I finally got the top clamp of the 2003 Triumph Tiger's steering column off yesterday. After undoing everything it did not let go of its own volition and I had to apply some heat to the central spindle and top clamp housing to let loose. Nothing crazy, just grazing it with a propane torch until it warmed up nicely (nothing glowing) and then I was able to spin the top clamp in relation to the centre steering pin (the forks are out).
With the top clamp rotating (if it has been sitting in your Tiger for a while don't expect it to be loose), I was eventually able to persuade it upwards off the centre spindle with a rubber mallet. The top clamp came off and the two nuts that hold the centre rod in place were accessible (they're visible but inaccessible under the handlebars usually). For a 17 year old bike with over 80k kms on it nothing about these difficulties came as a surprise.
Those locking nuts are big'uns, 38mm! The long centre post they're on means you're going to have a tricky time getting a ratchet on them (38mm long socket?). They aren't tight though and I was able to loosen them with an adjustable wrench.
I supported the triple tree (the bottom half of the steering structure) with one hand while undoing the nuts but the bottom end didn't fall out - it's a snug enough fit and what grease was left in there was holding everything together. A gentle tap on the centre spindle and it all came out the bottom smoothly though. I don't know the last time anyone was in there, but I've had the Tiger for almost 4 years and thirty thousand kilometres so it was high time I got in there myself. Judging by the stingy amount of grease in there I'd guess no one has done the steering on the Tiger before (factories are famous for being stingy on grease when manufacturing bikes).
The bearings still had some grease on them (the brown/grey stuff is grease), but not much. No one's been in there recently:
... once I cleaned it up the bearings were in good shape and turned freely:
... even the tube that holds the steering column is nice and rust free. After a good cleanup I reassembled everything with a liberal greasing using the Mobil HP222 stuff Triumph suggests.
Here are some torque settings for a 955i Triumph Tiger's steering system:
Triumph Tiger 955i Steering Torque Settings:
Steering Stem Nut: 65Nm (50 ft/lbs)
Fork clamp bolts (top yoke): 20Nm (14.75 ft/lbs)
Handlebar clamp bolts: 26Nm (19.2 ft/lbs)
note: there is no torque setting on the two nuts that lock together under the handlebar. The directions I'm following say to hand tighten the top nut, then tighten it down a bit more to seat the bearings, then back it off a touch. You then lock the second nut to the first. The idea is to seat the bearings and keep everything a set distance apart so the bearings spin freely. Making them too tight will make for stiff steering and will wear your bearings out sooner.
Some other points of interest are these bolts that hold the horn and front brake lines onto the triple tree. They're a bugger to take off and were another part that needed some heat to get moving.
The other complication that I should probably look at as a benefit is discovering worn wiring and cabling. The back of the clutch cable and the ignition wiring are both wearing through and would have ended up causing annoying problems down the line, but I can resolve them as part of this maintenance pretty easily. I'm going to slip some heat shrink electrical cover over both breaks and heal them up before they become a problem.
Next steps will be to reinstall a shock to line up the triple tree with the top clamp and then do the fork oil. Once the shocks are serviced, I'll put the whole shebang back together again and turn to the back end where I've got to work my way through a swingarm removal and rear suspension service before putting that all back together. I hope that goes as well as this with all the parts still being serviceable. Trying to get parts in during COVID19 isn't always a sure thing.
It's coming up on Xmas here, so if I can have all that done by the end of February I'll be in good shape for the coming riding season.
Other big-spa checklist items on the Tiger are: a coolant change, new brake lines and brake fluid changes and another look at the fuel injection system to see if I can clean the injectors and balance them better. My work in the summer solved the stalling issue, but the bike feels a bit sluggish, though that might be because it's being compared to a Fireblade.
An old bike that I run high mileage on it means lots of work to do while the snow falls outside. In this winter of our Covid-discontent it's good to have a lot of things to do in the garage so I don't go cabin crazy.
Possible needed-things list:
Triumph's 'thin wrench' is a basic thing that seems astonishingly expensive for what it is. DIY is a possible alternative.
