Well aware that winter is upon me and not wanting to be stuck in north Utah, I planned on 4 to 5 days here. I was told I could stay as long as I want, no worries, no problem and all that but I really wanted to get out of here before any major snow hit. I realized my bike needed it's 16k mile service, so I brought it in my third day here and got it back on my fourth.
Andy was leaving for 3 days and I didn't want to leave without saying goodbye, so I decided to stick around until he got back. Meanwhile, I got my bike back from it's service, and put it in the garage. The next day, as I went to saddle up, the whole garage reeked of gasoline.
There was no wet spot under my bike so I figured some gas maybe got moved around and spilled on part of it while they were adjusting the choke cable or something. I figured I'd ride it for 20 minutes to let it air out to see if the smell goes away.
It didn't. That's trouble. I could even smell the gas while riding. That's big trouble. So I bring my bike back in to the dealer. After about 5 minutes they bring me over with a flashlight to look up close at my engine. All of the seals on the carb heads have deteriorated and are leaking gasoline. It's pretty obvious looking at it up close, it just didn't occur to me to examine it.
They asked if I'd been using ethanol gas from the beginning of this trip and said that was probably the cause.
Simply put: Ethanol gas is bad for your engine . Stabilizer helps reduce the problems inherent in ethanol gas. I learned this in Maryland, and started acting on it in North Carolina by adding stabilizer every time I filled up (my bike already had over 12,000 miles worth of ethanol gas run through it).
I stopped using the stabilizer in New Mexico. While I was in Roswell, I started to wonder if I really needed to be dropping all this money in the highest octane gasoline. It was about 40 cents a gallon more than mid-grade, so if I could have been getting away with putting mid-grade gasoline in my bike, I could have saved myself around $110 on this trip so far. So I decided, rather than the 91 octane here, I was going to put in 88.
Big mistake. My bike just started making all sorts of complaining noises as soon as I set out for Santa Fe. Filling up on 91 (which is the high grade out here) after running her down only barely helped, so I had to buy Octane booster. I didn't know if it was ok to add the octane boost and the stabilizer. I figure, the less chemicals you're adding to gasoline, the better so I'll just put in the octane booster and after a couple of tanks, I'll go back to the stabilizer.
The octane boost worked great as far as getting my engine to sound right again. She might have even had less popping than back in New York.
I ran through about 5 tanks with the octane booster and then switched back to the stabilizer in Moab.
Now the damage is done and it's 1 of three causes:
1) Ethanol in gasoline is really bad for rubber parts in your fuel system. This is what the people who sell stabilizer will tell you.
2) Octane booster is really bad for the rubber parts in your engine. I don't think anyone will claim to know one way or the other.
3) Stabilizer, while good for preventing oxygenation of fuel that goes unburned for long periods of time and preventing moisture from building up in the tank, is actually really bad for the rubber parts in your engine. This is the opposite of what people who sell stabilizer will tell you.
When I return home from this trip, I'll try and look into this. Maybe I'll get to do my research in California so I'll know for the second half of my trip.
Meanwhile the work estimate came out to over $750, but before I told them to put the work in on my bike, I spent several hours there considering other options.
I test rode several bikes, mainly out of curiosity, but there was a bike, a Honda Shadow VLX whose price was pretty much the same as they were offering as trade in value for my Valkyrie.
It handled great, as a mid-size cruiser it had enough power that I wouldn't feel the need for more, it's engine struck a better note than the Valkyrie's, typically it gets better mileage than the Valkyrie, it probably can use lower grade gasoline without complaining, and they said if I wanted to trade in my Valkyrie I could just ride it home and we need not exchange any money. That would even leave me with almost $800 that I didn't have to spend repairing the Valk.
I asked them to measure the mounting space on the Valkyrie bags vs. the VLX to see if maybe I could bolt the Valk's larger saddle bags to the VLX. They wouldn't fit, but the VLX did look like it could hold the vast majority of my luggage, and with some creative packing or possibly using a fraction of the unspent repair money to purchase larger saddle bags, it might have been able to hold everything I had.
This was the sensible thing to do. Strip the GPS mount and heated gear hookup off my Valk, attach them to this perfectly fine motorcycle, and ride off into the sunset.
I've wanted to ride motorcycles all my life. As a kid, I would always pretend my bicycle was a motorcycle. In the fall of 2001, I did not yet have my motorcycle license and had never ridden a motorcycle, though I knew that I soon would. It was then that I first saw a Valkyrie and it stole my heart. It was love at first sight. One day, I would own that bike. That was when I started saving up for one.
For the next 6 years every scrap of money I made that didn't have to go to some bill or another, I saved tenaciously to put toward my eventual Valkyrie. Sure I spent money to have fun, but not particularly expensive fun. I certainly didn't take up any expensive hobbies. The Valkyrie was always in the background.
During those 6 years of saving I would photoshop different paint schemes onto a Valkyrie, and think up different customization projects and ideas that would turn this bike into the most beautiful creation ever to grace the pavement.
In 2007, I had enough money, I found one that had extremely low mileage on it, and I bought it. To me, that was an accomplishment. It really was the only material goal that I had.
Now as I said, it would have been sensible to ride away on that VLX, but as I was considering it, and before I could say "Ok, I'll take that VLX.", I could feel my heart breaking. The Valkyrie may not be the bike for me, and I don't like saying that, but the thought of not finishing this trip on it made me feel like I was giving up. I just may sell this bike when I return home, but I'll be damned if I don't make it all the way back on the Valkyrie.
So I told them to order the parts, and fix it. That was Saturday, November 20.
Turns out the parts are on backorder and are expected to come in this Wednesday.
Ok now since this blog was so wordy, here are some context free shots from around the area:
Sorry about the bike man...love the pictures.
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