Man I am so happy to see this. I got an old honda motorcyle about 15 year ago and this site was instrumental in helping me develop skills to fix it, and ultimately become a fully fledged shade-tree mechanic.
Also I'd like to add https://www.msgroup.org, another ancient website packed with excellent riding safety tips.
These two sites pretty much got me rebuilding, repairs, and riding motorcycles. Still goldmines today.
Any advice on sites to find old motorcycles for purchase? I know Craigslist might be good but I am always happy to take the advice of knowledgeable strangers.
Facebook Marketplace is the only reason I still have a Facebook account. It tends to have more realistic prices and is easier to use than CL in my experience.
It’s also reminding me of one of my best friends who builds custom choppers.
He was just in a gnarly motor bike accident and is lucky to be alive.
Fused spine, deformed body, lost a finger.
Still walking somehow but can’t work and is worried he may never be able to again.
Just to say, motorcycles are a lot like skydiving. If you are around them enough either you or someone close to you gets in a serious accident.
Make sure to take time to get proper training, life / health insurance, plan your estate / will, etc. to make sure if something happens you have security in place.
This is accurate. I rode a bike for 8 years but after a while the risk got to me, and I stopped. A close friend's brother was killed as he "T-boned" a woman pulling out of a supermarket plaza without looking for oncoming traffic (her fault, he had 2 kids, he died on impact). A second friend was recently severely injured, as a van hit him while violating the rules at an intersection. He had to have his leg amputated. I love bikes a lot (it's a family tradition), but at the end of the day, it's not worth it for me. Of course, this is a personal decisions, and everyone should do as they wish. Just be careful and do your best to keep the rubber side down.
The idea of riding a motorbike terrifies me. I cycle regularly for fun and exercise, I do about 45 km at an average speed of about 30 km/h, and I have a couple of near misses every time I go out.
Whether it's someone opening their door on me, someone pulling out in front of me (either because they haven't seen me or they don't realise how fast you can go on a bike), or someone passing me so close I'd be able to rap on their window, or a myriad of other reasons.
I'm fully lit up day and night, I have high vis socks, reflective shoes, reflective strips on my bibs and jersey, I have a rear radar, my front light at full beam is as bright as a car headlight on main beam, and I cycle about a metre out from the kerb. Not sure what else I can do.
Having all those same issues, plus travelling at a much greater speed? No thanks.
Not judging people who enjoy motorcycles, I've bombed down a country lane which I know well (has no turn offs, good surface) at 80 km/h on my bike so I can well understand the thrill being on a motorbike must give you. I would just never get on one myself.
It’s not about the thrill for everyone. As a motorcyclist myself, I scorn many of the bicyclists I see out on back country roads full of blind corners and hills without a shoulder. In my opinion, it is not safe to have large speed differentials in traffic because it erodes trust in the road and other traffic. If you enjoy two wheels as much as I do, you’ll perfectly enjoy motorcycling without the rush – you’re only as fast as you want to go but at least you’ll always be managing the speed limit. I appreciate in other regions there are minimum speed limits, and I’ve heard personal stories about getting ticketed for riding a bicycle slowly on a fast road.
Just to be clear, it's not all about the thrill for me either, it's just when I was bombing that hill with nothing but two wheels between me and being smeared across the road I realised what it might feel like to have the power of a motorcycle under you.
I ride safely, I'm not swerving between cars at traffic lights or squeezing through gaps.
In the UK, where I live, there are very few roads cyclists aren't allowed on, basically motorways (70 mph speed limit). Regardless I use a route-planning app called Komoot that uses cycle-specific data and heat maps to give you the safest route.
We have national laws that say drivers must treat bicycles as if they were a car and leave them space as such etc., not that it actually happens in practice.
Basically you connect it to your bike computer and it puts a little line along the side, cars appear as dots on the line and move along it as they get closer to you and your computer emits audible beeps when it detects a car. Has a different, more urgent beep when it detects a large vehicle like a lorry or a bus, or if a vehicle is travelling at a high speed relative to you.
Highly recommend it, haven't had any false negatives (obviously I still look over my shoulder, it's just nice to know a car's coming from a distance away and if they're going very fast).
I've run across this site in the past while searching for solutions to my bike troubles. In addition to the motorcycle stuff, his site is filled with religion, politics, and miscellaneous ramblings of an old-timer. Like this page[0], where he talks about this new-fangled thing called CSS which the so-called experts are using these days.
