Thursday, August 04, 2005

Going in a whole new direction.

Last night I was extremely pleased to get home and discover a message telling me that my bracket was in. I did a little happy dance, and thought about the wonderful, WONDERFUL time I was going to have riding my VX800 here, there and everywhere. I got the part on in less than 20 minutes (gotta love fast, bolt-on repairs), and went out for a "test ride." It didn't want to start at first, but eventually fired up and I was off! Even better, the lovely Lady Luck brought home pizza for dinner. It was a good night!

This morning I skipped downstairs, put on my jacket and grabbed my helmet, went out to the garage and discovered a new puddle under my bike. So, I looked for what was dripping, saw that it was coming from a fuel line, and tried to do a quick fix so I could still ride to work. The quick fix didn't do much of anything but I started the bike anyway, fully intending to ride to work.

Ordinarily, the VX doesn't need the choke on to start, and is ready to ride in the time it takes me to put on my helmet and gloves. Of course, today it didn't work out that way. When I'd rev the engine, it would just die. It's possible that I just got too excited and needed to wait a minute, but my confidence in the bike was shaken and I put it back in the garage. I also swore a lot.

I'm therefore contemplating changing the name of this blog to "The Merry Piece of Shit Motorcycle Laugh-Along," because the likelihood of actually making it to a pizza place any time soon seems pretty low. It seems to me that I managed to find the one Japanese bike that was engineered to give me all the reliability of an English or Italian bike.

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