Motorcycles in the shop

It both­ers me that it’s so hard to find good fast reli­able ser­vice for a motor­cy­cle. My Tri­umph has been in the shop for over a month wait­ing on a fan.… should be a pret­ty sim­ple part to get a hold of, but there it is. Six weeks lat­er and it’s still sit­ting in the shop. The Moto Guzzi is just get­ting reg­u­lar main­te­nance plus a replace­ment for the fend­er that spon­ta­neous­ly cracked in Jan­u­ary. It took eight months for the replace­ment to show up.

The both­er­some fact is that auto­mo­bile dri­vers don’t put up with this lev­el of ser­vice. If you want a reg­u­lar tune-up you can make an appoint­ment to have the ser­vice done cer­tain­ly with­in a week, and some­times parts take a bit of time to come in, but these inter­vals are mea­sured in days rather than months.

Any­how, the upside of the sit­u­a­tion is that I’ve bor­rowed the Vira­go for a few days while I’m wait­ing for one or more of my bikes to come back. As much as I was frus­trat­ed with the lack of pow­er and sta­bil­i­ty of the Vira­go when I owned it, I’m hav­ing a blast rid­ing it around town now. It may not be pow­er­ful, but it is light and even with the front wheel raked out it’s got a pret­ty short wheel­base, so it can be pushed around pret­ty easily. Dur­ing a short stint on the free­way it eas­i­ly got itself up to 85mph.

Maybe part of it is that it was my first motor­cy­cle, and cer­tain­ly that it’s a bike that I’m famil­iar with, but wow. Don’t any­one let any­one put down a small-dis­place­ment bike that’s fun to ride.

Plus, this thing gets eas­i­ly twice the gas mileage of the Moto Guzzi.