Modern Vespa

The standard advice is to make sure she doesn't sell off your stuff for what you told her you paid for it.

Fog was just as you described, so thick I couldn't see one hundred feet ahead.

The mountains around here get that way every now and then.
Bill

I spent about 3 1/2 hours today talking to the guy whose going to change the fork seals on the BMW and to find out why they keep failing.

Later on in the year the exhaust headers are going to be replaced which will be fun as most of the nuts have rotted to nothing and there's a broken stud to extract.

His handlebars had started slipping. Not badly, he said, just a little when you shoved hard on them. I warned him not to use his adjustable wrench on the tightening nuts. It was likely to damage the chrome and start small rust spots. He agreed to use my metric sockets and box-ends.
When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut.
"You're going to have to shim those out," I said.
"What's shim?"
"It's a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines."
"Oh," he said. He was getting interested. "Good. Where do you buy them?"
"I've got some right here," I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand.
He didn't understand for a moment. Then he said, "What, the can?"
"Sure," I said, "best shim stock in the world."
I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.
But to my surprise he didn't see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.
As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!
Ach, du lieber!
Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle maintenance. None, now that I think of it.
You push it any further and suddenly you are angry, without knowing why.
I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn't oxidize in wet weather...or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect.
In other words, any true German mechanic, with a half-century of mechanical finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular solution to this particular technical problem was perfect.
For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it.
That Krupp's-private-shim fantasy gratified me for a while, but then it wore off and I saw it was just being vindictive. In its place grew that old feeling I've talked about before, a feeling that there's something bigger involved than is apparent on the surface. You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. There was just a feeling on my part that this was something a little bigger than I wanted to take on without thinking about it, and I turned instead to my usual habit of trying to extract causes and effects to see what was involved that could possibly lead to such an impasse between John's view of that lovely shim and my own. This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.
What emerged in vague form at first and then in sharper outline was the explanation that I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was. That's how I arrived at that distinction. And when you see what the shim is, in this case, it's depressing. Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk?
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with by an old hunk of junk?

So the Honda Cub deal fell apart a few weeks ago which was a shame but then my Dealer gets in touch today and next week he's collecting......

A full power V - Max

A 2 year old Kawasaki Versys 1000

A Harley Davidson Heritage Softail Classic and a

Delivery mileage New Honda Super Cub.

Delivery mileage New Honda Super Cub.

This is why he's a Total Bastard.

I was offered a really clean 1984 Yamaha XS 650 Special with just 2300 miles on it earlier today.

Declined.

A full power V - Max

A 2 year old Kawasaki Versys 1000

A Harley Davidson Heritage Softail Classic and a

Delivery mileage New Honda Super Cub.

started watching clarkson's farm season 3.

and i might be picking up that rally in nashville when we get back from Vegas. i'll be in a lot of trouble with missus but there's a meme that i think applies at this point, being soon to retire and such.

I was thinking about your statement. Having two scoots is most likely inevitable. The whole retirement thing just affirms this. I say yes.

By the way, her red dress would make a killer color scheme for a Vespa. The one she was wearing in Italy. Just saying.

If/when it's time for a repaint, it'll be an original rally color. Maybe not the original one it came in, because i am SUCH a sucker for that orange they had...

Though Arancio Borealis is tempting as well...(lamborghini diablo 6.0 orange)

(of course i don't even have the thing yet, still 2 weeks away )

The spectacular Aurora Borealis display above the UK now has cheered me right up. Really rare sight this far south.

Hopefully the cell towers are still working tomorrow!

Meh. I'd be appreciative if those were given a day, or maybe even a week, off.
Methinks the world has forgotten how to get along with itself for even a little while.

Just make sure you've got cash in your pocket tomorrow.