Bly was telling me that he did all his own services on his Ducatis. A service costs $1200, he said. Buying all the gear and tools still leaves me in front the first service I do, he said.<\/p>\n
Does this work? Even if your time is worthless? I decided I would put some gold valves and fork springs in the KLR. The KLR\u00a0forum said you have to make a special tool out of some threaded rod to take out the damping rods to drill them, so I went to Bunnings and got some 5\/8ths threaded rod and nuts, and I tried to strap it to the bike and it didn’t work so I stuck the steel rod down my jacket and rode home freaking about getting hit by a car and stabbed by my own threaded rod and finally I got\u00a0it home and nutted it up and it didn’t fit.<\/p>\n
Maybe Americans don’t use Whitworth.<\/p>\n
So I went back and got a 16mm threaded rod and four nuts and strapped them to my other bike with ocky straps and a rag and rode home and found I only had three nuts and not four. One must have vibrated off the rod. So I went back to Bunnings and bought another 16mm nut, and on the way home I saw the one that vibrated off, lying on the side of the road.<\/p>\n
By this time I had spent $34 to avoid buying a Kawasaki special tool that costs $30, but that was the American price so it probably costs about a billion bucks here anyway. But the 16mm thing fitted and I did the job. Except fork oil. This guy on the KLR\u00a0forum said use Mobil 1 ATF for all sorts of good reasons, so I looked up Mobil servos and found that there was one at Rozelle.<\/p>\n
I went there and found it was now a 7\/11. But I remembered that there was a Mobil at Epping because I used to live near there, so I rode to Epping and found it was now\u00a0a 7\/11, too.<\/p>\n
I went in anyway and they sold Mobil lubes, but not Mobil 1. So I bought two one litre bottles of Mobil 220 ATF and went home and put it in my forks. I only used one bottle.<\/p>\n
So far, this has taken a couple of hours on Sunday and 0800-1300 – say 5 hours Monday, and my garage is overflowing with threaded rods and surplus ATF.<\/p>\n
I took\u00a0the KLR\u00a0for a ride, and it’s better.<\/p>\n
But, the shop would never have dared charge me 7 hours for such a simple job, and I could have spent the time riding my other motorcycle or binge drinking or something.<\/p>\n
It just doesn’t make sense.<\/p>\n
Unless you only have one motorcycle or have run out of booze, doing your own services is false economy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Does this work? Even if your time is worthless<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":3186,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[221],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3184"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4545,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3184\/revisions\/4545"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikeme.tv\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}