Retrograde Mechanica: Gordon's Cave

Thursday, 12 July 2012

Gordon's Cave

Took a ride over to see Gordon last night, The guy is awesome and proper talented - makes you want to sit cross-legged and just listen to his stories. He has some awesome bikes - a real Aladdin's cave for petrol heads!

There's some great stories behind these bikes - The Velocette two-fifty used to power a saw bench, and does 60 in 1st!
The Black Matchless in background is our own Billy Whiz's old bobber (you know the one he falls off bike surfing back in Junk magazine issue 1)
The Sunbeam (I'm hankering after this bike) sat in a loft for 20 years, the list goes on

Just as I was leaving a great bloke (Mark) on a '93 enfield spotted my triumph out front and stopped for a chat, as it turns out he did the same India ride this year as I did last year and we have a number of friends in common, including Darryl who we both rode with - small world!

"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"