While tipping the bottle, I noticed a little gusher of red oil coming out a small hole in the bottom of the primary. Shit, must have forgotten to put the bung in. Most old Harley drain points are big enough to stick a finger in. Hard to miss. This one’s not. If I was still smoking, I could have bunged it up with a bunger.
By the time I got it stoppered, the flow had receded to a trickle. Evolution primaries hold about a litre of oil – sorry, 38 fluid ounces in Yank speak, measured with a Jack Daniels bottle – which explained the growing puddles all over the floor. The bench had deflected it every which way and there was auto trans fluid dripping off everything.
No worries, I had spill protection on hand. A couple of rolls of kitchen paper that sucks up fluids like my mate Chooka on a Friday night. I started laying paper around, trying to stop the spread.
Being late in the day, the old brain flashed back to a similar scenario about 40 years ago. I was pouring fresh oil into the tank on my new Superglide after leaving it to drain overnight. The first couple of pints dumped straight on the floor before the bloke standing next to me noticed his thongs were feeling tacky. Fair play, he’d just told me he’d been sleeping with my girlfriend. No wonder I forgot the plug.
Another time we did it deliberately. A bunch of bike riding mates were staying overnight on their way west. Grant had borrowed Bill’s R90S because, as usual, his Titan wouldn’t make it outside his postcode. McKinnon laid down the law on looking after his BM, so Gibbo figured it’d be real funny to tip half a litre of oil under the motor. Roffy woke up late, scrabbled into his gear and didn’t even notice the puddle. Someone had to point it out to him.
I run ATF in my primary cases because it’s got some incredible properties. Automatics rely on clutch packs, so the fluid has to be able to handle friction. Then there’s the extreme heat, which means the same fluid has to handle that while lubricating all the planetary gears. It has to be able to stick to everything yet be thin enough to flow through little channels in the valve body and dense enough to operate a myriad of hydraulics.
Compared to a modern automatic transmission, Harley’s primary drive is all rocks and chisels. There’s a chain, a couple of sprockets, a bunch of clutch plates and a nylon ramp to set the tension.
They might have got a man to the moon but it wasn’t on one of their motorcycles…
The paper was doing an admirable job but I figured to speed it up by pushing it around with my feet. By this stage I’d dragged the bin closer to catch the balls of dripping paper I was lobbing at it. Then a secondary font caused by the flat jack under the bike overflowed, coating the tools that’d been pushed aside.
Do you know how far a litre of ATF will go if allowed to spread out? Even the cockroaches under the fridge were skating. Chuck in a few oily penguins and you’ve got the Exxon Valdez disaster in my workshop.
Only Prince Andrew could make a stickier mess than this.
Now, when stress hits, I’ve got a simple solution. I slid over to the fridge for a beer and a little think. No beer. Just a bottle of Jamesons. My oily hand slipped and pretty much filled the glass. It was a long think…
Things may have got even more sloppy after the second glass slipped too. I figured I’d better degrease the tools and as much of the floor as I could before riding the pushbike home.
Karen tried ringing, no doubt to ask why I was late for dinner but you try answering an iPhone with a sticky finger!
Bloody hell, what a lot of bother over a litre of oil. But next morning the tsunami really hit when Karen found red sandal prints running diagonally across her Egyptian cotton rug.
The joke I made about ghosts of motorcycle mummies past didn’t help much either.
At least it’ll be easy to find my shed from now on. Yep, just follow the bicycle tyre prints all the way up the path…
