Topic: Shop stories!

[HondaMan]

OK, not sure where to put this one, maybe the moderators will have to move it?

I'll start off with the one that almost did me in, I'll call it "The Happy Yamaha Owner".
 

One day a guy came in on his RD350, complaining of a slipping clutch. Or, that's what he said he thought it might be, wasn't sure. I asked him what he meant: he said, "Well, when I get on it, it winds up pretty good before it actually takes off".

Well, OK, that does sound like a slipping clutch.

In those days, I often took these bikes out for a test ride first to either confirm or figure out what the problem really was, and it was a real busy Friday. He left the bike and key, and about half an hour later I donned my helmet (ya never know...) and fired up the 'Hammer to take it up the street. I noticed the rear tire was smooth, so decided not to flog it or get too crazy with the throttle, right up front.

I rolled out onto the blacktop in between the traffic, then grabbed a '2-stroke handful' to test the clutch in 1st gear. I felt the whole bike shudder under me, then it crabbed off sideways to the right and QUICKLY ended up (those of you who ever rode the RD know what I mean) in the ditch at about 30 MPH, with me trying hard to pull it back down, quick! The RD had a lot of extra fuel to burn off after a throttle jump, so it was real 'exciting' for about 10 more seconds until I got it back under me, and stopped. That took a while to stomach.   

The rear wheel was pointing off to the right about 20 degrees: the left rear chain adjuster bolt had folded up and snapped off because the owner had a loose rear axle, probably forgot to tighten it after his last adjustment. Dang 350 rocket had almost shot out from under me, would have ended up in the next-door machine shop's front office!

But, the owner was right: something had noticeably slipped under power. Hmmm...I pulled the wheel straight and tightened it up for another go. Got back on the pavement and tried again, expecting the front to at least lift up with this throttle blast: nope. But, as I let off the throttle, I smelled burnt rubber(!). So, looking back, I goosed it again: the rear tire lit up like a dragster's start.

It wasn't the clutch: the tire couldn't hold the RD down! I took it back and installed a high-grip Avon on the back and called the owner, who came the next day for it. I told him all that had happened and charged him for the new chain adjuster, called him a dope (actually, it started with 4 letters, but had more added on) for doing that to me (I was a badass biker sort in those days...). He laughed when I told him it wasn't the clutch, but the tire: he left then, saying, "Yeah, I'm really happy with this bike...".

[bryanj]

Had a Customer with a 500 four we sold him that kept bringing it back 'cos it wouldn't run right. He started early so parked it in the side street and put the keys through the door----I kept road testing it and could never find anything wrong until the day i went to work early and found him parking it in the side street and removing his lightweight waterproof leggings from under the seat where they were blocking off the air intake!! A few choice expletive deleteds and off he went

[Terry in Australia]

Similar to HM's story, in a way. I swapped my car with a mate's Suzuki GT750M for 3 months back in 1979, I was bored with the car and he was too frightened to ride such a big bike, plus he wanted me to do some work on it for him.

It needed a new back tyre, so I took the wheel off and took it to the bike shop where they fitted a new Dunlop K81. I took it back to my mate's garage (I lived in the Barracks with no garage facility) and as I was refitting the wheel, the bike slipped off the side stand (no centre stand) and fell over. No damage to the bike, but the handlebar went thru my mate's new portable radio/cassette player, which really pissed him off, and of course, he blamed me.

Anyway, after that I refitted the rear wheel as quick as I could and got the hell out of there. I wanted to lube the chain as well, but decided to do that when I arrived at my folks place, 180 miles away. On the way to my folks place, I got "tagged" by a rider on a Kawasaki H2 750, and we raced each other for almost 120 miles. Being thirsty 2 strokes, we both had to stop and regas them, and we had a chat, he was enjoying racing me as much as I was, but he had to stop and swap spark plugs every now and then, due, he thought, to a dodgy ignition.

Eventually I arrived at my folks place, but it was raining, so I decided to lube the chain before I rode back the next day. As it had no centre stand fitted, I used 2 car jack stands to lift and hold the rear of the bike up. I grabbed the back wheel, and it moved sideways.  Initially I thought the swingarm bushes were buggared, but it turns out that in my haste to get out of my grumpy mate's garage I just hadn't tightened the axle.

All that was holding the wheel in line while I was doing 100+ MPH the previous day, was the chain adjusters.  Oops...........

[70CB750]

We heard bad thump from the next door shop, it was own by some Paki and his family worked there.  Anyway, it was the sound like something went wrong, so we went to check it out.

