I really thought I had published this blog but I hound it languishing in my Draft folder waiting for me to put in links. This weekend happen late last summer before my September trip to Alpine.
This
past weekend was a bike working on weekend. Frankly, it was not what
I wanted to be doing on a hot Sunday out in our garage but it had to
be done and it was really interesting work and a fairly easy job.
A
few weeks ago I had plans to go riding and craft shopping with my
dear friend Zippo. I don’t tend to ride much in the heat of the
summer but I had been off the bike for a while and needed to air out
my brain. The night before, like a good responsible rider, I was
getting ready to air up my tires. Mr Man often helps me with this.
I can air up my own tires but I’m not a small person and I’m not
bendy. Getting up and down is hard on me and easy for him so he
often helps because he’s cool like that. Fortunately, his eagle
eye saw oil on my tire. Now as a point of fact here, tires should
not have oil on them. There is no oil in tires to leak out and oil
makes tires dangerously unstable. At this point I pretty much saw my
chance of riding the next day diminish to nothing.
My
very first thought when I saw the dark liquid on my tire was that it
was brake fluid. Wrong color though, and it smelled like oil. So
something with oil was leaking down the forks and onto the tire. Mr
Man started tracing the oil back up my forks. Our first answer was
the steering damper. Mr Man pulled it off the bike and looked it
over. There was oil on it and we didn’t see any oil above it. I
started researching the cost of replacing it while Mr Man looked it
over. Neither of us felt comfortable rebuilding it but my heart sank
as I started to see the cost of replacing it. We could do it…but
we also needed to pay for roof repairs. After the oil got cleaned
off the damper Mr Man thought that the problem might still be further
up the line because we weren’t seeing a lot of new oil showing up..
So, rag in hand, he returned to the bike to start the search again.
This time he found a definite culprit. It was my fork seals. Thank
God. We can fix those and even better, parts were cheap. Inside we
went to do some research. In about half an hour I had ordered parts
and had found a few good tutorials on how to change the seals.
The
parts came in in just under a week (thank you Max BMW)
and
Sunday dawned hot and humid. Coffee was made and Kolaches were eaten
and out to the garage we went. I watched one more video showing me
how to do the job and we got down to it. I had some concerns going
in. My bike is tall and we had to jack the wheel off the ground
making it even taller. I wasn’t sure I could reach the fork seals
to pull them out. However, it’s bone simple from a conceptual
point and I actually had a clearer picture of what I was going to do
that I have ever had of any repair ever. Bone simple. You basically
pop out the fork tube, pry off the dust seal, Pry out the fork seal
(after figuring out how to reach it with your short arms), replace
the seals and them put everything back together. For someone tall
with a bit of experience it probably is the 15 minute job all the
tutorials say it is. For us from start to finish was two hours. Of
course, thirty minutes of that was me running to Auto Zone to pick up
a socket big enough to use as a driver to get the seal set. We
thought we had one but we didn’t. I also took a water and A/C
break in between sides. So it was maybe an hour to an hour and a
half of actual hot sweaty work. A good three quarters of that was
spent on the first side. The second side when much faster. By the
way…we wondered why no one suggested removing both forks at the
same time. It seemed so much easier to us. Don’t do it. It moves
your forks out of alignment with the handle bars and induces a small
freak out when you think you have somehow managed to bend your forks.
Also, keep a file handy in case you scrape the inside of your forks
while prying out the old seal to copious amounts of cursing about
your short height and short arms.
While
we had the bike up we took care of some things that needed to be
done. My front tire has got about 2000 miles left on it but I have a
trip coming up at the end of August that should be about 1000 miles.
Some of that trip will be off road riding and some of it will be solo
road riding. The last thing I want is to have tire problems in
Alpine, TX while traveling alone so I’d rather change out the tire
a little early. Because of the sidecar, the tire wears unevenly so
it’s easy for problems to sneak up on you. Since the tire was gone
I looked the brakes over but the pads look to be in great shape so I
left them alone for the time being. Now the bike is up on jack
stands and my front tire is in my trunk. Hopefully I’ll be able to
get that changed out after work today and we can get it back on the
bike Tuesday or so. Although it’s hot, hot, hot here, I may try to
get in some riding to work later on this week. Maybe on
Wednesday….maybe Friday when I don’t have to worry about changing
out of jeans. At the least I’ll take it down to get gas once the
tire is on to make sure the forks shook out ok.
At
any rate, it felt good to be covered in oil. Good to understand the
job I was doing even if I needed some help. Good to make sure my
bike was ready for a trip. It will feel even better to take her out
for a ride.
So
absolute virtual Kudos to a couple of internet sites that got me
thought this. First off, Max BMW was super speedy and they included
M&Ms with my parts so that kinda made my day. Also, I found two
great tutorials, one at Every Day Riding right here and
the other one was a YouTube video I found here. Pardon
the camera shakes and the NSFW language and the less than winning
personality of the guy doing the work. The first person shooter POV
was super helpful when I was actually doing the work.