A narrow angle adjustable wrench: CT has one that goes up to 3 inches (76mm, so it'll handle the 38mm locking nut). I'm hoping my narrow angle vice grip will hold the bottom nut while I tighten the top one.You'd need the Triumph special thin spanner tool T3880140 for adjusting it with the handlebars installed, but I'm hoping I can sort it out while I'm in there and not need it. Paying $60 odd dollars for a bit of machined steel is a bit rich. I suspect I could get our metal-shop teacher at work to fabricate me a couple of them for nothing (I fix his computers for him so it's a barter exchange).
big enough electrical heat-shrink to cover the clutch cable rub through. I think I have it and I don't want to use tape as it looks half assed.
I've been frequently digging up old pre and post World War 2 motorcycle details for THE BOOK. This often involves advertising. The time when something came out is as unique a culture as where it came out. These are some of my favourites from Pinterest that present a bygone era of cultural influence...
I cleaned this one up and printed it on a poster for the garage.
Going to try and make a custom t-shirt out of this one...
Not mid-Twentieth Century, but has some cool 70's vibes to it.
Amazon et Machina is a series of graphic prints by Señor Mayor that uses historical motorbikes with iconic women. My fav is Diana Rigg on a Brough Superior, but they're all fantastic...
The garage is a less than single car (it's so small a micro-sized Mazda2 hatchback won't fit in it). It does the trick with motorbikes, but you get more than two in there and it's so full it's difficult to get around a bike to work on it. It's also dark and bloody cold in the winter. I'm trying to think of a way out of it short of moving.
Since I can't go out I could go up. The attic above the peaked roof on the garage is a workable space currently being used for storage but the only access is a ladder on the house wall which not only messes up a wall that could be doing something else but also makes access to the attic a real pain in the ass. Looking into solutions it appears that drop down stairs are possibility and they aren't even particularly expensive. Even a good one is under six hundred bucks.
If I can get the drop down stairs sorted it won't cost much and opens up the top floor to easier access while also making valuable wall space available down below since the stairs fold up into the ceiling when not needed.
The next step would be to address the poor lighting. A neighbor has a glass garage door that looks fantastic, lets in lots of light and would also let in some solar heat in the winter while also being well insulated. This is where the prices start to climb. Doors like this start at a couple of grand and go up from there. I might be able to find a used alternative for less, but a glass door would solve a lot of the lighting issues, at least during the day.
If I really wanted to blow the budget I'd also get windows installed on the back wall. I don't know what window installs on external walls cost, but I don't imagine they're cheap.
The last piece of the puzzle is working out heating in a space that was never designed for it. I've put thick rubber mats down that are much better than the concrete floor, but it's still damned cold to work on in a Canadian winter.
Tempzone under floor heated mats would do the trick. Because they're focused where I need them they'd probably be more efficient to run than the air heater I currently have in there. The garage is about 200 square feet, but I don't need the whole floor heated, just the square around the work benches. A cunning selection of those mats would create an area of heating around the lift and mean I'm not working on aching feet when it's minus forty outside.
With the upper floor more accessible I'd move the permanent shelving I've got on the bottom floor upstairs, making more room to move around, which was the point of the exercise in the first place.
If I did the full pimping out including the windows I'd put a sit down workbench in the attic for finer work and finish the space more than it currently is. All in I'd guess that the windows, garage door, drop down stairs and heated flooring would be in the vicinity of:
Glass garage door : $3000 (est. though some cunning shopping might reduce that to $1700)
Heated flooring in work area: $1400
Window cutouts and installs (one up, one down): $1500 x 2
Hardware to finish attic (lumber, wiring for electrical): $1000
TOTAL: $9000
With all that in place I should be able to park a bike (or two) off to the side and still have plenty of space to work. It's not really lost money if it raises the value of the house, right?