This young fella got a pickup off the lift after changing brake pads and forgot to pump the brakes before he drove it.  The wall stopped him 

[lucky]

Where should I start..
OK...

A bike came into the shop and the owner said it just needed a tune up.
Ok no problem very routine. Many times though it meant that him and all his friends had already tried to tune it up and turned every screw on the carb and messed up the timing.

So I gave it a tune up and saw nothing out of the ordinary. The bike was sort of ratty though.

I took the bike out went up the same familiar street and turned left.
All of a sudden the bike felt very weird and tank slapped me all around, banging one of my legs into the frame. Did not go down though luckily. Don't know why!

My leg hurt very bad and I thought it might be broken.
I got back to the shop and went home with a friend.

That night my leg swelled up double size but did not turn black and blue.
I called the hospital and they said I had a contusion.
Meaning the muscle had gotten smashed.

The next morning my leg looked normal size and I felt like going back to work.
When I got there the owner of that ratty bike showed up and I told him the frame steering head was bent.

Then he said ,"Oh I forgot to tell you about that."   @#$%^$&*&^@#!!

[jude0007]

Great stories guys, love this kind of stuff

[Rookster]

I worked in an HD dealership for a few years.  The owner decided he wanted to get his old knucklehead running.  So he wheeled it in the shop.  We hooked up the exhaust tubes to the fishtail mufflers but they didn't really fit over the fishtails.  We started taking turns kicking it.  The littlest guy in the shop almost got thrown over the handlebars when it kicked back.  A bad omen.  We finally get it started and everybody walks outside, except me.  I go back to my lift and get back to work.  A few minutes went by and I start feeling weird, then weak and sick at the same time, then I almost passed out.  I made it outside but scared the hell out of myself.  It seems the exhaust tubes had slipped off the fishtails because they didn't really fit in the first place.  I guess the other guys kind of thought that might happen which is why they walked out of the shop.  I really believe a few more minutes in that shop and I would have been in serious trouble.  One of the other guys went back in and shut it off.

Scott

[Don R]

Neighbor kid asked me to help install a 289 in his 53 ford PU. His dad said that was the only way. I agreed. We got it in but he insisted on taking things apart and messed up the engine. On the second install I was in my garage working on a project. He appeared and wanted me to drop what I was doing and rush over to put in his engine with my chain spreader.
 I told him 30-40 minutes. I went in for dinner and when I got there he looked kinda sick.
He got in a hurry and tried it using his bike lock, the engine fell so hard it shook his dad out of hs easy chair in the house. It bent the crank.

[DH]

I used to work in the service dept of a Western Auto store.
One of the general service guys (titled as installers) was mounting
2 customer supplied tires on a gmc/chevy truck. I noticed the installer was wrestling the first one, but he got it mounted. As he started to air it up, he removed the big spindle nut from the tire machine, and
continued to inflate. By this time I had gone back to my job at hand,
and was facing away from him. The tire exploded, the wheel went
straight up, and hit him underneath the chin, instantly giving com
pound fractures to both jaw bones. Seemed like it took minutes
rather than seconds for me to turn around just to see how the guy was. By the time I did get turned around, the wheel had
come back down and was rolling in a circle on the shop floor.
The guy's baseball cap was laying by the tire machine, with it's bill ripped clean off and found two bays away later on. We cussed those "junk" tires for quite a while after the ambulance left.
Until we figured it out..The truck getting the tires had 16.5 inch wheels. The tire that exploded was a 16.0. Workman's comp,
etc, etc. Then after the guy tried to sue the company for HIS screw up, (and lost), he brought racism into the fiasco, and went as far as to imply that the other techs "set him up"....He's lucky he lived. Thankfully, they fired him on a technicality before he ever came back to work.

[bwaller]

Summer of 73 a customer came in the shop complaining his CB750 had a wobble at speed. Of course he had a windjammer which I found often often caused handling problems. I tried the bike without issue but went through all the usual bearing, spoke, bushing checks and found nothing. A week later he was back and said it always became "unsettled" at 70mph. This time it did shake it's head suddenly but straightened up with a handful of throttle. I removed the jammer and of course the thing was steady as a rock right up to 90 when I backed out of it for the exit off the elevated expressway. I also then noticed the cop bearing down on me. The exit funneled into one lane and I darted along the shoulder beside traffic figuring he'd get stuck behind, not so. His siren had traffic squeezing right and eventually I ran out of room.....#$%*e!

