On the first bike, the accidental purchase, and the particular value of not knowing what you're getting into.
The seller looked at me the way people look at someone who has just said something that doesn't quite parse. Not unkindly. More like he was giving me a moment to reconsider. He'd had the Ruckus in his parents' shed for somewhere between three and five years — he wasn't precise about the timeline, which should have told me something — and he'd taken it apart and hadn't gotten it back together and his parents had reached the end of their patience with it and he wanted $350 and he wanted it gone. I asked for the papers. For registration. He said it would never run again. He said it was for parts. I said I'd give it a try. I did not tell him that I had never fixed a motorcycle. I did not tell him this because it did not seem like information that would help either of us.
He got me the papers and the key. I was on vacation. I had been thinking vaguely about getting a small bike. The Ruckus was down the street. The kick starter, when I tried it, showed compression, which I knew was a good sign in the same confident, approximate way that I knew things about motorcycles at that point: directionally correct, short on specifics. I loaded it into a truck and took it home and called my father-in-law, who knew more about engines than I did, which at that point was not a high bar to clear.
My father-in-law took the carburetor out. I saw carb cleaner for the first time. He did some of the job on the driveway — not all of it, not the careful jet-by-jet disassembly that I would later learn to do — but enough. The carb went back on. We tried it. It ran. Under an hour from the first application of carb cleaner to a running engine, on a bike the previous owner had been certain would never run again.
I rode it around for a couple of minutes. It bogged badly past half throttle. I noted this and kept riding, which tells you something about where I was in my mechanical education at the time. It wasn't until later — some interval that I prefer not to specify — that I checked the oil. There was none. The drain plug was almost finger tight. Someone had drained the oil, snugged the plug back just enough to stay in, and that had been the situation for however long the bike had been in the shed. I added oil. The bogging did not improve, which meant it was a different problem, but at least now it was a different problem happening to an engine with lubrication, which is a significant upgrade.
"He said it would never run again. He said it was for parts. I said I'd give it a try. I did not tell him I had never fixed a motorcycle."
— the negotiation
This is how it went for the better part of a year. One problem revealed the next. I got the factory service manual. I bought tools I didn't have — calipers, a torque wrench, a set of JIS screwdrivers after I learned the hard way why JIS screwdrivers exist. I took the CV transmission apart because it was there and because I wanted to know what was in it, not because anything was wrong with it. I measured things. I looked up what the measurements should be and compared them and wrote them down. I was learning what a bike was made of by handling each piece of it, which is the only way to actually learn it and which nobody tells you at the beginning because at the beginning you haven't asked the right question yet.
The electrical system had been interpreted creatively by whoever had last touched it. The high beam and low beam indicator lights were swapped — wired backward, so the dash told you the opposite of what the headlight was doing, which is not dangerous exactly but is the kind of thing that erodes your confidence in everything else. The front turn signals had been removed and reinstalled on the wrong sides, which meant the wiring didn't reach anymore, which meant someone had dealt with this by leaving them not quite connected, which I found when I traced the circuit and discovered that the signals worked intermittently and the intermittency was a connector that wasn't fully seated because it was six inches from where it needed to be.
The horn didn't work. I could have bought a new one for fifteen dollars. Instead I took the old one apart. It needed a shim — the gap between the diaphragm and the electromagnet had closed up — and shimming it cost nothing and ten minutes and afterward the horn worked and I knew how a horn worked, which is the kind of knowledge that has no cash value and that I have used several times since. A brake light switch needed a wire soldered. The license plate light wire was broken at the housing. I fixed these things one at a time on evenings after work, learning to solder properly because a cold joint on the brake light switch is not an acceptable outcome, learning which problems are fifteen-dollar problems and which ones are worth understanding from the inside.
That a carb clean is real and immediate: Under an hour from disassembled to running. The satisfaction of this does not diminish. It is why people keep trying the carb first even when the problem is something else entirely.
That oil is not optional: Related: check the drain plug. Check it before you ride. Check it when you buy a bike from someone who is not certain where all the parts went.
That the FSM is the beginning of the education, not the end: The manual tells you what should be there. What is actually there is the other document, written in wire routing and stripped threads and someone else's decisions, and you read it with your hands.
That the horn is worth understanding: Not the horn specifically. The thing you could replace for fifteen dollars. Understanding it costs more than replacing it and teaches you something that replacing it never would.
That propane finds air leaks: An unlit propane torch held near the intake while the engine is running — move it slowly along the joints and the hose and the airbox — and listen for the idle to change. Where the idle changes, unburned propane is being drawn in through the leak and altering the mixture. That is where the air is entering. The bogging above half throttle was a cracked air tube, found this way, fixed for the cost of a new tube and an afternoon. Do not light the torch. This cannot be said too plainly.
That helicoils are not failure: Two sheared bolt heads. Weeks of hours drilling them out. The helicoils went in and held and the bike did not care that the threads were repaired rather than original. Neither should you.
I'd bought it out of province, which meant it needed a safety inspection before I could register it. The inspection fee, plus the transport permit, plus the out-of-province permit, came to $275 on top of the $350 I'd already paid. I was invested now in a way that went past the money. I went and found the actual government regulations — not a forum summary of them, the actual document — and went through the bike against the list, item by item, looking for anything that would fail. The brake cable was routed wrong and the sleeve was wearing against the tire, which I caught this way and fixed. The signals were on the correct sides by this point. The lights worked. The horn worked. I had verified, personally, by hand, every item on the inspection checklist before I drove it to the shop.
It passed. No problems. The inspector said nothing memorable. I drove it home and felt something that is hard to describe accurately, which is the specific satisfaction of a thing that was broken and is now not broken and that you made not broken yourself, starting from a position of knowing very little about how it was supposed to work.
I rode it for a year. I never got it to 60 km/h — I tried, more than once, on a straight stretch of road with good visibility and no traffic, and it would pull and pull and fall just short. That was fine. It was a Ruckus. It was not built for 60 km/h, it was built for exactly what I was doing with it, which was riding it around and learning things and occasionally checking the drain plug.
I sold it for $1,500. I was into it for $800, counting permits and parts and tools. On paper that looks like a return. It was not a return. The hours I put into it were very many. If you valued the hours honestly — even at a fraction of what an actual mechanic charges — the Ruckus cost considerably more than it returned and nothing about that calculation was the point.
What it returned was the knowledge of how to take an electrical system apart and find where someone else's logic ended and trace the wiring back to where it should have gone. The knowledge of what a CV transmission contains and how the variator works and what the belt looks like when it needs changing. The knowledge that a seized bolt has solutions and that the solutions take the time they take and that two sheared heads and weeks of drilling is a worse outcome in hours than in results, because the results are two solid helicoils and an engine that doesn't weep. The knowledge that carb cleaner is real and immediate and that compression means something and that checking for oil before you ride is a habit worth forming early and keeping forever.
The buyer was excited and nervous and indecisive in a way I recognized. He had questions, and the questions were reasonable, and underneath them was the real question, which was whether this was a good idea and whether he was capable of it. I knew that question. I had stood in a driveway with that question myself not long before.
I told him: it's a single cylinder Honda. It is what it is. It's going to outlive both of us. They still make this bike and they haven't changed the parts in twenty years, so whatever it needs, you can get. He seemed to take that well. He bought the bike.
The original seller thought I was buying parts. He was right. I just passed them on differently than he expected.