Exxon Valdez or The Mystery of the Vanishing Bolt

Note: No wildlife was harmed in the making of this blog entry!

In my last entry, I talked about the amount of time I thought I would have to put into looking for parts. When I did, I was thinking about finding parts that ad worn out or rusted or were damaged in trying to remove them.

What I wasn’t thinking about was the time I would have to put into looking for parts I had lost!

After consulting the Honda Twins site yesterday, I was all set to drain the oil from my bike. I had assumed it was low on oil and that the oil that was there was dirty. At first, I was confused in that the pictures in the manual and what I was looking at didn’t jive. It turns out that my Clymer manual had it wrong. The advice I got from the Honda Twins site was not only accurate but given with a sense of humour. So I approached the oil draining wit some confidence.

I placed a bucket under the drain plug and started to undo the plug. Now, I haven’t drained oil but I have watched it being done to a car. I had assumed the oil would drain smoothly. Boy, was I wrong.

I had the bucket placed directly beneath the drain plug, but because the plug is horizontal, the oil began to shoot out the hole with some pressure, missing my bucket altogether. Oil hit the floor and began to spread. I moved the bucket over and let the oil drain….

And drain…

And drain.

I started to realize that the bucket I had was too small…

Too late.

It overflowed as I scrambled to get another bucket underneath. More oil all over the floor. My garage was starting to look a lot like Alaska after the Exxon Valdez spill!

It took a while, but I got the oil mopped up in into an old orange juice jug. The rages went into plastic bags, along with all the paper towels. (I’m lucky to have a gas station nearby that takes old oil. They took the towels, too.)

Well, having cleaned up the mess, I went to put back the drain plug. Only to find it gone.

And I mean gone. I spent the next hour rummaging through the bags and towels. I poured out the oil in the orange juice jug into a container. I swept the floor and searched shelves (Even ones I hadn’t been near).

The drain plug was gone. It went to that place where socks go when they disappear in the in the dryer. So, I went off to the local motorcycle shop. I bought a new bolt and came back. It didn’t fit. So, off I went again to the local cycle shop and changed the bolt.

And it didn’t fit.

A check at Honda Twins told me that the problem may be the pitch on the bolt and offered me information to ask the next time I go to the cycle shop.

Too much time was wasted today due to my errors, but I will take it as a learning experience. I seem to be having more learning experiences than I’d like, but it was a good day all in all. At least I was able to install the oil filter.