Re: I bought an edible motorcycle


"Pip" <NOSPAMgingerbloke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:7h5mu1hc760r6nvfmd1jr226lck5682tb8@xxxxxxxxxx
Thought I'd take the bike out today, the weather being clement and the
sun doing the shining thing. So I released the beast from its Winter
quarters in the garage and brought it out to stand in the sun for a
while - let it warm its bones, so to speak.

While having a coffee and a ***, thoughts of a pre-flight checkover
came to me. Brakes seemed fine, chain similarly - but there were
pieces of what appeared to be foam, like seat foam, stuck to the chain
and around the front sprocket cover. Strange. Not memory foam, more
like mystery foam iyswim.

Thoughts sprang unbidden, speculation ran rife. Mental pictures of a
Spiccy character doing seat repairs or mods, perhaps - The Burd having
a sudden cleaning frenzy, sponges whirling ... or might it be that
muscular mouse, recently evicted from its cosy Winter home in my
welding gloves?

It was with the icy fingers of dread dancing along my spine that I
lifted the seat, expecting to find the arserest foam internally
excavated - but no, no damage to the stout plastic seat base was
visible - neither any teeth marks in the vinyl, nor any evidence of
leverage of securing staples. No burrowing, at least - but the little
fucker had done for the rubber bobbin that presses against the battery
cover. A mere stump remains, with distinct lines of rodent teethmarks
around it.

Looking to the rear, behind the bag of spanners, I could see fragments
of seed cases. So Mousy had been filching bird food and scoffing it
in my bike's boot, the arse. Then I spotted something that didn't
look like a seed case, nor a nut shell - a sliver of yellow plastic.
Panning vision forward, the origin became horribly clear - the
ignition wiring loom.

Every last wire running to the ignition module has been stripped of
its insulation, bared copper strands twinkling in the sunlight. All
the relays that live under the seat have suffered the same fate - the
coloured insulation has been neatly removed from the end of the loom
tape to the plug at the end. Mousy hadn't even eaten his loot - the
fragments of stripped insulation were visible, on close inspection,
caught on ledges in the mudguard moulding beneath the battery.


I can see soldering irons, insulation tape and a fuckload of
mousetraps in my immediate future.

If you are re-terminating why not use the small diameter heatshrink rubber
from Maplins?
Excellent stuff, not too pricey and far superior in finish and insulation
than insulating tape.

BTW... When rewiring the cranes I work on at the relay blocks we encapsulate
the terminals in silicon mastic, it stops the meeces from eating the wires.
Cable noshing rodents aren't confined to bikes you know!


--
Robbo Trophy 1200 1998
BotaFOF #19. E.O.S.M 2001/2002/2003/2004/2005B.O.S.M 2003, 2004, 2005 PM#7
BotM#4
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