Retrograde Mechanica

Monday, 10 June 2013

Yardley

Tiny wee show with virtually nowt there - but nice to visit all the same and I do like a tractor or two!

Saturday, 8 June 2013

It really does

Explain it - thanks to BCM for letting me find this short.

The Build Film from Instrument on Vimeo.

Ze Carni-val

Northampton Carnival today...good to see Bill and the boys holding up the cycle front.

Sunday, 2 June 2013

Wizard....

Anyone got anymore pics of this pretty skill Triumph?

Running In....

The newly rebuilt engine is sweeeeeeeet! Smooth as you like and no oil leaks!

Jack you rock - thank you for doing this for me, and thanks to Shaun for your assistance in getting the timing cock on!

Sunday, Sunday, here again in tidy attire

Headed down the cafe, then for a long ride out round the lanes and on to Thornby. Found a lovely Brough and my favourite bike of all time the TT special....then home for beer in the garden with friends and neighbours and some impromptu VW mechanics.

"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"