> Several college students, majoring in web design, have kindly offered to "Update" the site to a more modern look. The offers are generous and sincerely meant to help, so I always go and look at the more modern examples they give of their work. Slow loading, lots of Adobe Flash. Strange, to say the least, site navigation. Like this " ≡ " symbol called, believe it or not, a Hamburger Button.
> I code everything I put up in NotePad. I test in Pale Moon, Firefox, Internet Explorer and sometimes Opera and Chrome. I look at some of these "Modern" web sites filled with ads up and down the sides and across the top... Yuck! I understand the desire to get Revenue from your site and all, but really, things have gotten out of hand.
> You know, all this could help with the yearly Flu and other diseases. I particularly like the Social Distancing. Keeps all these creepy, irritating people at six feet away. What's not to like? Not to mention leaving no finger prints and no drones or cameras taking your picture, tracking who you are, and where you go. That could be handy if you happen to walk on dry sand or want a haircut or play tennis. Again, what's not to like? Nitrile gloves are reusable too. Wash your hands, a bit of hand sanitizer, pull them off and you are good to go to reuse them for the next trip to town.
Of note, both display lots of valuable content in an easy-to-access way, load faster than anything Web 3.0, and no js. I feel like we lost some lessons along the way to here.
The phrase “everything I learned about x I learned from n” is probably kitsch and hackneyed, but in the case of bicycle maintenance, Sheldon Brown and his website, it’s absolutely the case for me.
This is definitely the best site about motorcycle repair and maintenance I was able to find when resurrecting my old Honda. His style and instructions are clear and to the point, and he takes care to make sure you can do everything with regular tools, even going so far as to show you how to build special tools you might need for your bike. I actually downloaded the whole site with wget out of fear it might go missing some day... An absolutely essential website if you have a bike that is no longer under manufacturer's warranty.
I have always wanted to do something like this for tractors: use, maintainance and repairs. A lot of women drive tractors and still need a guy around like a spare set of muscles.
I feel like I can’t tackle this until I have a set of adapters or levers or some such hack to deal with our obvious gender handicap.
This is going to be my winter 2020-21 project. Thanks.
ETA: heh .. http://www.dansmc.com/china_bikes.htm .. I remember when I arrived here to the states many years ago and all I knew was enfield and fury from India. Asian bikes were called ‘rice bikes’ ..and at least in the east coast, there was a certain derisiveness towards anything that wasn’t a Harley. Indian bikes were neither here nor there but were rice bikes anyways.
Eta2: I agree with the sentiment. it’s the same with cameras. I remember a cheap Chinese TLR called Seagull. Used the same medium frame film and was just a cheaper cheaper version of Rollei or Hasselblad. You get what you pay for.
There is a lot of room for better help for mechanics. Most of it is distributed as long-winded YouTube videos, and it's the wrong medium. Everything else is lost in the noise on various forums.
I'd love something like ifixit for other fields and I can't possibly be alone. I want answers that aren't hidden in a 30 minute 480p video of a mumbling dad.
Knowledge is power, and it's dirt-cheap to mass produce. I wish more people casually documented how they repair things.
I think adding a gendered twist to it would be great too. We shouldn't deprive an entire gender from the satisfaction of fixing things with their own hands. It's too good an experience to pass on.
I wish those companies dedicated an employee or two to maintaining such content. Repairability and access to documentation would be worth enough to tip a purchase decision for many. Instead the manuals and parts list are kept off the internet. They're sold at insane prices if at all.
Currently I am dealing with tractors and PTOs. I agree that.. Mechanically for motorcycles and cars, everyone who owns a wheeled vehicle should be able to fix things and at least know how.
We shouldnt have to use brawn when physics should do.
> We shouldnt have to use brawn when physics should do.
There's nothing inherent about this space requiring manly strength, it just takes up a lot of slack when everything else is lacking - from tools to knowledge.
The trained professionals don't rely on brawn to perform repairs properly.
> professionals don't rely on brawn to perform repairs properly
In point of fact I have recently had a mechanic lament to me that he was no longer strong enough to work on suspensions anymore. Professionally, time == money, and where something like a come-along pulling a torque wrench can work, it's not viable in the real world of a busy shop. At home, your own car, hobby, fine; but AFAIK that cost him his job.
I've been privileged to have spent a lot of time with people who kept construction and farm machinery operating as part of their living; and sheer brawn is absolutely so large a benefit in those tasks, as to almost be a requirement.
If you interpreted my mentioning a come-along as something you'd combine with a torque wrench, I'm afraid this is kind of pointless.
