HIGHLAND PARK, Illinois, July 5 -- Everyone who rides a motorcycle knows that battery maintenance is an important part of keeping a bike running. If you don't ride in the winter, it's important to disconnect the battery before you put the bike away -- if you don't, the battery will discharge and eventually, for reasons of electrochemistry, go to seed. Once that happens, it won't hold a charge in the spring, which can have unpleasant consequences.
My old bikes both have batteries in the conventional place -- right under the seat, where you can get at them easily; just unlock the seat, flip it up, and the battery terminals are right there, where you can disconnect them easily.
Monkey see, monkey do
Not so with Meg's 1988 Honda Shadow VLX. This bike, like most cruisers, was designed to look as much like a Harley-Davidson as possible. Styling took priority over everything else. And one of the "everything else" things that went out the window was ease of maintenance. Harleys are air-cooled, so although the Shadow is water-cooled, it has to look as if it isn't-- the radiator and coolant reservoir are tucked away where you can't find them. Old Harleys had no rear suspension -- so the Shadow's rear suspension is buried somewhere deep inside the bottom of the chassis (I don't know exactly where). Old Harleys must have had inaccessible oil filters, too -- because the Shadow's is notoriously hard to get at. When I changed the oil last month, I didn't change the filter, because I couldn't get it off -- I have three different oil filter wrenches, but none of them was able to get into the confined space where the filter is located and get a grip on the thing.
But the important item for the purposes of this story is the battery. On the Shadow, it's buried way underneath several layers of plastic underneath the non-movable seat. Unlike the batteries on my bikes, the Honda battery is behind a side cover, a rubber flap, a fuse box, and a plastic cover held in place with a bolt (which I've taken out).
It's a pain in the backside to get the battery out or even disconnect one of the terminals (not all that difficult, but still much more involved than taking out the battery on either of my bikes, and just enough to make me too lazy to do it); so last fall, when I disconnected the batteries on the BMW and Yamaha, I left the Honda battery connected. And there it sat all winter.
Letting a bike battery discharge and sit for a few months usually destroys the battery, or at least degrades it to where it won't hold a charge anymore. This is what happened to Meg's battery, as I was to find out.
Would you like some toast with that?
We'd only fired up Meg's bike a couple of times this spring and early summer -- once when I changed the oil last month, and then again a couple of weeks ago, when we went for a spin around Lake County. The bike had started without too much difficulty, although it did require an hour or so on the battery charger before it'd turn over. However, as I discovered, this did not mean all was fine and dandy with the battery. More precisely, it was toast.
Last Saturday morning, we got up bright and early, because we'd signed up to take a Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF) training class. I'd gone out to the garage the previous evening and checked the oil in both my BMW and Meg's Honda, pumped a little air in the tires, and connected the battery charger to the latter bike. Unfortunately, Saturday morning, I discovered that although I'd connected the charger, I'd forgotten one minor detail: plugging it in. (In my defense, I originally had plugged it in -- but then, I'd unplugged it in order to plug in the tire pump -- after pumping up the tires, I'd forgotten to plug the battery charger back in.)
No big problem, I figured -- I'll just jump-start the bike, and it'll charge enough on the way to MSF class that we'll be all set.
Ideally, when you're running on a near-dead battery, it would be nice to be able to turn your headlight off, to give the charging system a chance to recharge the battery. Unfortunately, this is where we run into Stupid Washington Regulation Number One. This is the law, implemented in the late 1970s, that requires motorcycle manufacturers to have the headlight come on when you turn on the ignition, and stay on -- there's no on-off switch. Now, I'd be the first to agree that keeping your headlight on when riding is a good idea -- I almost always have mine on, and when the sun is out, I keep it on high beam, so the distracted cell-phone-chatting soccer moms in their 4-ton sport-utility vehicles might have a remote chance of seeing me, instead of turning me into a hood ornament. However, the bureaucrats who made the headlights-all-the-time law had obviously never had a bike with a dead battery -- if they had, they'd realize that sometimes, there's a legitimate reason why you might want to turn the headlight off for awhile!
But I digress. We rode off to MSF class -- or that's what we thought we were doing. That idea didn't last long, however. The first problem we ran into was that Meg's bike -- with a gas tank that only holds about two gallons -- needed a fillup on the way to class. I told her (over the two-way radio), "Leave the engine running while you fill up, in case the battery doesn't have enough juice yet to start it again."
The problem with that idea was that, as on many bikes these days, you can't leave the engine running on the Shadow while you fill the gas tank -- because the gas cap is locked, and the only way to open it is with the ignition key; you have to shut the engine off and remove the key to open the cap.
Now, I hear you saying, "But you're supposed to shut the engine off anyway -- it's illegal to fill up with the engine running." Well, true -- but why? I've never figured out why they make you shut the engine off. There's no fire hazard -- after all, the sparkplugs are inside the combustion chamber, which is inside the engine -- no chance of ignition there. Maybe the idea is to prevent idiot car drivers from driving off while someone's filling the tank, but even that seems implausible. So we're dealing with Stupid Washington Regulation Number Two here.
In any case, we hadn't had the foresight to bring an extra key, so regulations or no regulations, she had to shut the engine off. And after we filled up, the bike wouldn't start -- when Meg pushed the starter button, it cranked over a couple of times, then petered out.
Although I'd forgotten to plug in the battery charger overnight, one thing I hadn't forgotten was to bring a set of jumper cables. So I hooked them up to my BMW battery and Meg's bike, and hoped that the Beemer's cheesy charging system (barely adequate to keep the bike itself running, let alone jump-start someone else's battery, although we had done it before, as documented in our Blue Ridge Parkway trip report).
