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By Root 304 0

held the air gun on the bearing for a good long while. The pitch of the spinning bearing continued to rise, to the point it sounded like a dentist’s drill. Grinning over the bearing, Tommy and I turned to Garnet. But Garnet was gone. The next thing I knew, the bearing felt a lot lighter in my hand, and there was a terrible racket up in the beams of the ceiling, like we were under rifle fire. The bearing had exploded, and all that remained in my hand was the inner race. Tommy and I felt lucky to be alive, and more inclined to heed Garnet’s inscrutable silences.

Writing Service Tickets

I keep a logbook in the shop, a sort of motorcycle diary that serves a number of purposes. It is a record of bikes taken in, work done, and lessons learned. Sometimes I draw pictures to help myself reason through some mechanical situation. I measure various tolerances, when rebuilding a clutch, for example, and list them next to the wear limits specified in the service manual, if I have one for the bike. I also record the amount of time I spend on each task, and the money I’ve spent on parts. The book serves as a rough draft, then, for the service ticket I eventually write for the customer. It is rough because I have to make a judgment about how much detail the owner is interested in, and also about how truthful it is prudent to be.

I record hours on the left side of the page. Under that number, I’ll write another number, the hours I think I ought to bill.

5.5 R&R front end, rebuild forks.

Bill: 2.5

This entry means that I actually spent around five and a half hours removing and replacing the front end of a motorcycle, tearing down the forks and cleaning their parts, inspecting everything for cracks and wear, putting in new fork seals and crush washers (these are washers made of copper or aluminum, used for sealing bolt holes; the forks contain oil), and putting the whole mess together again. But more often than not, I will bill for much less time. This was especially so when I first started. Early on, I decided it was best to lie about how much time it took me to do things, because the time I was spending seemed implausible. Partly it is inexperience that slows me down, and partly it is my disposition to get totally absorbed in the details, and forget that the clock is ticking. Also, my market niche lies in the fact that I am one of few people who will work on just about anything, so it is often the case that I am seeing an uncommon motorcycle, for the first time, and have to learn my way around it. The dealerships sometimes refuse to work on old bikes because they are prone to complications, and may require a bit of improvisational engineering. Some of the manufacturers no longer exist. Finding parts can be an endless hassle. Such bikes become “projects,” and the last thing a service manager wants to do is break the rhythm of his mechanics. They get to be very fast, these dealer mechanics, and as an independent mechanic I feel I have to meet the standards of efficiency that they set, or at least appear to. So I lie and tell people a job took ten hours when it might have taken twenty. To compensate, I also tell them my shop rate is forty dollars per hour, but it usually works out to more like twenty. I feel like an amateur, no less now than when I started, but through such devices I hope to appear like somebody who knows what he is doing, and bills accordingly.1

This gap between my private logbook and the service ticket is the space where the ethics of repairing motorcycles gets worked out. Especially when working on old bikes, in trying to solve an existing problem I’ll sometimes create a new problem. For example, to remove the brass float needle seat on a Bing carburetor (used on BMWs), the prescribed method is to use a tap to thread it; then you can put a pair of vise grips on the tap and pull the seat out from its recess. Once I was doing this and the tap broke off inside the seat. What now? Now you consider drilling out the tap. But the broken end is jagged, so you can’t really get a drill bit to stay on the center of it. How