Any mechanic worth anything would use a longer torque wrench or reach for the trusty pipe in such a situation.
This reminds me of some of the shitty amateur shops I've had the displeasure of working in where toxic masculinity runs the place and people would be embarrassed to need increased leverage on something they should be able to do with brawn. That's a different problem altogether, and unfortunately it's very common among automotive workers.
This is a feeling and I can’t prove it. Because I dont have a decent sized sample set, but when it comes to women..I think it’s not just brawn, but also our slightly different center of gravity.
Many many years ago..when I was young and stupid, I decided that I was going to hike the Appalachian trail..end to end. And then I figured that I was smarter and that I will do it in parts. And then I gave myself yet another break to do the trail stops in any random order.
That began my crash course in acceptance towards gender differences. Starting with backpacks to shoes to equipment to tents..to climbing technique and speed..everything was different! Because of our waist-hip ratios, breasts and lower center of gravity.
Recently when I was struggling with some tractor stuff, a lot of it came back ..and I could go to harbour freight and found the equivalent for hoisting machines. It wasn’t ideal but if I hadn’t been familiar with climbing equipment, I wouldn’t have known how to use most of it. If you know how to hoist your own body weight, you can project it to do it to any 100-500 lb machine. Same principles.
On a slightly different note, I have seen women who were into fly fishing have a special set of hidden skills that they probably aren’t even aware of...I am not a fishing person myself and so I can’t put my finger on it. They are just different! Right from their way of surveying a surrounding area to problem solving to attitude. Is it sharpened by their hobby or did they pick that hobby due to their aptitude?
I am torn because I am a big believer of adopting hobbies..and many of them..as a way to unearth hidden skills and talents. But a lot of what’s picked up as hobbies translates to real life survival skills. So a blanket ‘everyone should learn __fill in the blank__ as a survival hack’ is not always possible.
I grew up mopping floors, fixing things, bending over a lot, and hanging from high branches etc because I am from a different time and place. The first time I saw a kid pulling a weed at the farm, I knew he was going to throw his back. It’s the same thing at the gym. Most adults don’t know how to lift their own body weight without hurting themselves. It must come naturally. Balancing onself on a motorcycle or kickstarting it(do bikers do that anymore?)..making sure we don’t fall flat on our face or trip over are such fundamental things that are essentially physics principles.
Most machines designed should have been intuitively based on the mechanics of the human body or bio inspired by animals around us. If they are not, the learning curve is steep. I feel like this why there are gender/generational differences when it comes to why some people are mechanically inclined and others are not..
Which brings me to my personal bias. Italian design/engineering vs German design/engineering. I prefer the latter. Italian designs make me think that a stubborn male with no friends who lives in a basement made it. German designs make me feel like a group of people brainstormed to come up with it. German designs are more intuitive.
Of course, we will all end up with Japanese designs because it doesn’t matter who made it..it was made FOR everyone.
A recent example is the gear box with the tractor spader I got shipped from Italy recently. I just couldn’t find it! And after I did, I couldn’t get to it. Hours wasted because figuring it out is a free game by itself that the Italians threw in for shits and giggles.
I would like to hear from mechanics and motor cyclists who have known the innards of cars and bikes re Italian vs German engines and designs. Philosophy/attitude.
I'm a hobbyist but in my experience the Germans and Japanese have a clue about automotive design while American stuff is just a crapshoot. American engines are really not at all bad but the cars they are in were definitely not designed around the drivetrain. GM has some absolutely incredibad ideas on how to make a car serviceable that floors me everytime I pull one apart. Same thing with Ford if we are talking about vans with a transversely mounted engine. Even something as simple as changing plugs is an involved job. Let me put it this way... you might as well just drop the engine a bit in order to get some clearance. Why should you need to do this? I don't know fuck it just buy a new van. Rants aside, this thing just doesn't happen very often with imports. VW does a halfway decent job making sure you can repair your car in a driveway with hand tools. They always make sure you have clearance and doing swaps is really not awful, you just have to be careful because newer German cars have a fetish for plastic on parts that honestly have no business being plastic. Also make sure to get triple squares and hex sockets because they get a kick out of throwing them in for good measure. In addition, a lot of interior trim is overdesigned for no reason. I have no idea who they pay to do that. Modern BMWs and mercs are a shitfest and should be avoided if possible. Older BMWs and mercs were very nicely built though. I especially loved the W124s. Beautiful cars that ran forever and weren't overly complex. I've never actually worked on korean cars so I don't have an opinion on em. Toyotas are fucking excellent to work on. I think out of all the manufacturers they care the most about designing reliable and serviceable machines. Brand new models are unfortunately doing some silly shit, but that's mostly body work related. Honda's a close second followed by Nissan. For closing remarks if I had to pick cars to work on it'd be toyotas, mercedes and hondas but hey sometimes I can't pick what a friend of a friend brings to me you know what I mean?
