There’s a cheerful little anecdote about a cardiologist chatting with the mechanic who was adjusting the pushrods of the doc’s mildly hot-rodded Twin Cam.
The wrench says, “It just isn’t fair. I’m getting paid $90 an hour to do this work, while you, doing the same kind of work, get paid thousands.”
“True,” says the doctor, “but you have to remember I’m doing the work while the engine is running.”
This explains why the MD has a 40-foot yacht moored at his vacation home’s dock, and the wrench has to make do with a 22-foot speedboat that lives on a trailer.
I am the first to say that I have equal respect for any fix-it competency, whether it is in matters mechanical or corporeal. I’ll cheerfully admit that I have little skill with wrenches, and even less with broken bodies. In the army I thought about becoming a medic, but when I heard about the nitty-gritty of the training and practicing surgery on live animals, I declined and became a demolitions expert instead...you could see where I was headed.
I do not have a “feel” for metal,or a knack for appreciating when a spring washer is properly snugged, or a locknut well-tightened. I’ve stripped too many bolts and boltholes in my day to consider myself anything more than a survival mechanic. And I’ve lost a few bolts because I was too nervous about tightening them too much.
Having been raised in a family that thought a wheelbarrow was pretty sophisticated equipment, about the hardest task I had had to perform before I got my license was changing the tire on the family sedan when I was 15. Mom and I were out together, tire went flat, and I was the man of the hour; proud of myself, too. Fortunately my first motorcycle was a dead-reliable 250, but my second was somewhat less sound, being a well-abused 1951 Indian Chief. It looked good in its Sunshine Yellow paint, but it had many problems, the most common of which was blowing head gaskets. I bought a torque wrench in a vain effort to get the flat heads seated properly, had a chart showing the proper order to tighten the bolts, and even tried sanding the heads to an appropriate flatness using a sheet of glass.
Back then, in the late 1950s, it behooved most any motorcyclist to have a collection of wrenches and screwdrivers handy, and to check all fasteners, including head bolts, at least once a week. Vibration was the real killer in those days, and keeping revs low was the key to a reasonably long life. But try telling that to an 18-year-old at a traffic light with 80 cubes between his legs and a glass-packed ’50 Ford revving its engine beside him.
Back then engine rebuilds were a matter of course, especially in motorcycles, whether they were Harleys or Brit-bikes. Panheads and BSA Road Rockets were routinely disassembled down to the crankcases, a bearing or two replaced, new piston rings added, and then the whole thing was put back together. This required no genius, just a good feel for metal on metal.
Today? The average Twin Cam out of the factory, be it York or Kansas City, is the soul of Harley reliability, especially now that the cam-bearing and tensioner problems have been resolved. The metals involved are so much stronger, the engineering so much more refined, that any new Harley should be able to run 100,000 miles so long as the routine maintenance is done according to schedule, and a competent mechanic can warn of future concerns.
Actually, there is not much to do on a fuel-injected Twin Cam, and most of it cannot be done by the owner because “diagnostics” are the key to good running. No longer does the professional wrench listen to the engine and try to determine any possible problems; he, or she, just plugs the darn thing into a fancy computer, which whirrs quietly around and tells the knowledgeable one what is going on—sort of like cat scans and MRIs in your local hospital.
Probably the biggest bugaboo on any bike, new or used, is the battery. The Yuasa items used by Harley are good, but nothing is perfect, which was the case of the electric-start Indian, the Hendee Special, that appeared on the market in 1914. The bike had a couple of design flaws, notably the lack of a generator, meaning that when a battery was tuckered out it had to be replaced and then charged up in the garage. But more important was the unreliability of the batteries themselves, which could not stand up to the pounding that a motorcycle delivered on the bad roads of those days. That self-starter was a one-year experiment, and Indian retained its kickstart until the company’s demise in 1953.
In the 1950s you could usually get a bike with a weak battery to fire; some even had a notch to turn the key to in case the battery was dead, with the kick-starter generating just enough juice to spark a plug. Now the battery is everything, and without sufficient voltage, nothing works. To begin with, it juices the starter motor, runs the little black brain-box called the electronic control unit (ECU) that serves the fuel-injection system and the ignition. Not to mention horn, lights, turn signals and perhaps even a sound system.
Although battery technology has progressed a good deal since 1914, the wet battery remains a mystery to me. Years ago I had an Evo quit on me as I rode through the charmingly named Poison Canyon at 60 mph on my way to Death Valley. With no warning the plugs quit sparking due to a defective battery. I would have thought that the alternator would have given enough spark to keep me going, but such was not to be.
Anyway, the contemporary mechanic should be able to figure out most, not all, impending electrical problems. I don’t think Harley uses the word mechanic any more, but rather technician. Sounds more gracious, more elegant. Like “truck drivers” becoming “equipment operators” in the construction industry, and “customers” turning into “clients.”
However, with all this electronic stuff, the art of being a mechanic is far from being lost, and those who twiddle wrenches competently are much in demand. I value those who can do a job well, and who err on the side of caution when they recommend getting a new battery. And I can tell you that your cam-chain tensioners should be replaced.
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