No dice. The Honda was going nowhere fast. Seeing as we only had about 20 minutes before MSF class was scheduled to start, we had no way of making it on time (and if you don't make it to class on time, they give your spot to somebody else; there's usually someone waiting to take your place) -- so we pushed the bike away from the gas pumps and into a parking space, and rode home on my bike, to get the car and (I thought) jump-start Meg's bike and ride it home.
Is this the party to who I am speaking?
Fine. Except that when we came back with the car, with its much beefier alternator than my poor BMW, I still wasn't able to get Meg's bike to start. I'm still not sure exactly why that was, but it may have been that I had the negative jumper cable hooked onto the aluminum cooling fins on the Shadow (not the best place to ground the cable), instead of onto the frame or, better yet, the negative battery terminal itself. The latter was out of the question, though -- because the Shadow's battery is buried so deep in the bowels of the machine.
In any case, after a few minutes, we decided to punt and call for a tow (or, more precisely, a flatbed truck on which to take the bike home).
What happened to the good old days, when the operator would just put you through and not worry about charging you for it?
Meg pulled out her recently-acquired cell phone (which I refer to as "the Leash") and tried to call directory assistance to get our friends at Leonard's Towing. All she got was an error message that said the phone was "out of area." Out of area -- 15 miles from Chicago?
Next, she tried the pay phone at the gas station. She dialed 1-800-AMERITECH, to try to use her Ameritech calling card. Again, no luck -- for some reason, Ameritech had cancelled the card.
This is the second time in the past few weeks that Ameritech has cancelled one of our calling cards by mistake. Last month, I called Meg from the golf course when I'd arrived and signed in on the walk-in list, to give her an estimated time when I'd be getting to the first tee -- and, therefore, a general idea of when I'd be coming home. I called 1-800-AMERITECH and tried to use my Ameritech card. It, too, had been cancelled for some reason -- we've been paying our phone bills regularly, so that wasn't it. OK, so I tried to call collect -- no luck there, either. For some reason, Ameritech had set our line, the top-secret unlisted one, not to accept collect calls.
I asked the operator to put my call through anyway, and she said, "I can't do that -- let me put you through to customer service." Well, customer service was not only unable to put my call through, but they couldn't explain why my card had been cancelled, or why the number wasn't accepting collect calls. What's more, the customer service rep actually tried to sell me more phone service I didn't need! What happened to the good old days, when if you were having trouble making a call from a pay phone, the operator would just put you through and not worry about charging you for it?
While this was going on, the starter called my name. I tried to get his attention, so he'd know I was tied up on the phone, but to no avail. I tried to wrap up my conversation with the Ameritech customer service rep quickly -- actually, I finally had to hang up on her, poor thing -- and ran to the starter's desk. But by that time, I'd missed my tee time, and I had to wait half an hour or so before another opening turned up.
Anyway, so back at the gas station, Meg found that her calling card had been cancelled for no apparent reason. So we scrounged up some coins, and she tried to put a call through the old-fashioned way. No cigar -- the pay phone wasn't working right, and it didn't acknowledge the coins she dropped in!
OK, so the pay phone was a bust. At that point, our only choice was to go home and call Leonard's from there.
Current events were never my strong point
I called the guy at Leonard's -- turned out he was a former motorcycle racer -- and asked him to meet me at the gas station with his flatbed truck. He did so, and proceeded to jump-start the Shadow, clipping the negative jumper cable onto the frame -- he explained that (as suggested above) trying to ground the negative cable on the cooling fins wasn't going to work; it might pass enough current to charge the battery slowly, but not enough to jump-start it. Well, I'm not 100% sure this is true -- but in any case, the bike was running.
However, I was there at the gas station, with the bike and a car -- and no riding gear. I didn't want to leave the bike there, so much as I hate to ride with no gear (this was the first time I'd done it), I made an executive decision to ride home, sans helmet, jacket, gloves, and boots. It's only about three miles, and I made it home in one piece -- but I'll try not to do that again.
Of course, I still had a car back at the gas station, to pick it up and take it home. So that made four trips to the gas station and back in one Saturday morning, and all it got us was back where we started.
What's the moral of this story? I'm not sure there is one. Well, you'll never again see me leave a bike battery hooked up all winter, for one thing. As for more general life lessons, I'll leave those as an exercise for the reader. If Honda's listening, though, how about making your bikes easier to maintain, with parts more accessible? If our friends in Washington are paying attention, stop writing stupid vehicular regulations (like the mandatory lights-on-all-the-time, no off-switch rule) without thinking about their implications for the motoring public. And if Ameritech is reading along, tell your operators that the customer is always right -- when someone's having trouble making a call, put the call through, instead of telling the customer he's wrong.
While we're on the subject, though, I confess that I had to suppress a snicker when Meg's cell phone didn't work. Regular readers know that I consider the cell phone the most abominable invention of modern times, possibly excepting the golf cart (that's a column I haven't written yet). Instead of giving people freedom and independence, what they actually do is allow people to reach them anywhere (hence "The Leash") and foster dependence. People go hiking without maps or proper gear, thinking they can simply call for directions or -- if they've got money to burn -- for a helicopter to come take them home if they're too tired to walk. And they think they don't have to know how to change a tire or jump-start a car, because they can just make a call and have someone rescue them. Well, sometimes it may work out that way -- but what about when the Leash doesn't work?
In any case, there are two ways to handle something like last Saturday -- you can point fingers, or you can laugh at yourself, and live and learn. One of the benefits of having a few years on the odometer is the ability to handle these situations constructively. Or at least that's what I keep telling myself.
Copyright © 1999 John J. Kafalas