Winter Storage
LEANINGS
Winter storage
Peter Egan
SNOW FELL AGAIN LAST NIGHT, SILENTLY and in large flakes, like an airborne invasion coming off the Great Plains. This morning, I made a lone trail through the snow to the workshop with my coffee (Triumph mug), turned the heat up a notch and sat down to look at my bikes.
Did I say, “Turned the heat up a notch?” Yes.
One of my non-negotiable, self-imposed conditions for moving back to the Midwest from California seven years ago was that I would buy, rent or build a large heated workshop that would be as warm and comfortable as the living room in my house. Period.
No more sockets frozen to the toolbox, I vowed. No more paint cans too cold to spray, no more frozen feet, blue hands or visible breath between me and the bike I’m working on, no blown fuses because the air compressor oil is thick as taffy. Been there, done that.
As it turned out, I built a shop in a clearing in the apple orchard near our house, a 30 x 40-foot structure with a Kentucky-cabin roofline and a raised front porch to sit on while looking at bikes, observing rain, watching geese fly south (or, preferably, north), reading a shop manual or drinking coffee. Or a beer from the garage refrigerator. The shop also has skylights, lots of fluorescent fixtures-and a furnace.
Not just a feeble electric heater in a losing battle against Nature, but a genuine ceiling-suspended gas furnace with forced air vents running the length of the garage and a liquid propane tank the size of a small submarine out back. I leave the thermostat set at 50 degrees F. and then kick it up to 70 when I enter the shop. Within three minutes it’s warm enough to work in a T-shirt.
Barb occasionally shakes her head at the heating bills, but I defend it as part of the cost of being alive, like blood transfusions for a hemophiliac or insulin for a diabetic. We all have our own ideas of health care, and the heated workshop is mine. When I can no longer aiford it, I’ll bring the bikes into the house. Or move south. I can’t stand being cold while I try to do mechanical work. Can’t concentrate, and don’t want to.
So, where was I?
Ah yes, sitting in my heated garage, drinking coffee and looking at the bikes. I was thinking about “winterizing” them.
Now, I’ve read at least 50 articles on
how to winterize your bike, and I probably even wrote one in the early Eighties, when I was Technical Editor at this magazine. But I’ve always been incredibly lazy and slack about this stuff myself. Last winter, for instance, I never got around to taking the battery out of my Ducati 900SS, and in the spring it just barely started. Then I rode it all summer and the battery never recovered a full charge. Now the battery is coming out (also the Harley’s and Triumph’s) and going on the automatic trickle charger for the winter to see if it can be saved. Better late...
I did, however, put some fuel stabilizer in all three bikes (I hate looking for gum in carburetors), and I’ll start them all a few times with the pipes sticking out the door, just to circulate oil and move the piston rings. This heat cycle may do more harm than good, condensationwise, but I’ve always been amazed at how fast rings can form a band of rust inside the cylinder barrel of a stationary bike. Unused airplanes do it, too. The air above a piston seems to make its own weather, like a small terrarium.
What else? I usually pump the brakes a bit, move the bikes around and change any disgusting-looking brake fluid during the winter. That’s about it.
All useful stuff, but I still think the best way to winterize a bike is to treat it as you would a dog or cat: Bring it inside. My theory is, if you are warm and comfortable, so is the bike. Fortunately, you don’t have to build a big fancy heated workshop to do this.
My friend Joe Deane, for instance, rents a commercial/industrial space with an actual trucking dock out front, and shares it with two other motorcyclists. Among them, they have a couple dozen bikes, with plenty of room to work on them, store parts and so on. The rent, when shared, is reasonable.
Fellow Slimey Crud Bruce Finlayson is fortunate in having one of those garages where you drive in underneath ■ the house. I’ve always thought that this is the best combination of all, because you can get to the bike(s) without dressing up like a deer hunter, and the heating bills are unaffected. If you can’t sleep, you can fix yourself a drink, go down and bike-gaze in your bedroom slippers. If we ever build a house, it will probably have a ride-in basement garage.
You can also carry a bike down basement stairs, of course, but this is not exactly a spur-of-the-moment deal, and later you’ll need disc surgery or hernia repair. Or four strong friends to get the motorcycle off your chest. Still, it’s a good place to keep a bike.
Another ideal winter-storage solution is to put your bike dead center in the middle of your living room. My friend Jeff Weaver does this, and it works out splendidly. He does full engine rebuilds, just feet from the sofa. Jeff, however, is a bachelor, as you might expect. Married guys will find this strategy slightly tougher than importing a French maid with big eyelashes to do “light dusting.”
However you do it, I heartily recommend bringing a bike indoors during the winter, just as a sympathetic and preservative gesture. I am always amazed, when I drive into the city or past nearby farms, how often I see a bike left out in the snow and rain, or only partially covered. Even from a distance, you can see the chrome turning ashen-white, the bolt recesses holding small wells of water. And yet a motorcycle is such a small thing to move and to store properly, hardly bigger than a bicycle. Or three bicycles, in the case of my Harley.
Still, it takes so little effort to bring them in under a warm roof. And, unlike those cats and dogs I mentioned, they don’t demand much, except maybe a light battery charge and a moderate amount of admiration. Also, they are more realistic than a poster-or a photograph taken last summer-and a lot more fun to watch than television. E3