Long story short the company paid the ticket and the customer decided to keep the windjammer, go figure! Then there was the time I was wiring the guys chopper project and it caught fire.....

[andrewk]

I'll add a quick one and maybe some better ones later-

Guy rides in on his CB650 that he had just "tuned up" and it was exhibiting signs of an incomplete carb clean.  I went out to the bike with him as he's explaining how he cleaned the idle passages 5 times, and it still just falls flat on its ass.  One look at the bike and I can see that the carbs aren't even pushed into the intake boots.  Guy rode in with the carbs effectively removed from the bike!  10 minutes and some elbow grease, and she was back in action.  Talk about embarrassing- "uh, you gotta put the carbs back ON." 

[scottly]

Not really bike related, but one day my buddy who shared our shop building came over to my side and said he smelled something burning, and everywhere he looked he could smell it. I pointed to the smouldering red spot on the fly of his jeans; he had been welding while sitting at his bench, and welding sparks had started a slow burn. He smelled smoke wherever he went because it was drifting straight up into his face.

[HondaMan]

Summer of 73 a customer came in the shop complaining his CB750 had a wobble at speed. Of course he had a windjammer which I found often often caused handling problems. I tried the bike without issue but went through all the usual bearing, spoke, bushing checks and found nothing. A week later he was back and said it always became "unsettled" at 70mph. This time it did shake it's head suddenly but straightened up with a handful of throttle. I removed the jammer and of course the thing was steady as a rock right up to 90 when I backed out of it for the exit off the elevated expressway. I also then noticed the cop bearing down on me. The exit funneled into one lane and I darted along the shoulder beside traffic figuring he'd get stuck behind, not so. His siren had traffic squeezing right and eventually I ran out of room.....#$%*e!

Long story short the company paid the ticket and the customer decided to keep the windjammer, go figure! Then there was the time I was wiring the guys chopper project and it caught fire.....

Unless I miss my guess: was that one of the "SS" or "Jammer IV" fairings, made of ABS? (Hint: many of them had the "leading edge" lites). The crooked bankers who stole Craig's company from him in 1976 quit the expensive (but excellent) hand-laid fiberglass shells for the flexy-flier ABS plastic-molded fairing bodies instead. Those things wobbled side-to-side and top-to-bottom at 70 MPH, but the US had the 55 MPH speed limit in those days and the bankers didn't care.

I have the hand-laid glass 'Jammer I, good to 120+ MPH, not a bobble! Hard as a rock, too. The bike has fallen on it a dozen times or more, and all it ever did was either bend the frame mount, or scratch the paint.

[HondaMan]

I worked in an HD dealership for a few years. 

First, I'd like to offer my condolences...those old Harley's really tested one's mettle as a wrench.

We also sold those things in the 1970's shop I had. One day a rider brought in a 1966 Sportster, said to have S&S pistons and cam, and with a Linkert carb. At the moment, I forget why it was there, but none of my other guys could start it after the work was done, so when I got there they called me over to try it for the test drive. This was one of those Sportys that had the distributor with the retard grip on the left bar for starting: the other guys didn't know that, so they had been fighting it the hard way.

I pulled out the plugs and dried them off, first...poor thing was drowned. Then I put it back together and took a couple of easy swings at the kicker from the side, no go. OK, gotta get up on it, still flooded, to jump this one into life. I put a jackstand under it to level it out, then climbed aboard and rolled the kicker up to pre-combustion stroke. As I then attempted to gorilla-drop my 120 lbs onto the pedal, I realized too late that I was also holding the left grip too tight, which when rotated toward you advances the distributor. (!)

The next thing I remember was being able to see most of the shop floor as if I had bounced to the ceiling on a trampoline. I didn't let go of the grips, though, and when I fell back down on the seat, the Harley was happily chugging out the black fumes from the overloaded cylinders. Somehow, after it backfired me clear off the starter, it started!

My knee hurt for 2 days, though...

[dusterdude]

Oh yea mark,the good ole days lol

[brewsky]

A friend had a small custom shop and had just finished a 50 something panhead chopper for a customer.......extended forks, ape hangers, skinny front, angled up straight pipes with fishtail tips etc...etc.

Bike was parked inside, pointing out the open front door when customer came to pick it up.

He straddled it, fired it up, sat back, put his feet up on the highway pegs.....still on the sidestand, to try out the fit.....

As he racked off the pipes one more time, his foot slipped off the peg, fell onto the gearshift,........out the door, across the road, and into the creek he went

[brewsky]

One more......

Elderly lady (owners mom) worked part time doing bank deposits, getting office supplies etc.

