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By Root 238 0

worth the money it takes to get them running right, the tension I mentioned between your fiduciary responsibility to the bike owner and your metaphysical responsibility to the bike itself is especially acute. In retrospect, I now recognize the sign scrawled above the parts counter at Donsco (“Speed costs. How fast do you want to spend?”) as an attempt to ease this stress, in the same way as my speech. It basically says, check your economic logic at the door or don’t come in, because I can’t answer to two masters. But, of course, no customer can simply disregard the larger frame of his or her economic life. Much as I would like to be responsible only to the motorcycle, I am responsible also to another person, with a limited budget.

Say the bike shows evidence of a substantial oil leak: a thick, three-dimensional layer of caked-on grime covers the bottom half of the engine and frame. It could be something easy to fix (a leaking oil tank, or an external oil line), or it could be something requiring a complete teardown of the motor (certain oil seals, for example). In the latter case, it’s often best to write it off as a parts bike. But to make this determination, you have to first figure out where the oil is leaking from. The problem is that, once liberated from where it’s supposed to be, oil flings everywhere in the blast of wind that comes with speed, so it’s near impossible to say where the oil is leaking from unless you first get everything clean and dry, and cleaning the bike is a big job. You poke halfheartedly at it with a screwdriver, not quite accepting this sequence of tasks, and watch chunks of shit-colored bike cheese fall off onto the lift. Next come the rags, lots of them, and various caustic substances.

Once everything is spick-and-span, I’ll sometimes spray all the suspect areas with athlete’s foot powder spray. (The powder is white, and clings to surfaces, so oil leaks become more visible.) But before you can check for oil leaks, the bike needs to run. So you may need to spend a lot of time removing carburetors, disassembling and cleaning them, sorting out buggered wiring, and who knows what all, before you can fire the thing up. That is, before you can say whether it has a serious oil leak, which, if you had known at the outset, would have made the bike not worth putting all this effort into. So at the beginning of any resuscitation of an old bike, you try to think logically about a sequence of investigations and fixes that will reveal the most serious problems sooner rather than later.

The Magna was screwed every which way, including loose. Further, with gratuitous plastic covers here and there, and that swoopy eighties comfort bike look, it had about zero cool factor. There were probably millions of them rotting in junkyards around the world, and it seemed a bit mad that I was about to devote my precious time, and the customer’s money, to sorting this one out. But I kind of needed the work. Thoughts of the bike’s economic value receded as I wheeled it onto the lift. The warehouse was empty and silent. I could see my breath with each exhalation, dissolving quickly into the chill void. I stepped on a red lever, and a loud whoosh of compressed air raised the Magna up to eye level.

Based on what I’d read about valve train problems in this bike, I decided to check the valves first. The thing is, with the close fit of the frame, getting the valve cover off the rear bank of cylinders on this bike is like trying to get a ship out of a bottle. It just seems flatly impossible. You persist only because you know it must have been put on at some point in the past, and in theory every sequence of moves ought to be reversible. But if you’re me, at least, eventually your mind starts to doubt even such unassailable logic, and you begin to entertain the idea of cutting the frame away and welding it back later. I get so focused on the problem at hand that, outside my tunnel vision, a wholesale insanity begins to sprout in support of my immediate goal.

I smelled something burning, and discovered my pants were on fire.