Retrograde Mechanica: Full Circle?

Monday 3 December 2012

Full Circle?

This is my W650 that I put together a few years back, I'd caught a glimpse of what the likes of BratStyle and RedzPor Vida were doing to these things and decided I want some of that!

Now it seems after two Brit bobbers and the Slight brat-ish CL I've come full circle, both in the matter of tastes and affordability. Brit (and especially american) Iron is a little outta reach for me now, hence the new CB350 which will hopefully be a more classy version of that japanese style.

I wish to keep it's identity as a 69 as it's such a pretty thing, but I do miss my W650 so think this is where I'm heading with it.

Pic from my old house in a makeshift workshop in the run down conservatory.

"Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's some kind of a "knack" or some kind of "affinity for machines" in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a "short between the earphones," failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself"

"That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind — number three tappet is right on too. One more to go. This had better be it — .I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this...that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes...pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts...all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all out of someone's mind. That's important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone's mind. There's no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There's nothing else there. But what's "potential"? That's also in someone's mind! — Ghosts"