The night I admitted my garage was the problem was the night I dropped a 10 mm socket into the sump guard on the Valkyrie and spent four minutes on my knees with a phone torch in my teeth, looking for it under the engine. One shop light on a cord, clipped to a rafter, threw a single hard shadow straight across the spot where I needed to see. That garage had been “set up” for two years by then — a bench, some shelves — but no light where the work actually happens, and a bench positioned so I had to walk sideways around the forks every time I needed a tool.
Author Archives: Howard Rivera
Thirty-Year-Old Plastics and What They Need
I pulled a side cover off a bike in the club car park last month and watched a crack run clean across it just from the pressure of my thumb – not dropped, not cracked in a crash, just thirty summers of Perth sun finally winning an argument with a piece of ABS plastic that was never built to last this long outdoors. The owner was more surprised than I was; he’d never touched that panel harder than a light wipe with a microfibre cloth.
Insuring a Modern Classic: What Owners Get Wrong
A club member out near Georgetown wrote off his ’97 Valkyrie in a low-speed parking lot tap-up last year — cosmetic damage, bent forward crash bar and a cracked fairing panel, nothing that looked catastrophic. His insurer totaled it anyway and cut him a check for $2,900 based on actual cash value, on a bike he’d spent four years and probably $6,000 in parts and labor bringing back from a barn-find condition. He didn’t have an appraisal on file, didn’t have an agreed value endorsement, and found out the hard way that a standard policy doesn’t care what you put into a bike, only what a depreciation table says it’s worth on paper.
Buying a Used Tourer: The Inspection List
The seller had the bike parked nose-out in the shed with a beach towel draped over the seat “to keep the sun off,” which in twelve years of buying and flipping used tourers around Mandurah I’ve learned usually means one of two things: a genuinely fussy owner, or a seat that’s been patched and they’d rather you didn’t look too closely before you’ve fallen in love with the rest of the bike.
What a Flat-Six Cruiser Is Actually Worth in 2026
I bought a rough 1999 Valkyrie out of a garage in Round Rock last spring for $3,200, put about $1,800 into carbs, tires, and a fork seal job, and listed it two months later expecting something close to $7,500. It sold for $6,100 after three weeks of silence, and the buyer’s opening line was that the standard price guides had it listed “somewhere in the low fours to mid sixes,” which is not a number, it’s a shrug. That gap between what a guide says and what a bike actually clears is the whole problem with pricing these things in 2026, and it’s cost me real money more than once.
Group Ride Formations That Keep Everyone Alive
I run the club’s big autumn ride out of Canberra every year, twenty-something bikes leaving the meet point in a loose group that has to survive fuel stops, a lunch break, three sets of traffic lights and at least one rider who’s never done a group ride before. The formation isn’t decoration – it’s the difference between a group that flows through a servo stop in four minutes and one that turns every intersection into a re-grouping exercise, and after a decade of organising this ride I’ve learned the formation matters more than the route.
Waste Oil, Coolant and Old Fuel: What a Home Workshop Does With Them
I did the maths on my own shelf last month and stopped enjoying it fairly quickly: four 4-litre drums of used engine oil, a couple of litres of old coolant drained during a radiator flush I never finished, and about ten litres of fuel siphoned out of a Valkyrie that sat through winter storage with a full tank going stale. None of it was going down the drain, obviously, but none of it had anywhere sensible to go either, and it had been quietly accumulating in the corner of the garage for the better part of a year because “I’ll deal with it eventually” is a very easy sentence to keep saying.
Road Surfaces That Catch Riders Out
I’ve put down about four kilometres of my own farm track over the years, one wheelbarrow load of aggregate at a time, so I notice road surfaces most riders roll straight over without thinking. The corner that got me two winters ago wasn’t loose gravel or wet leaves – it was a patch where the seal had been cut for a water main repair and re-laid slightly proud of the original surface, a lip you’d never see from a car and absolutely feel on two wheels at 80 km/h. It put me down at low speed, more bruised pride than anything else, but it changed how closely I look at the road surface itself rather than just the traffic on it.
Turning Circles and the Tree in the Way: An Auckland Driveway Job
Twenty-one years on flat-six cruisers and I still misjudge my own driveway once or twice a year, and it’s always the same culprit: a phoenix palm my neighbour planted sometime in the nineties that now leans a good half-metre over the boundary and eats into the exact arc I need to bring the bike around from the street. A Valkyrie’s turning circle is not generous to begin with — low bars, a long wheelbase, and a wet weight that punishes any correction you make at walking pace. Add a trunk and a skirt of fallen fronds sitting right where the front wheel wants to track, and what should be a two-point turn into the garage becomes a stop-start shuffle with the bars locked hard over and my boot doing more of the work than I’d like at my age.
Crosswinds and Heavy Bikes: Reading the Road Before It Hits You
The gust came off a gap in the tree line on a farm road outside Austin, the kind of crosswind that doesn’t announce itself until the front end is already six inches off line, and twenty years on this style of bike I still felt my hands tighten on the bars before my brain caught up. That reaction – the grip, not the correction – is the first thing worth unlearning about crosswinds on something this heavy.