#maintenance

Changing your motorcycle’s oil is one of the most important – if not the most important – maintenance tasks you can perform for its engine. All those expensive moving parts within your engine won’t last very long without a coating of quality lubricant preventing metal-on-metal violence. If you’re new to wrenching, an oil change is the perfect confidence builder. It’s almost impossible to screw up and requires very few tools: sockets or allen sockets to remove bodywork, a wrench to remove the drain plug (ultimately, you’ll really want to use a socket and a torque wrench to get it tightened to factory specs on reassembly), an oil catch pan, and rubber gloves. Don’t worry about voiding a new bike’s warranty. Just save your receipts and keep a record of the date and mileage of each change.

We rode back from the big Six-Pack Superbike Shootout covered in glory, triumphant heroes who had conquered all the logistics and Russian nested-doll email chains that culminated in the whole MO crew getting to flog the latest greatest high-tech hardware around the crazy twists and turns of Laguna Seca raceway. A couple of us even had the good fortune to ride a couple of the bikes home afterward. (One of us even got to ride up!) Followed by another couple of days roosting all over hell and back for the street portion of the test. It’s a lot like a military operation, it really is, minus the shooting. In fact there’s shooting, too, but photos and video instead of projectiles. Anyway, when it’s all over and everybody returns home to their loved ones (with only one flesh wound), you seriously do feel like you’ve accomplished something. Or helped accomplish something in my case, since E-i-C Duke and Troy S. did most of the heavy logisticing.

When we first decide to buy a motorcycle and start riding, we think the whole experience will be what happens out on the road – the wind in the hair, bugs in the teeth, freedom and individuality and living in the moment and all that clichéd stuff about riding that is totally true and an essential part of the riding experience.

Tires are, arguably, the most significant factor affecting your safety on a motorcycle. We trust both our shiny, expensive machinery and our lives to what, when you really consider it, are two impossibly small contact patches with the pavement. Modern tire performance in wet or cold or dirty or hot conditions with rapidly changing forces (acceleration, deceleration, cornering, braking, and bump absorption) is nothing short of amazing. While much of the moto-press’ attentions are focused on increased engine output or the expanding role electronics are playing in riding, the unsung advances in motorcycle tires over the past decade have been astounding. There are sport touring tires with performance that was once reserved for racing rubber. Wet weather riding need not be the worrying task it was in the past. Heavy touring bikes and cruisers achieve mileage out of a set of tires that is hard to fathom.

In the ’70s, while I was still bumbling my way through high school and establishing a glide path to academic doom, I had a teacher stop me on the way out the door, she wanted to talk to me. This was not unusual. What was unusual was that I was actually doing fairly well in her class, and I couldn’t imagine what she wanted to talk to me about. So, I stayed, she asked me the normal teacher questions, how are things going (Fine), how are the other classes going (Wretchedly), that sort of thing. Then she turned in her chair and grabbed a book off her personal bookshelf, she held it out to me saying she couldn’t wade through it but that I might get something out of it.

I am an evangelical motorcyclist. It’s an unsettling realization. I’m not entirely comfortable in that role, as being an evangelical anything can be something of an annoyance at times, but when I consider the facts, there is no denying it. I try to curb my preaching so as not to be overbearing. But if I detect the slightest interest from a potential new rider, or an ex-rider who wants to come back to motorcycling, I don my Vanson frock of Two-Wheeled Salvation and grab the tie downs. I’m just hardwired that way. If I see an opportunity to increase the size of our flock, and spend somebody else’s money in the process acquiring a new-to-them motorcycle, what’s better than that?