I turned half my garage on the Sunshine Coast into a proper workbench a few years back, mostly so I would stop doing delicate jobs on a tarp in the driveway between rain showers, and the job that made me grateful for a stable, level bench more than any other was balancing six carburettors instead of the two or four I was used to on other bikes. The first time I attempted it I chased a rough idle for a whole Saturday before realising I was balancing pairs against each other in the wrong order and never actually converging on a single reference cylinder.
Category Archives: Ownership & Maintenance
Shaft Drive: Service Intervals, and What Neglect Looks Like
I buy two or three of these bikes a year, patch up whatever the previous owner ignored, and move them on to someone who actually rides. The single most common thing I find neglected is the final drive gear oil, because it is out of sight, it is not on most owners’ mental checklist the way engine oil is, and the bike will run for years on old, contaminated shaft oil before it fails in a way that is expensive rather than cheap. Last one I bought had a rear drive that was audibly whining on deceleration, and the fill plug had clearly not been touched since the bike left the dealership a decade earlier.
Tyre Wear Patterns and What They Tell You About the Bike
I spent four seasons doing track days on 600s before I bought a flat-six, and the habit that carried over was reading a tyre like it was telling me something, because on track a tyre that wears wrong is a lap time problem, and on the road it is a crash waiting to happen. My first winter with the big cruiser, I pulled it out of the shed after a few months and found the rear scalloped with a cupped, uneven pattern I had never seen on a sportsbike. It was not a tyre fault. It was the bike telling me something about how I had been riding it, and about the suspension underneath.
Storing a Heavy Cruiser Through Winter Without Wrecking It
The first winter I owned a flat-six in Canberra, I did what I had always done with lighter bikes: covered it, closed the garage, and forgot about it until August. It started, eventually, after a lot of cranking and a flat battery replaced under warranty out of embarrassment more than necessity. The fuel had gone slightly varnished sitting in the carburettor bowls for four months of near-freezing nights, and the battery had been slowly bled down by a parasitic draw I did not know the bike even had. Storing a bike this heavy properly is not hard, but it is a specific set of steps, and skipping any one of them costs you a spring morning you would rather spend riding.
Pre-Ride Checks That Actually Catch Problems
A guy at the club meetup last month told me his pre-ride check was “look at it and listen to it start.” Three weeks later he was on the shoulder of a farm road outside Austin with a rear brake light switch that had been hanging by one wire for who knows how long, discovered only when a truck behind him did not realize he was slowing down. I have been the wrench-turner for our chapter for about nine years now, and the bikes that break down on a ride are almost never the ones that get a real thirty-second check before the key goes in. Here is what that check actually needs to cover, because “look at it” is not a checklist.
The Flat-Six: Things Owners Work Out Years Too Late
I bought my first flat-six in 2004 off a rider who was moving overseas, and for the first three years I rode it like an oversized cruiser that happened to have a strange engine note. It took a split radiator hose on a 39-degree Melbourne afternoon, stopped dead on the Eastern Freeway with the temperature needle buried, to teach me this was not a Harley with extra cylinders bolted on. Twenty-odd years and three of these bikes later, here is the list of things I wish someone had told me on day one instead of letting me find out the expensive way.