This will be a short read because this is nothing as profound as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
My underground parking garage is given a biannual cleaning so we all have to move out for the day. I’d normally push my old 1968 BMW R60US motorcycle to the bicycle racks but this morning I decided to start it and ride if over there instead. It hasn’t been ridden for over two years and for a modern bike one would likely need to drain the tank, put in fresh gas as well as charge up the battery.
But you don’t need to do any of that with an old bike. This bike is actually a prewar design. BMW Motorad engineers lost all their design blueprints with their factory in East Germany, which was dismantled and shipped back piecemeal to the Ural Mountains by the departing Soviets, after the war (that’s World War 2). The BMW engineers had to reverse engineer existing BMW motorcycles to produce the postwar models that helped save the parent BMW company from bankruptcy in the 1960s. Modern engine designs began in the 1970s with pressurized oil lubrication and internal filtration. And like Porsche, the ultimate departure from air cooling to liquid cooling. Customers will always demand faster, more powerful and better handling motorcycles.
The virtue of an old bike is that it needs no battery to start. The electrical system uses a dynamo instead of an alternator. You do have to turn the motor over by kick or push starting it. No new gas is needed. I had stabilized the fuel in the tank against water ingress by adding methanol to it but the most volatile components of gasoline had longed evaporated leaving something akin to varnish. But these unstressed and low compression engines were famous for running on ersatz wartime gasoline with low octane rating¹. One has to flood the bodies of the twin carburetors and adjust the throttle opening with alchemy. The bike would either roar into life, or not at all. Until you got those alchemy adjustments just right. And after a dozen kicks, it did come to life.
An old bike, like an old human, is something that can be relied on. Humans are like chapters of a book that becomes more and more complete as one approaches the end. Older people, provided they have some basic level of intelligent introspection, will tend to do the right thing at the right time. Older people rise up against repression because it’s the right thing to do and the personal cost is no longer high given the adjacency of death. Older people are also thinking about the lives of their children and grandchildren and the legacy they want to leave behind. Older people tend to make the right decisions because hopefully life has taught them something. Older people are more generous, be it financially or with their time because neither means that much anymore. And just like an older person, an old bike will always start and run when somebody is depending on it to do so.
¹It was in fact the wide availability of high octane gas from the US which gave Allied aircraft a very significant advantage in power and performance over German aircraft.
Jim Chung's Ramblings 