One aspect of maintenance is understanding the mindset of the original designer. This is pleasant for very well designed machinery. Here's a long description of a Teletype restoration I did a decade ago.[1] Mostly this is about the mechanical processes, but sometimes I wrote about the thinking behind the design.

Teletypes were originally rented, with maintenance included. So they were intended to be reliable and repairable, and capable of a long life with periodic maintenance. All parts outside the motor are individually replaceable. Parts were treated against corrosion by Parkerizing, a chemical treatment involving hot caustic baths that leaves a rust-resistant coating. Few parts are unreasonably tiny, so you don't need tweezers and magnifiers. This did result in a bulkier machine than really necessary. Most moving parts are powered in one direction and spring return in the other direction. If something sticks, that doesn't cause further damage. Almost every screw has a lock washer. One of the few exceptions was due to a drafting error, as I mention in my writeup.

Mechanism design balances size, cost, ease of repair, wear, and lubrication requirements. The number of people really good at that is not large. All the good Teletype machines were designed by two men, Howard Krum and, later, Ed Klienschmidt. There were some other, inferior designs best forgotten. (The Teletype Model 26 was what happened when management wanted a cheaper machine than the classic Model 15. Many Model 15 machines are still running; few Model 26 machines are. And the Model 26 turned out to be no cheaper to make.)

Once you can appreciate this, you'll see good and bad mechanical designs more clearly. It's clearer in the mechanical realm than the software realm, because failure is more obvious.

[1] http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=43672

As someone who read Zen the first time many years ago, the book talks about the joy you get from seeing the world on a motorcycle (or bicycle) over being in a tank like car where you don't fully experience your environment. At its heart though, Pirsig used the concept of motorcycle maintenance as an examination of quality, value, and what brings people fulfillment. It takes a meandering path to get there which is probably why so many people don't finish it. The most memorable thing in the book for me was the topic of gumption and how it can so easily be destroyed. In my work in tech, gumption traps are everywhere. Reading this book made me recognize them so that I could logically decide my next action rather than making an emotional decision.

I wish I was articulate enough to properly detail how really interesting the book is even for someone who has absolutely zero interest in maintaining a combustion engine

I find the root premise flawed. I have known many people that loved working on cars. The plethora of very old vehicles where I live kind of holds that up, as well. My truck is 23 years old, and I'm positive it isn't even close to the oldest around here.

Even closer to the general idea, the radio show "Car Talk" was less about cars than the name would have implied. Would love to see it revived in spirit.

That said, still a fun read. Not entirely sure there are general learnings that can't be found anywhere. Such that I would push for the takeaway of "don't stop looking for lessons when out of the job or classroom."

I maintain my motorcycles but the romance around it is just a way to moralize fixing the consequences of my own negligence and incompetence:) That said, there's a life or death gravity to it, as the failure mode of a bike in motion can get a bit runny - and the romance is an instance of the idea that physical competence is fundamentally moral, which goes back to the stoics and Aristotle, and it underpins a lot of the hacker ethic.

The shortest summary of it I could describe is from the concept of "trueness," where you have a wheel or a reference point, a straight edge, or even just geometry, so you can physically apprehend what something is supposed to do as an objective ideal, and then you use that reference to reason, refine, and gauge your effort against it. Like the process of truing a wheel. Once you have an idea of what the perfect case is, chosing to align to that case is essentially moral.

In the case of a motorcycle, someones life depends on the integrity of your alignment to ensuring the trueness of the moving parts together. The effect of people generally choosing this now-moral alignment to precise measures and ideals produces desirable outcomes. This is what I think makes bike maintenance and other physical competencies philosophical, as their logic translates into metaphors pretty seamlessly.

Great article anyway. His comment on the public good of providing live saving organs is funny and accurate:

> The supply of organs and tissue from motorcycle riders has gone up in recent decades, especially in the 22 states that still don’t have helmet laws.

It's why EMT's call them donor-cycles.

>In Pirsig’s book there is never a mention of the make and model of his motorcycle.

This past weekend I was on a road trip to South Carolina. On the way, most every motorcycle that I saw was a BMW. I told my girlfriend after seeing the Nth that it can't be a coincidence, and I went and found out there was a BMW motorcycle rally taking place that weekend. Anyway, seeing some old BMWs made me remember the book, and I mentioned it to my GF. She had read it too but may years ago like myself - like 40 years ago. But one thing that I had remembered was that the bike was a BMW.

After reading the above quoted line about Pirsig not mentioning the make, I looked it up, and I had to reset my memory. It's the Sutherland's who are riding a BMW, and they don't have an interest initially in doing any of their own maintenance. Well, at least I remembered that there was a BMW in the story. ;)

I've been watching mechanic channels on YouTube recently when I need some background noise, and It's very interesting to see them do their once overs on the car, and hear their initial theories get confirmed or disconfirmed as they move through the vehicle. You can feel their experience for the sorts of issues that are likely or unlikely, and the focus on root cause (whether a botched repair job or something broken from the factory) is very... motivational? Difficult to describe, but it's uplifting.

One channel is mostly teardowns of different busted car engines, and as those are essentially all postmortem operations, they play out like murder mysteries as different parts of the engine face varying degrees of damage from whatever went wrong (oil starvation/clogging typically, sometimes hydrolock or more exotic combustion failures). Apart from absorbing some small amount of understanding of how internal combustion engines work, the need for regular oil changes and inspections has been impressed on me about 20x.

