Retrograde Mechanica: Bloody Amal's

Monday, 3 September 2012

Bloody Amal's

Got finished up a bit early today so thought I'd go out and check the Bonnie over after the weekends riding and make sure all was tight and nothing would part company with the bike on route to the TripOut and saw this lovely gooey mess under the bike.

As it turns out I'd left the fuel taps on and the carbs were dirty add to the fact that one of the fibre washers wasn't too happy resulted in goopy goodness (So not really the Amals fault after all)....anyway a quick strip down later and all fixed, and as i bonus I managed to balance the carbs better and the petrol has washed most of the oily mess off my bike - excellent!

"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"