Pulled in one morning to her parking spot, and hit the gas instead of brake on her Caddy

Thru the glass window she went, taking out 7 or 8 brand new R1 and R6's at once.

[becken]

I had a bike on the lift and went to check the oil before starting. When I pulled the dipstick, gasoline started pouring out. The owner had left the petcock turned on and a leaky float valve and an open intake valve had allowed the contents of the fuel tank to transfer to the crankcase.
I also had an owner bring in an engine completely torn down in several boxes claiming all the parts are there, just put it together. A quick inventory showed the cylinders were missing.

[bryanj]

That reminds me of the Yamaha XV100(1000 Vtwin chain drive) the the owner brought back asking for the "head gasket" modification to be done as it had been found they occasionaly blew gaskets that were of the stell asbestos ring type as in exhaust gaskets.
Duly ordered the modified gaskets from yamaha and a large box arrived with two cylinders, two heads and all the gaskets----nice cheap mod kit huh

[brewsky]

Our young 20 something year old salesman came flying into the parking lot early one morning, parked his bike in front of the front door and ran inside the showroom.

"Doooude......if the cops come by, tell them you haven't seen me"...and proceeded to hide in the jacket and clothing section.

Sure enough, a deputy came screeching up in front of the door, lights and siren blazing........."All right, where is that no good SOB"

Turns out, he had wheelied past the deputy before seeing him, and tried to out run him.

He was riding a one of a kind bright yellow cbr crotch rocket that could not have been confused with any other bike in the county.......and parked it OUT FRONT instead of just pulling into the open shop door...

He was still hollering "Doooud, ......it wasn't me!" as they drug him away in handcuffs!

[nvr2old]

I was painting bikes at Westside Honda in Cheney, Washington back in the early 80's.  A very progressive, and very professional shop run by a bunch of 20-somethings.  We had a customer bring in his "custom painted" Goldwing to be serviced, and after he came to pick it up, he went ballistic about a scuff in the paint on the gas tank.  It was there when he brought it in, and we mentioned it to each other when he did, but he swore up and down that it had to've happened while being serviced.  I took it in back, color sanded the panel and polished it to a point that was so far beyond what the rest of the bike looked like, that he ended up paying me another $150 to do the rest of it so it would match..

[brandEn]

That's great!

[bender01]

I like these stories! Ive heard some and seen some dumb $#!t.. Signing on for this!

[HondaMan]

I had a bike on the lift and went to check the oil before starting. When I pulled the dipstick, gasoline started pouring out. The owner had left the petcock turned on and a leaky float valve and an open intake valve had allowed the contents of the fuel tank to transfer to the crankcase.
I also had an owner bring in an engine completely torn down in several boxes claiming all the parts are there, just put it together. A quick inventory showed the cylinders were missing.

Oh, yeah...one day a fellow brought in his Beemer (I seem to remember it was the R75/5) complaining of an oil leak and low power. He brought it in his pickup truck, and it left a dribble of oil as we wheeled it into the shop. Got to looking at it, and it was leaking oil, very thin, from the bottom of one of the cylinders on the 'downhill' side, when on the sidestand. I crawled down to look, and the cylinder was raised up off the block (!). Odd...

So, figuring that somehow it had pulled the cylinder studs out of the block, and deciding I'd better pull off that cylinder to take a look at the damage, I started draining the oil. After it overflowed the gallon pan (the Beemer holds less oil than a 750 by a stretch), I noticed it looked real thin and smelled like gas. Hmmm. Plugged the hole with my finger and slid another gallon pan under. Filled that one, too.

Hmm...

The 3rd pan finally drained it. I pulled off the cylinder head, and filled my shoe with gas from that side, as I had my foot underneath the head when I pulled.

Hmm...

Top of the piston had a hole in it, cracked by apparently a lot of hydraulic pressure, which also pulled the whole cylinder right out of the crankcase. then the [full] tank drained into the cases not once, but 3 times. I asked the owner if he didn't notice it was leaking gas: he said, "Yeah, every week when I come out to it, the dang thing is empty. I thought it was evaporating out of the tank somehow. This all started about a month ago when I started it and it made a popping sound and ran rough, so I just shut it off."

I still can't think of a word to describe this, because 'Duh' just seems to fall short?

[70CB750]

It happens to 2 stroke Jawas and CZs often to drain the gas into crankcase.

Friend of mine bought a decent used Jawa 350, it stoped running after 2 month, he pulled the engine and found the piston was made out of oak. It run till it burned hole in the piston.