I already mentioned I’m a lousy (inexperienced) mechanic. You already knew I bought a 1989 Honda Pacific Coast… which no mechanic will touch. I knew damn well what I was getting into. I did it anyway. Such hubris!
Dealerships in my area don’t like to service… anything. They’ll barely touch the Goldwing their customers financed two years ago. A decade ago they started to get fidgety over brake pads and a tire for my dirt simple 1999 Honda Shadow; which is pathetic. Honda sold like a bajillion of them! Imagine a mechanic in 1973 saying “Volkswagen Beetle? I’d need metric sockets! Can’t work on that.”
So anyway, I bought a 37 year old bike knowing I’d someday face the learning curve I’m enduring right now. Fine. A man needs a challenge and besides Hondas are famously reliable. (When I bought it I secretly wondered if I’d be able to make PC800 body panels with my 3d printer. Answer back then? No! More detailed answer now that I’ve experimented with 3d printing a few years? Mostly no.)
Last year I changed the oil. For an inept dweeb it was a cracking good start. I can and do change oil but it feels like a challenge. What can I say? We all have shit at which we suck.
This year I finally got healthy enough to take my PC800 camping. It was great. That’s when I noticed the tire is running out of tread. These things turn into sagas so I started “working on it” right away. There may (will?) be months of grumpy drama and unavoidable setbacks. Best to start early.
What do I mean by “grumpy drama”. Well, here goes:
I went to the dealer. “Can you put a new tire on my bike?”
I knew the answer but you’ve got to ask. It’s like checking the fuel in a car that won’t start. You’ve got to check before you do whatever else will really fix it.
The parts guy lobbed grenades at me. “Tires that size are out of stock. It’ll take 2 months to get one. Plus I’m quoting a price $60 higher than Amazon.”
The parts guy tagged out and handed me to the service guy. “That ridiculous price is just for the tire. Installation will be a lot more.”
I could live with that. A ‘throw money at it’ situation implies the situation will get solved.
But the service guy wasn’t done yet. He looked at the calendar like it was a cancer diagnosis. “We will drag this out”, the service guy continued, “we’ll take so long your life will begin to ebb before your eyes. The bike will wind up abandoned in a garage full of snowmobiles. We won’t even look at it until January, at which time we’ll say ‘it’s not a snowmobile’ and put it off another six months.”
I expected this but he heaped on more despair.
“Also, did you say it has ‘plastic fairings’?” He’d Googled PC800 and was squinting at the images. He didn’t like what he saw. “Why don’t you fuck right off? In fact, keep fucking off until you cross the fuck off event horizon from which we will never see you again.”
They didn’t say it exactly like that. I exaggerate… a little. And, it’s about what I expected so I wasn’t upset.
Before leaving I tried an alternative. “What if I show up with a wheel in one hand and a tire in the other?”
This changed everything. They were on board. They like mounting tires! “$50 to mount it. Probably take a couple hours.”
My path was clear.
Stay tuned…