I just finished Matt Crawford's latest book, Why We Drive. This challenging read unpacks how we've backed ourselves into an intellectual dead end under tech driven surveillance capitalism. Crawford comes at it from the big-tech push to colonize one of the last moments in our lives where human skill is tested and judged by reality rather than marketing expectations, vehicular operations. Advertising companies like Google aren't trotting out self-driving cars for safety or efficiency (though that's the marketing), they're trotting them out so they can take all that consumer attention wasted on driving and advertise to it. Even with this problematic impetus and misleadingly media spin self-driving vehicles are imminent and this leads Crawford to (quite rightly) question the intent of the companies pushing them. The assumption that self-driving cars will somehow be better for us is undressed in many ways in the book.
Seeing where Matt's head is at in 2020 encouraged me to reread his first book, the bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft, which came out in 2009 in response to the market crash that everyone seems to have forgotten now as we're increasingly told we need austerity to pay back the predatory organizations who caused the debt in the first place. Running the economy is a good gig if you're one of the 'financial class' who maintain the fiction. You can crash the market and make billions of people poorer and then profit from it indefinitely as you charge interest on the loans you handed out to 'solve' the crisis you caused. It takes a special kind of stupid to buy into this.
Looking at Shop Class now years later it has historical context to it I didn't see in earlier readings where the response to the market collapse wasn't as obvious. Back then it was just timely. One of the themes that follows Matt's thinking through all three of his books is his dislike of automation. In Shop Class he talks about situated knowledge and the importance of having an intimate relationship with reality. Fundamentally, Crawford believes this vital to human beings fully developing their abilities. When we're devalued by monied interests into simplistic consumers we are unable to fully develop our human potential. Surveillance Capitalists intent on monetizing every moment of everyone's existence for their own financial advantage have coupled with safety and efficiency movements in government and society to create a brave new world of atrophied people.
I've come at this digital prejudice from an educational technology point of view on Dusty World, but it bears examining from a motorcycling perspective too. Crawford is a physicist and mechanical and electrical technician, but he seems to have drawn a hard line between digital technology and everything else. It's probably an age related thing. Matt's about five years older than I am. As I was getting into early home computers and figuring them out he was already through high school and working in his trade. I ended up heading towards IT because when I was working as a millwright I was the only one willing to take computer controlled systems on in a department full of older people who couldn't be bothered.
The idea that digital technology is opaque and unknowable is a continual professional frustration for me as a computer technology teacher. Other educators, students and parents all buy in to this opacity even while they embrace information and communication technology in more aspects of their lives. I understand the reluctance to make ourselves literate in this emerging technology, but if we're all going to use it I'd suggest we're all responsible for having at least a basic understanding of how it works or else we're going to all end up illiterate in a digitally powered world.
A bunch of smooth talking sociopaths have taken over the face of digital technologies, but I can assure you that Google, Facebook and the rest are not the limit of what digital technology can do for us. Thinking that is dangerously reductive. There was a time when the internet was newly birthed from academia and the people on it were exploring a new frontier rather than leveraging it in an Orwellian attempt to monetize our attention. I'm a digitally literate person and I have no love for them, but I get the sense that Matt truly despises computing to the point of lumping any digital tech in with the sociopaths. It's a hard distinction to make, though John Naughton does a good job of coaxing it out of author Shoshan Zuboff:
"While it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the digital, it is easy to imagine the digital without surveillance capitalism. The point cannot be emphasised enough: surveillance capitalism is not technology. Digital technologies can take many forms and have many effects, depending upon the social and economic logics that bring them to life. Surveillance capitalism relies on algorithms and sensors, machine intelligence and platforms, but it is not the same as any of those."
Another motorcycling angle to come at this from might be Neil Spalding's MotoGP Technology. This technical manual charts the evolution of the top prototyping class of MotoGP motorcycle racing over the past twenty years. These have been years of digital integration and management in terms of rule making and deciding how much of an influence computer assistance will have in the sport. Unlike Formula One, which many have suggested has gone too far down the technology path, MotoGP has evolved to focus on enhancing rider abilities rather than replacing them. Spalding mentions the estimate that F1 is an 80% car engineering 20% driver skill equation, where as MotoGP is the opposite. Marc Marquez winning championships on the third best bike would certainly suggest the humans operating MotoGP bikes matter more than the tech, and yet these are digital machines.