Agree so much about the newer German innards and the use of plastic!!!!
(Altho I have never worked on them, but I paid an ungodly amount of money to get some of my 10 y/o mini’s insides replaced/repaired..post cooper’s sale to BMW...it’s just unacceptable! Some of the stuff just gets eaten away or corroded? How is this possible..it’s like a detective novel inside to figure out what’s what)
FWIW I've done a lot of lifting for engine and trans services with nothing more than ratchet straps or a come-along hanging from either an overhead joist or I-beam, or a constructed A-frame when the former were unavailable.
Honestly two post lifts are more just a space and time saver for quick service shops and kind of suck. Back when I worked at a muffler+brake shop it was the two post lifts that did the most damage to vehicles due to poorly located pads or doors hitting the posts, and put the mechanics at the most risk. And when you use them to lift something lopsided like a FWD vehicle off its K member for major service, it becomes so imbalanced the damn car is liable to fall off. Not a fan at all. But they conferred good density to fit more bays in the shop. It's a shit compromise from a mechanic's perspective.
If there's space and resources a four-post drive-on lift is superior. The good ones include sub-lifts on rollers in the middle for raising the vehicle further off its tires. Some of them can be annoyingly crowded underneath though, alignment racks tend to be this way to accommodate a maximum range of vehicle sizes.
If there's no permanent dedicated space, you can get a lot done with robust safety using simple ramps made from stacked wide planks of wood.
The first hot-rod shop I worked at in my youth had a simple four post lift and a big iron A-frame on wheels used like a gantry crane. We'd lift entire bodies off chassis or K members with it, and roll them out of the way into a corner so we could access the powertrain. It was a big shop space, usually with 5-6 cars in the air at a time, but most of the cars were on static stands. The A-frame would just move around the place as needed, it was just big enough to straddle the largest anticipated vehicle. But we weren't in a constant hurry like your typical muffler/brake shop full of butchers.
I run a two wheel tractor tips group for BCS tractor(Italian design) machines on Facebook. At some point, I want to come up with an easy to follow repair and maintenance manual from the crowdsourced solutions. I was thinking wiki format.
At some point, I want to create an online course for women who farm for tractors and tools repair and maintenance.
I believe more and more that our machines and tools in the future would be robots and electrical. And data hogs. Connected machines. At which point, we are most certainly going to be restricted from repairing them.
I am sorry to go off on a tangent as the GP is about motorcycles. I have made this about farm machinery. I don’t suppose right to repair is an issue with personal road vehicles?
That's a great initiative. A wiki-like website for maintaining a specific range of products would probably work really well, although not everyone is keen to figure out how to contribute.
Alternatively, you can simply have a comments section where people can share results, improvements and additional details. This works well for recipe websites.
> I don’t suppose right to repair is an issue with personal
road vehicles?
It is! Cars also require more and more proprietary tech, and it's getting harder to repair them yourself without specialised tools. Car manufacturers are also inching towards DLC and even subscription-based hardware features for cars.
Japanese manufacturers have had that stigma in Australia too, it's just a way for people to feel better about themselves. I think any decent enthusiast would be able to see past that and appreciate the bikes for what they are.
"The Metrics" is another term for I have heard for them.
I thought the same. Hopefully this time I can finally learn how to repair a motorcycle instead of the elusiveness of "quality" as a philosophical concept.
Such a pleasure to read this, thank you for posting. Motorcyclists and hotrodders were OG hackers. Not so much a gentleman, but more of a yeoman scientist. You have to be a bit of a lunatic to ride motorcycles, a noble, heroic, and glorious lunatic. Even with modern engineering, a working bike is still only a temporary equilibrium.
This is the biggest thing I missed moving to SF and not having a garage or even a driveway. In my prior place I had a garage and could do all my maintenance and repairs myself. Yes, it would probably be worthwhile having a mechanic do it, but there is something very zen about working on your own vehicles. Plus, you know it's done right.
