maiNTENaNCE CoRNER

IMPROVISATION

By Tony Gray, Member #3905

We have all no doubt heard the term use it or lose it? It can and does apply to our riding skills as much as to our physical and mental well-being. Have you returned from a long riding trip where you have ridden daily over mixed terrain and then have your riding buddies comment on how smoothly you are riding and how clean your cornering lines have become? The reverse equally applies where after a long time off the bike you have to take things very carefully as you familiarise with what once had been second nature. In the workshop the physical part of the equation is easily understood with bending, crouching, lying, leaning, standing, lifting putting our bodies through a fair range of movement as well as the application of muscular force when required. This can be a good physical workout for an ageing or out of condition body. The mental part may not be so easily understood or resolved. If we undertake a process in the correct manner and then repeat the actions regularly it will likely become easy and no longer require much mental input. For example I look at old footage of female workers in the Spandau BMW factory hand painting the pin-striping on airhead fuel tanks. The precision and artistry is impressive indeed but I do wonder how much thought was actually being applied if they were painting their 100th tank for the week? https://youtu.be/mSq3u8Pppxc Now put yourself in your own work-cave (no man-caves here, we are pluralist) where each day presents its own challenges. If you perform regular services on your bike then you will have equipped yourself with the necessary tools to complete those routine service tasks. For the more complicated repair work you may require a factory tool that may be unobtainable for a mere mortal or so prohibitively expensive that you end up sending your bike to a workshop after all. Here is a very expensive and difficult to buy factory tool to ease the replacement of the alternator belt on hexhead/camhead R1200 boxer motors. This is out of the reach of most home mechanics but the task can be performed with a slightly higher degree of difficulty using a 34mm socket with ratchet handle and a thin strip of flexible plastic.

So what are your other options? You could join a specialised club like the BMWMCQ - already a member, excellent - tools are available for use at the club service days or for loan to individual members. You could also take a trip to one of the many excellent specialist Tool Shops around town, you might be surprised at the diversity of hand tools available to perform unusual tasks in difficult to access positions. Another alternative is to improvise. My process is to analyse the exercise at hand and try to work out a solution using what I have available. The excellent Haynes Manuals often offer a ‘home alternative’ to using a factory tool. Then there is the internet which is a veritable Aladdin’s Cave of potential solutions. Take care however as some of these ‘solutions’ are worth exactly what you are paying for them – nothing! If you are a real thinker of the ‘Heath Robinson’* variety then your solutions may be outlandish but if it achieves the required end result then all power to you. An arc welder is a worthwhile investment for your home workshop and with a little bit of practice you can shape various pieces of scrap metal into what your project demands. If you are not that way inclined then work out what you want and seek out a local light engineering

shop and get something fabricated. All of these potential solutions require the use of our often neglected brain so this is good neural exercise. Here are a few tools fabricated over the years for different bikes in the Gray Workshop. So next time you are heading off to the workshop for a little bit of bike maintenance therapy instead of mowing the lawn or hoovering the house, resolve that you are really undertaking your daily exercise program. Happy spannering.

*Heath Robinson was an English Cartoonist noted for his depictions of complicated solutions to often simple problems. His works became famous before and during the First World War and the term ‘Heath Robinson solution’ entered the lexicon. Famously the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park who invented what could be called the World’s First Computer to crack the German Cipher Machine in WW2 called it Heath Robinson.