High Mass

High Mass

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

THERE WERE SUSPICIOUS TIRE TRACKS IN the snow leading up to my workshop last Saturday when I returned home after a hard day of snow-blower shopping.

Yes, our old Jacobsen unit finally bit the dust last week, so I spent the day driving around to farm-implement stores, looking for a replacement. Ended up with a new Ariens (made right here in Wisconsin, where people know about snow-not to mention the Packers, cheese, beer and ice fishing). It has an 8-horse Tecumseh engine and I’ve been telling friends I just bought a classic big Single, which takes some of the sting out of spending money on something that goes 1.7 mph.

Anyway, I came home from shopping and immediately noticed those big, aggressive tire tread marks going right up the driveway to my workshop. I parked my van, walked inside, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a huge, flat cardboard box about the length of my workbench, all wrapped in steel bands.

“Handy Motorcycle Lift” it said in bright red letters on the carton.

Barb appeared from nowhere and said, “Happy birthday. Your present arrived early. The truck driver and I just unloaded it, and it’s heavy! ”

A dream come true for me: A real motorcycle lift, like the kind you see in professional motorcycle shops where dignified people stand upright and work calmly and methodically on bikes instead of writhing around on a cold concrete floor, looking for drain plugs. Pneumatic cylinder to run the scissor jack beneath it; front wheel chock to hold the bike steady; removable plate under the rear wheel so you can drop it out without fender-tweaking.

I’ve been working on motorcycles all my life (well, since I was 15), and have never owned a real lift. If I have to raise a bike, I usually put a flat oak board across my hydraulic automotive floor jack and raise the motorcycle very...very...carefully, while hanging onto the handlebars and watching for disastrous tipping tendencies. Precarious indeed.

A few weeks ago, I put two new Metzelers on my vintage Ducati 900SS and had both wheels off the bike while I ran them over to my friend Al Gothard’s shop for a session on his tire machine. So here’s this beautiful old black Ducati with no wheels, teetering on a floor jack, nearly two feet off the ground. I attached tie-down straps from the bike to an overhead beam in my garage, just to help reduce the level of paranoia, but it was still an iffy deal.

The wheels and new tires went back on the bike the moment I returned from Al’s shop. I couldn’t have slept that night with the bike on a jack. But then I can’t leave a car engine dangling on a chain, either. It causes nightmares in which I’m visited by the ghost of Sir Isaac Newton, who shakes his head sadly and leaves me a printed copy of his Universal Law of Gravitation, only it’s in Latin and I can’t read it.

Real motorcycle floor jacks, of course, are a much more stable solution to this problem, but for some reason I’ve never gotten around to buying one. Even these, however, can be tippy if you don’t have a good flat frame or engine surface under the bike. An added problem with floor jacks is contained in the very name: They’re near the floor.

Which is exactly where your eyes and hands are not, unless you’re on all fours, crouching, or seated low to the ground and cross-legged, like a Hindu wise man. And as a fallen-away agnostic with limited wisdom and bad knees, this doesn’t work well for me. As I found out some years ago.

I was restoring my 1967 Triumph TR6C and spent one entire morning crouched next to the engine while I tightened mounting bolts, hooked up cables, wires, fuel lines, etc. When I stood up, my right leg didn’t work. Numb as a post. And it stayed that way.

My doctor said I’d killed or damaged some nerves by cutting off the blood supply; I might get some of them back, but maybe not. I had to wear a plastic foot brace for weeks before things got better, and Barb still says she can hear my right foot dragging slightly when we take a walk. Even now, you can stick a pin into the side of my leg just above the ankle and I can’t feel a thing, though I have asked my friends to stop doing this, especially while I’m speaking at public events.

So crouching is not good, but neither is kneeling. I have three pairs of coveralls with the right knee worn out, and half my blue jeans, too, rendering them useless as “airline travel jeans,” at least in Business Class. I hate it when some woman with a laptop computer keeps glancing at my bad knee.

Both crouching and kneeling are hard on the back as well, so I spend much of my motorcycle maintenance time lying on the floor on my side, like someone trying to coax a cat out from under the bed.

Which is not all that dignified when you’re almost 60. Also, it gives your coveralls that dusty, caked-on greasy look you normally get while pulling an old engine out of a pickup under a tree, and it leaves you wondering if you shouldn’t have aspired to something higher in life. Like finishing medical school, or learning Latin.

So it was with great joy that I severed the metal bands and removed the cardboard box around my new Handy Lift last weekend. It was so heavy, I had to use my engine hoist to flop it over, but I got the thing assembled and upright in no time, hooked up to the air hose from my compressor. Using my Honda VER as a guinea pig, I rolled it onto the lift, firmly clamped the front wheel, strapped it down and raised the bike high into the air.

I opened a Capital Amber and walked around for 15 or 20 minutes, just regarding the Honda from a whole new set of perspectives. It looked quite grand and imposing in this elevated state, like a golden calf in some biblical tale of forbidden idolatry.

The underside of the fairing was dirtier than I expected, but that can be fixed quite easily and casually now, without kneeling or other evidence of humble supplication to my small collection of sacred objects.