Lonerider59
Wizard
A little non-scheduled maintenance can sometimes save you a whole bunch of frustration and busted fingers and knuckles. A frend of mine asked me to remove his starter from his 1983 Goldwing Interstate a few days ago. It was raining like crazy the day he wanted it done and the bike is outside so I waited till today when at least we have some sun (and some snow on the ground). Anyway, to get the starter out it is very helpful to remove crash bars (if installed), and least remove the exhaust header bolts, and shifter. Not a big deal and I knew it because I had to do the same to the 1980 Wing I owned for a while a couple years ago. Mine had always been garaged so the story was a little different. The crash bars aren't bad and came loose easily but you can't get thm out of the way until you have dropped the exhaust. The exhaust bolts/nuts were in pretty bad shape due to the heat but I managed to get two nuts off and on the other two, the nuts and studs came out. Not a huge deal, but kind of tough on the knuckles. Then there is a cross-pipe on the mufflers that had almost 30 years of rust and mud caked on them and that was a genuine challenge but after breaking one clamp bolt, the other actually came loose and I was able to drop the left muffler. The job took about an hour and a half. On mine, it was about a half hour job. The moral of the story is whenever a rider has a half hour to fill, checking he condition of those bolts that aren't worked on very often can save a whole lot of cussing. I do plenty of that in the first place and when something isn't going right, we have to evacuate the kids from the neighborhood. On one of those rainy or just bad days when you can't ride, going around the bike with some WD40 or light lubrication and giving those bolts/nuts a little squirt can make the next maintenace task one hell of a lot easier and faster too.