I have done a few brake jobs on cars that parked on the street in SF, but that gets to be a pain in the butt. There are garages you can rent down in the South Bay which gives you access to a lift and a ton of tools (pneumatic tools too!), but I think most of them went under.
Bizarre take, it's one sentence at the top of his page of motorcycle knowledge. The average HN comment wanks on with more far useless fluff in an attempt to look smart.
Is it really that hard to accept other people holding different views? And does it really warrant a comment about how it makes you feel uncomfortable despite all the work that has been freely provided for your benefit?
I'm a stout atheist and grew up fixing a dozen or so bikes mainly learning from this site and online manuals. I owe Dan an invaluable amount and couldn't care less about his beliefs.
Try being a bit more inclusive in life, you might learn something.
I didn't say that I hold it against him or that I was offended. Just that it makes me uncomfortable. There are at least 3 references to religion in the first 3rd of the repair course page, including 'The Ultimate Shop Manual' link. Dan's ultimate shop manual won't tell you anything about motorcycles or motorcycle repair and does not belong in the middle of a 'repair course'.
I like HN for interesting technical info like Dan has here. But I'm not here for religion.
I don't really mind, it adds a personal touch to his website and he seems like a fantastic guy. To play devil's advocate, it might be that in secular cultures its a little unusual to mix things like this. Like if youtube cooking guides had a 2 minute segment on muslim religion. Not horrible, just not the norm everywhere.
(it would never have occurred to me to write an "atheist motorcycle guide" until now: "bike won't start, what could be the reasons? 1. Spark plugs are fouled 2. Battery's empty 3. God is dead")
It's not my cup of tea either, but it's one of the things I like about this site. It represents a previous era of the internet, when people put whatever they wanted up on their personal sites.
Nowadays we're all carefully curating an image, crafting our messages, and optimizing our content to fit our audience. This guy is not interested in any of that. He has something to say so he says it. He doesn't seem to care much how it's perceived, he's not trying to make money off of it, he doesn't care how it looks or if it has good SEO (at least as far as I can tell...). He's just being himself, with all his quirks and oddities.
I think that's why it's so popular on HN right now. It reminds us of the way the web used to be.
The religious portion was the most beautifully hysterical part of the site though. I clicked the top link thinking the domain was moving only to find its availability was about to be limited by my own mortality.
can i psychoanalyze you for a sec here and ask you to delve into why that makes you uncomfortable?
for context, to me (lifetime atheist) it looks roughly equivalent to someone sticking some hippie nonsense in a blog post. not particularly relevant to the content but a bit of personal minutiae.
do you have a history with religion or situations where you felt pressured to conform to religious norms perhaps? or something else entirely?
I think he's using the right words for his audience. People who already knew that there were multiple types of cruciform bits wouldn't need the article. For the people (Americans) who don't, they know them as phillips bits. Literally everyone in America calls them phillips bits, even most who are in the trades:
> Don't be surprised, when you ask for a JIS screwdriver, if the "Expert" parts person has no idea what you are talking about.
I doubt that, based on the condition of all of the screws on Japanese bikes I’ve owned. Either way, only a couple percent of people in the US even own a Japanese motorcycle. A fraction of that work on them, and a fraction of them use the right tools.
I miss the wacky elements of yesteryear retro websites. Custom mouse pointers, tiled backgrounds etc.
Nowadays its mostly white webpages with similar looking buttons and elements. I guess uniformity makes it easy for users to use web-apps. But I still miss the creativity of retro websites.
Ari Henning makes some great motorcycle repair videos. His current show is The Shop Manual on RevZilla. Before that, he hosted MC Garage on Motorcyclist Magazine.
I would also highly recommend the MC Garage series on YouTube. It won't go into specific bikes, but is such a good general resource on how to do most maintenance jobs.
I would like to see something like this for petrol engine power generators. I noticed in my community we have a lot of people in generator repair business but they are not grounded and no reference material to consult when they face new issues.
not online, but check out what is usually just called the idiots guide. Specifically "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot". Everything I know about auto mechanics I learned from that book. Like this site, it is sprinkled with personality and anecdotes (of a Santa Fe hippie in this case), but as a learning resources it is excellent.
I didn't click anything for a few seconds because my brain was waiting for GDPR, pop-ups, ads and notification boxes. It's quite refreshing to have an old-school website for a change.
Also I'd like to add https://www.msgroup.org, another ancient website packed with excellent riding safety tips.
These two sites pretty much got me rebuilding, repairs, and riding motorcycles. Still goldmines today.