Motorcycle Maintenance Log, Part III

Two months ago my motorcycle key slipped from my fingers and dropped down between the fork tubes.  Before I could grab it, it slipped beneath a plastic shroud and fell down inside the fairing, deep inside where no hand could reach.  I was, of course, 25 miles from home at the time.  Donna, the kindest and most patient of wives, drove across town to bring me the spare key, and on the way home I stopped at a locksmith shop and had two additional keys made.

All this time the key’s been resting inside the fairing, sitting on top of the engine, inaccessible.  Worried that it might wind up in the throttle linkage where it could cause trouble of the most serious kind, I called my buddy Ed and asked if he’d help me take the fairing off and retrieve the key.  He said sure, come on over. And that brings us to today:

If you click on the photo to see it full-sized on Flickr, you’ll see that we had to remove the saddle, side panels, instrument panel, side fairing panels, and shelter (the thing that looks like a fuel tank but really isn’t, since the actual fuel tank is under the saddle), along with innumerable screws, nuts, washers, and plastic retaining pins.  What the photo doesn’t show is that having done all that, although we could see the key from above, wedged in between the right side radiator and the fuel injector/throttle body mechanism on top of the engine, we couldn’t get to it from that direction, so we were forced to remove the lower cowl and another panel from the front of the fairing, directly behind the front wheel, in order to pull it out from the front. At that point I was too busy to take any more photos — Ed and I had burnt up our remaining brain cells trying to keep track of all the fasteners we’d removed, the panels they’d come from, and the order in which we’d have to reinstall them.

We started work at ten, found the key around noon, and had the motorcycle reassembled by two-thirty. We had to make one side trip to Ace Hardware to replace a small metric bolt & nut I stripped. And when it was all done, there were no spare parts or fasteners left over. Our mothers were right all along — we should have been surgeons!

I’ll tell you, having a motorcycle is great.  But having a friend who rides the same kind of bike, knows how to work on it, and has his own motorcycle garage with manuals and spare parts and every tool known to man, is, as they say, priceless!

My next project: attaching all my motorcycle keys to big fuzzy dice so that if I ever drop another one it won’t be able to slip down inside the fairing, and if it looks silly that’s too damn bad!