That was a big mistake. I certainly wouldn't trust my life or my family's life to a bike that some distracted idiot had messed up.
I'm fond of posting this excerpt from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book about quality:
I took this machine into a shop because I thought it wasn’t important enough to justify getting into myself, having to learn all the complicated details and maybe having parts and special tools and all that time-dragging stuff when I could get someone else to do it in less time – sort of John’s attitude. The shop was a different scene from the ones I remembered. The mechanics, who had once all seemed like ancient veterans, now looked like children. A radio was going full blast and they were clowning around and talking and seemed not to notice me. When one of them finally came over he barely listened to the piston slap before saying, “Oh yeah, tappets.”
Tappets? I should have known then what was coming.
Two weeks later I paid their bill for 140 dollars, rode the cycle carefully at varying low speeds to wear it in and then after one thousand miles opened it up. At about seventy-five it seized again and freed at thirty, the same as before. When I brought it back they accused me of not breaking it in properly, but after much argument agreed to look into it. They overhauled it again and this time took it out themselves for a high-speed road test.
It seized on them this time.
After the third overhaul two months later they replaced the cylinders, put in oversize main carburettor jets, retarded the timing to make it run as coolly as possible and told me, “don’t run it fast.”
It was covered with grease and did not start. I found the plugs were disconnected, connected them and started it, and now there really was a tappet noise. They hadn’t adjusted them. I pointed this out and the kid came with an open-end adjustable wrench, set wrong, and swiftly rounded both of the sheet-aluminum tappet covers, ruining both of them.
“I hope we’ve got some more of these in stock,” he said.
I nodded.
He brought out a hammer and cold chisel and started to pound them loose. The chisel punched through the aluminium cover and I could see he was pounding the chisel right into the engine head. On the next blow he missed the chisel completely and struck the head with the hammer, breaking off a portion of two of the cooling fins. “Just stop,” I said politely, feeling this was a bad dream. “Just give me some new covers and I’ll take it the way it is.” I got out of there as fast as possible, noisy tappets, shot tappet covers, greasy machine, down the road, and then felt a bad vibration at speeds over twenty. At the kerb I discovered two of the four engine-mounting bolts were missing and a nut was missing from a third. The whole engine was hanging on by only one bolt. The overhead-cam chain-tensioner bolt was also missing, meaning it would have been hopeless to try to adjust the tappets anyway. Nightmare.
The thought of John putting his BMW into the hands of one of these people is something I have never brought up with him. Maybe I should.
I found the cause of the seizures a few weeks later, waiting to happen again. It was a little twenty-five cent pin in the internal oil-delivery system hat had been sheared and was preventing oil from reaching the head at high speeds.
