Have been receiving many compliments about my bike lately. Contrary to what people had assumed before, my bike looks like it's fighting off the “gonner” image. People use to take a ride and say “sell it, it's a gonner”. I don't wanna be exceptionally cruel in accusing those nice people of false accusations, cause many times even I felt it was a gonner! But I knew it was fixable. If you ask me today, I can still tell you a list of parts on my bike that need fixing, but that's how some bikes are, they're like a thoroughbreds, you need to keep brushing it up often, feeding some of the best food available,looking into every detail each time before you take a ride. Even with all that, it ages, it's built to age, it's natural. Selling won't solve the problem, it'll only transfer the problem, and get you a new set.
So I decided not to part with my bike. Decision one. Decision two, I decided that I would fix it myself. Some say this was a bad move, but I disagree, since it's given me more confidence in pushing a bike which is, well, “far more blunt than cutting edge”. And to ride, that's what matters the most confidence, if you have it, you can thread a needle between trees at 100kmph, if you lack it, you can end up in one, or worse, several trees! The make or age of the bike doesn't decide that, how comfortable you are on it decides it. I've had my experiences, believe me and so have you, I can see it on your faces.
Thinking this I went ahead to repair my bike. And it has turned the bike around a complete 180 from where it was heading. No more gallows/curtains/casket/pushing-up-daisies for my bike, it works like a charm, that, I say assuming you don't mind being chivalrous to it. Recently, I was rewarded with a sweet sound from my bike that had disappeared from it for more than three years. It's been two weeks since I returned from chikmaglur. A few days ago, after I came home and parked the bike, I thought I heard something, so I decided to stay and listen, for a second, it was all silent, for another second, it was deafening silence again, I had almost given it up, dismissing it as my hallucination from petrol fumes. But then, it did happen, “tink” I heard, my face lit up! Then the pattern was clear “tink........tink........tink.......tink”!! the catalytic converter was working again. Not a big deal for all you guys may be, but for me it is. It had stopped working after my engine blew-up years ago. But my repairs in february and hence the nice seal of the engine and the recent trip to ooty and chikmaglur had probably generated enough heat to blast away all the coating which was poisoning the palladium hot-tube meshes. Now they were free to expand under heat, and now when you park the bike after some hard riding, they take their own time to contract and cool down, “tinking” away for minutes.
This is what the story of most bikes would be, if you took the effort to dig it up, they'll work, but they can't fix themselves right? You fix it such that things work in the way they were intended to work and you can really enjoy the personality of a bike which new bikes lack. Try it out sometime, you'll fall in love with it! Chao!
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