Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.
― Ray Bradbury
It was time to take stock of what was working and what was not:
- The electric starter is dead (but the kick starter works)
- Battery at least is powering the lights.
- The gas is 93 octane with no ethanol and is getting to the carburetors.
- Spark plugs must be working as I get a sputter and an occasional start.
What might not be working:
- Points not adjusted properly after engine reassembly.
- A problem with the valves?
- The carburetor settings are all wrong?
- Something else I was unaware of?!
A plea: So I called my mechanic, Kevin, and asked for a referral. He directed me to Paul, a wise tinkerer who agreed to do a house call. What kindness from a near stranger! Spending almost two hours looking at the bike and teaching me more about its parts, he poked and tested and puzzled and smelled and finally offered his opinion:
Diagnosis: He suggested my spark was not a good color, and that I replace the ignition condenser, put on new points, and replace several fuses (they seems to be whole, but which were in fact, fried). It was a wonder anything was working. $45 later and a few weeks for shipping and I was ready to go:
Hope?: I was so excited. The bike basically needed its carburetors synched (which Paul agreed to help with), new rubber on the wheels, and I was ready to go. My impatience and lack of knowledge of rubber pushed me to contract with a local dealer to buy tires and have them put them on for me. It would be $450 and a blow to my "do-it-yourself" approach that was already a slippery slope, but I would be racing through the world soon enough to leave my pride behind. And that's good, right? Leaving one's pride behind?The ignition condenser is a standard "tune-up" part on any Honda CB350, CB360 & CB450 and is the most common failure part of the ignition system. Regardless of the condition of your Honda CB350, CB360 or CB450, condensers wear out. Yes they do not physically move, however as an electric component they are prone to decay. The condenser's job is to keep the ignition coil charged under high speed and to keep the points from wearing out prematurely. Signs of a bad condenser are burnt points that do not last very long (few hundred miles) before they need replacement. A failing condenser will also let the bike idle OK but tend to keep it from revving very high, AKA your engine seems to cut out at a random RPM and stay there. --http://www.common-motor.com/honda-ignition-condenser
Ignition Condenser
Progress: And so I registered the bike, and bought insurance, and got my plates. I only needed to get inspected, and manage a few other things, but I was Soooooo close to getting to ride......and the bike stalled out on the way to the dealership.
Betrayal: To make the story shorter, they had sold me the wrong sized battery back at the beginning of my repairs. The terminals were shorting out on the underside of the seat, causing all sorts of electrical problems. And so I got new rubber, drove home having bit the bullet for a new battery (and vowing not to return to said deanship for their lack of ownership for selling the wrong one in the first place), and stalled out one mile from my garage...
Expectations and disappointment: Electrical? Carbonation? Something else? I was losing my patience as I watched my reality and my expectations move further and further apart. And now I needed to get a 350+ pound bike back to my house up a steep hill before reassessing where to go next. Oh, and there was the new problem of the small amount of oil on the cylinder head with a broken bolt...Impulsiveness: I tried a simple method of extraction. It seemed simple. I was so close and had this one little setback. With tunnel-vision for riding and full gallop toward my desired expectations I jumped in to do my own simple work for once... and made things much, much worse! I mangled the extraction, and damaged any easy removal by a more skilled mechanic. There is no way the bike was going to be ready before the cold weather of the Berkshires hit. I had lost my window...
...Perhaps it was time to throw in the towel on the whole—now expensive and time consuming—process. I was not finding my inner mechanic, nor any peace. I was not making my way to freedom or feeling unfettered. I was really stuck!
Taking a deep breath: I spent the next two weeks dealing with other life concerns, before deciding on what to do next on my bike. I spent some time online seeing what I might get as a sale price for "Joe," and what a newer cleaner bike might cost me. I felt like a failure and decided on inaction for the time being. And then I picked up Zen, and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance again. I chip away at its pages slowly like a meditation. I hoped to pace my progress with the book along with the work on my bike. It's been a long read for sure. I was at the end of chapter 23 when I last put it down, and so began reading again at the start of chapter 24. And this is what I came across:
Stuckness. That’s what I want to talk about today. (p. 270)It was an uncanny topic for Pirsig to address. He goes on to illustrate stuckness with an example of a stripped screw on a side cover assembly. Amazing parallel!
Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn’t just irritating and minor. You’re stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It’s absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle. (p. 271)
This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It’s a miserable experience emotionally. You’re losing time. You’re incompetent. You don’t know what you’re doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out. (p. 271)
Let’s consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn’t the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it's exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to introduce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like...
...If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas...
...The solution to the problem often at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness allows it, in time, to assume its true importance. It seemed small because your previous rigid evaluation which led to the stuckness made it small. (p. 277)
Normally screws are so cheap and small and simple you think of them as unimportant. But now, as your Quality awareness becomes stronger, you realize that this one, individual, particular screw is neither cheap nor small nor unimportant. Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until you get the screw out. With this reevaluation of the screw comes a willingness to expand your knowledge of it. (p. 278)And so I am learning to let go in order that I might at some point learn to get...
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