There is a point in the book where Spalding has to re-orientate the reader on how electronics work in MotoGP. Unlike what a consumer is used to, racing electronics have nothing to do with safety. Their only intent is more speed even if it means more effort and skill is expected from the rider. While everyone watching a race has only ever experienced electronic interventions (anti-lock brakes, traction control etc) as a safety blanket thrown over their incompetence, a racer only experiences them through the lens of performance. Electronic intervention on a race bike make it more extreme and harder to ride. That alone should make the true breadth of electronics and digital technology in riding a bit more clear. They are only self-driving us because someone wants them to for their own reasons, not because the tech is inherently focused in that direction.
Crawford often speaks of the mechanical work he's doing on various machines, but mechanical work doesn't end where a computer is involved. There are some parts of vehicular evolution where automation is a much needed advance. Crawford does make a point of mentioning this, but grudgingly. Reading Classic Bike Magazine a few weeks ago I came across a great article about Dr Desmo, Fabio Taglioni, the Ducati engineer who spent his career continually looking for advancements for the brand. His quote about computer controlled fuel injection is much like a MotoGP team's fixation on performance rather than protecting a rider from their own incompetence and is yet another reminder that electronic and digital technology does not have to replace human agency but can in fact enhance it.
Sorting out the Triumph's fuel injection system by finding a modified fuel map and installing it on the bike's FI computer was one of this year's most satisfying repairs.
I like getting a bank of carbs sorted out as much as the next person, and sometimes I make a point of working on bikes without electronics to distance myself from what I do at work all week (mechanical repairs offer a more immediate kind of satisfaction), but I've also had great technical satisfaction from the hybrid mechanical and electronics repairs I've had to make on the Tiger. I realize that electronics and computer based repairs are often out of the comfort zone of the home mechanic, but that's based on the kind of anti-digital prejudice Crawford carries through his philosophy. If we could all get passed that prejudice perhaps we could reclaim the digital tools we've surrendered to the attention merchants.
It's critically important we don't romanticize old technology for the same reason we shouldn't romanticize previous time periods. If you think the 1960s were some kind of magical time in human history odds are you're a heteronormative, neurotypical white male. From the point of view of the vast majority of the people on the planet the nineteen sixties were fucked, and so was much of the technology we were using back then. That time of excess and privilege has led us to the brink of disaster fifty years later. Longing to go back to it or recreate it is a kind of insanity.
This is distinct from respecting culture and engineering from a certain time period when it showed us a better way forward. I greatly enjoy working on older machines in order to keep that history alive, but if you're putting on rose coloured glasses that make you blind to the possibilities of today's technology then you're just as manipulative as the sociopaths who are destroying society for their own gain.
Crawford talks about technology that is locked and closed, like Mercedes without dipsticks to check your own oil, or electronics that are sealed to prevent 'tampering'. Corporations are able to do this because people have been convinced that digital technologies are something they can't comprehend, but this is bullshit. The companies offering to do everything for you aren't technology companies, they are advertising companies. Ignore them and ignore authors who dismiss digital technology as inherently nannying. Modern technology can just as easily be used to enhance human ability and force us to be smarter, stronger and faster as it can be used to make us stupid, docile and compliant. The issue is the intent of the people peddling it, not the tech itself.
If I can't convince you maybe Kenneth Clark's angle in 1969's award winning documentary 'Civilisation' will highlight things:
Clark's concern is that automation plays to the hands of authoritarian regimes. He couldn't see the emergence of multi-national corporations that we're now under the yoke of back in 1969, but he isn't wrong about automation playing to fascists. Crawford shares the same concerns, and they're well founded, but one of the best ways to take back control for more people is to make them literate in the technology being used to enthrall them.
All that to say don't be afraid of the digital aspects of motorcycle maintenance. This tech was made by people so you can figure it out, and in doing so you will also teach yourself to author the technology the attention tyrants are using to snow you under. From that point of view of self sufficiency and understanding of technology Matt Crawford should be on board.
