The lack of Zen and the confounding art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I hope I get better at this. Since the weather finally got better this weekend after our recent “wintry mix” (BTW, one the stupidest phrases), I finally got around to changing the oil in my motorcycle on Sunday. Aside from lubing up the chain, this is my first major piece of motorcycle surgery I have attempted and everything was going fine, despite making a major mess spilling oil everywhere, until, as I was tightening up the bolts on the oil filter cover, I was thinking, hmmm, these bolts don’t seem to want to tighten. I re-read the part about closing everything up and sure enough, it explicitly stated not to overtighten the bolts. I then went back to tightening the bolts and the next thing I knew *snap*, “FUCKKKKKK,” I overtightened the bottom bolt. Immediately I began to envision the horrors of what should have been a $15 job into a $150 job, just because I’m a dumbass. Luckily, in reading up on the forum of knowledge for my motorcycle (www.gstwins.com), this is a pretty common problem and an even easier fix, you just need to have the correct bolt. Knowing all the dealerships were closed on Sunday, on Monday I started calling around and discovered that apparently no dealership keeps these parts in stock, so I had to go online to order the bolts. As a temporary stopgap measure, I managed to fashion a replacement bolt out of one I found at a hardware store (not Home Depot, which has fuck all for metric sized bolts) by cutting off the head with my rotary drill.
My other bit of motorcycle shenanigans has to do with my attempt to purchase a pair of electrically heated gloves. I know a couple posts back I was boo-hooing over how cold my hands get and gloves don’t seem to work, so I began poking around and found a company that makes what appear to be pretty good heated gloves. I found a place way out in Plano that sells them and when I went out there I found out that they did not have the proper harness in stock. I still bought the gloves (although even a small appears to be too big) and when they finally got the harness in yesterday, I went out again, bought it and stupidly forgot to check to see if it was in fact the correct harness. When I got home, I discovered that although I do need the harness and this one would work, I was still lacking the fucking battery connector cable. So now I’m going to have to order and wait some more. Luckily the weather has improved, so there no longer is a time issue involved and I can wait, but still, what a fucking pain in the ass. Also, knowing my luck, were going to have an early spring and it’s going to already start heating up next month, so I may just need to return the gloves altogether.