on the relatively primitive vintage bikes that were our specialty, some diagnostic situations contain so many variables, and symptoms can be so under-determining of causes, that explicit analytical reasoning comes up short. What is required then is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. I quickly realized there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in my previous job at the think tank.

Socially, being the proprietor of a bike shop in a small city gives me a feeling I never had before. I feel I have a place in society. Whereas “think tank” is an answer that, at best, buys you a few seconds when someone asks what you do and you try to figure out what it is that you in fact do, with “motorcycle mechanic” I get immediate recognition. I barter services with machinists and metal fabricators, which has a very different feel than transactions with money, and further increases my sense of belonging to a community. There are three restaurants in Richmond with cooks whose bikes I have restored,