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Jay, Paul, Brad, & Bryce |
Do you need any mechanical abilities to own a dirt bike? Well, maybe
not, maybe so. You can certainly try to depend on "the shop" to do most of your
maintenance. Though this can be costly and sometimes you find the guy at the shop
doesn't know as much as you do. Not to mention that when you're 150 miles into
the Baja peninsula, there aren't that many shops around. Do you really want your
friends working on your bike? If you ride with guys that are similar to the guys I ride
with, that can be a hard question to answer.
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Brad on the phone |
I'll start with Brad, better known to many as Pinhead. Recently I was talking to
George about some of our past trips. He looked at me strangely and asked, "Why do you
guys even ride with this Brad guy?" Well, besides the fact that he's one of my
best friends, I really don't know. OK, it's really not that bad. I'm just,
still, really bitter about our last ride to Rasor Valley. I intend to do a ride report
about this trip, but every time I start it turns into a tirade, griping about Brad. Anyway
Brad, I'm still holding a grudge and will do my best not to thoroughly trash you or
make you look too stupid. That said, let's move on. Brad is a really smart guy with
above average mechanical skills. However, while he has an excellent grasp of most really
complex concepts he just has no grasp of the obvious. By day he's a successful
engineer at one of the leading companies in the field vibration damping. By night, aside
from being a father, he's a student working on his masters degree. While he'll
argue this ‘til we're all blue in the face, he has no common sense. At least no
conventional common sense. If there is any mechanical situation, Brad will begin to
pullout manuals, schematics, blue prints, etc. After several hours of analysis, including
drawings, he'll reach a conclusion and begin to act on it. Basically, if it
can't be done "the right way" (his way), he'll do his best to see that
it's not done at all. On a recent trip, while in the middle of the Mojave Desert, he
had several problems with his newly installed MSM lighting kit. Since this kit did not
come with a schematic, Brad could not even begin to troubleshoot.
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The crew work on Brad's bike |
This resulted in several hours standing around his stripped bike with a Digital VOM
arguing about the design of the XR's electrical system and an hour-long conversation,
on my cell phone, with the guys at MSM. Resulting in him disconnecting the kit so he could
ride the rest of the weekend. Now, I would think that most people would simply disconnect
the kit in the first place and get on with the weekend. There's much more, but as I
said above, I'm bitter and won't go into it. In his defense, he finally has the
kit working (months later) and only after MSM sent him a new kit.
Bryce on the other hand is also a mechanical engineer, but spent some time working on a
prune ranch. He has a lot more practical experience. For those whom don't know it,
when working on a prune ranch, one gets practical experience such as building forklifts
using an old Chevy truck, some scrap metal, and a refrigerator. Bryce has the most well
rounded background and a lot of experience from maintaining is own road racing bikes.
However, he's one of the most stubborn and opinionated of the group. If you
don't agree with him, he'll just blow you off and do it his way anyway. Luckily,
I agree with him most of the time.
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| Don't use slip-joint pliers on your forks! |
Paul, the least experienced of us, is a general contractor. We like to joke that he
uses the contractor approach to everything, "he can make anything work as long as he
has a big enough hammer." I don't think there's a non-rounded bolt head on
his bike. While Paul has the most simplistic approach to everything, he's also the
most adventurous of all of us. Paul would not hesitate to split his cases on the trail if
someone suggested it would be a good idea. Our very first trip with Paul started with him
completely disassembling his carburetor on the desert floor and duct taping part if his
clutch cable together.
There's another guy we go riding with on occasion, Scott. Scott, better known as
Loopie because he tends to loop-out his openclass YZ in camp, is one of the more
imaginative "mechanics" that I know. On one trip he showed up with a pancaked
exhaust pipe. He simply cutout the smashed section and replaced it with some flexible
aluminum tubing/ducting. You know, that stuff that connects your air cleaner to the valve
cover on your old Chevy. This combined with a pair of hose clamps and some chamber seal
and he was set. At the end of the day, he put in a fresh piece of tubing and he was ready
for the next day. Granted, that big-bore YZ has so much power that he could use a straw
for an exhaust pipe and it'd still have more power than he would need. The amazing
thing is how long his fixes last. Many years ago, he fixed his throttle with a piece cut
from a plastic water bottle and some silicon. It's still there and has lasted longer
than the original throttle.
Then there's me. I spent most of my youth working in service stations, this was
before the job was nothing but sitting in a glass booth. Looking back, some of the
"repairs" I made to peoples cars I certainly wouldn't wish upon myself. I
also had the usual array of auto shop and metal shop in high school. I also took a couple
auto repair pre-certification classes in college "just for the fun of it". I
tend to lean towards the "quick and dirty" repairs. Getting back before dark is
my main goal. If I need to buy a new motor when I get home so be it. Also, being a
computer geek, I tend to solve problems by thinking about how I'd write a program to
do it.
Anyway, with this group of guys, I'm always sure that we'll all make it back
to camp. However, I'm not always sure about how long it'll take. If there is a
failure we usually spend an hour diagnosing it, an hour arguing how to fix it and another
hour arguing about how to make the special tool needed to fix it. Most importantly the
only thing that we can agree on is that we won't take it to a shop and we don't
want/trust anyone else to do it...
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