>One time, when a customer asked him to help revive a beloved 1983 Honda Magma V45 that hadn’t been driven for two years, Crawford responded harshly: “Assuming it’s got all the usual problems from sitting, you’re looking at a thousand dollars to get it back on the road.

First, it is the Honda Magna. Second, this mechanic took him to the cleaners. The Magna isn't nearly as complex as a Goldwing. $1000 for cleaning the carbs and a new battery simply isn't honest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7txrxM-NCc

What Motorcycles Teach About Maintenance: fuel injection is great.

There is a major step change in maintenance difficulty from motorcycles to cars .

motorcycles are more exposed and intimate so it’s easier to detect issues earlier .

Modern cars have adopted more non-user-serviceable tech. Intermediate procedures like clutch replacement , brake maintenance , tune ups are accessible to beginners on a motorcycle .

in general motorcycle maintenance is more accessible due to the open drive train, smaller footprint and user-serviceable technology .

For those discouraged to put their life in their own hands – it’s much riskier to put your life into someone else’s . You can mitigate the risks with checklists and solid testing procedures . Trust me , you will develop safety and quality standards that are much more rigorous than a shop .

I've read ZATAOMM some time ago and remember it highlighting my bias in perception. Mostly you look at things for what "they are" or "how they look" but not "how they work" or "their potential uses". I found that quite insightful and thought it was applicable in my work as well. I can't tell if it actually was though. :)

I expected the writer's footnote regarding organ donation to be anecdotal, but was surprised to find studies confirming a small, but significant basis in fact: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33334475/ https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/motorcycle-rallies-and-o...

Having tried to read Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I struggle to understand the book's popularity. The more I read the more I was convinced it was not the work of a healthy mind. Maybe he was schizophrenic? Wikipedia says yes, he was.

As someone who enjoys working on my own car and motorcycle - and as someone who does find a certain zen in maintaining the machines that I own - the book was a profound disappointment. Instead of finding philosophical insight from a relatable perspective, I found the ungrounded ramblings of a man who is seeking to understand a world which only quite exists inside his own mind.

I'm about as diy shade tree mechanic as it gets. Every car my extended family owns is over 200k miles, and we havent paid for a mechanic in over 25 years. I do it all, from general maintenance to swapping or rebuilding an automatic transmission.

A motorcycle actually taught me my main lesson of maintenance: sometimes it's just better to leave a well working system alone instead of servicing it for fun. I once did a task that was 2x behind schedule, and while doing so exposed a problem that almost caused it to fail hard the following weeks commute. If I had done that before a long trip, it would have been a serious problem.

I told this story to a prior air force mechanic and he laughed. He told me the military learned long ago that there is a limit to preemptive maintenance such that the likelyhood of problems from human error and just chance overshadows the benefit of the preemptive maintenance. I now no longer do any "might as well!" maintenance at all, and never do major maintenance before a trip without a good chunk of time prior devoted to road testing the vehicle again before the trip.

While not the key point of the article, if this made you at all curious about engine maintenance then I would recommend checking out howacarworks.com

It was posted here a while back and I’ve been enjoying the detailed build up.

A seasoned mechanic told me the 3 stages of a mechanics career progress.

1st a mechanic learns to fix things without breaking things along the way.

2nd a mechanic learns to do things quickly.

3rd a mechanic learns to do things without getting dirty.

I’m curious to hear the perspective of someone who is both into motorcycles and bicycles, as I’ve only ridden on a motorcycle a handful of times, while I cycle nearly daily.

Bicycle maintenance can be annoying, but it doesn’t seem nearly as time-intensive as motorcycle maintenance. On the other hand, the process of cycling feels better to me compared to being on a motor bike. It’s quieter, slower, and great exercise. I can talk with others. I feel as though I can get into a state of peace on lower effort rides, as well as a state of flow while racing.

I use metaphors like this when talking about programming: Any system of systems complex enough can easily be anthropomorphized...

But they both come back to basics: What is the overall model of how it should work? What are the symptoms? What do we know about the possible underlying causes of those symptoms? How do we design a test to see if the hypothesis is right? When we run the test, do we get confirmation, denial, or something else entirely? Did the test properly test the right thing?

And so on...

And at some point, is it worth fixing?

The author also cites sailors Knox-Johnston and Moitessier. I learned about both here on HN and found their respective books bingeworthy.

By Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, author of The Media Lab, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, assistant to Douglas Engelbart on The Mother of All Demos, and subject of the recent film We Are as Gods. Glad to see he's still busy!

I wish I could find a good enduro (KTM, Beta, Sherco) or motocross bike (KTM, Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki) with zerk fittings for the suspension. The expectation is that you take apart the whole suspension and grease it every 25-50 hours.

> Maintainers learn to be causation experts when dealing with repair. They build two narratives, one for finding the problem, and one for solving the problem.

I'd prefer to have those narratives delivered as part of the product when maintainer is hired.

The motocycle maintenance metaphor was very popular at Facebook.

Talking loudly about your accomplishment too, on the dedicated Workspace/Facebook @ Work—too much to the taste of several of my colleagues.

Someone once connected the two. They did so using a metaphor that compared the sound at the end of the digestive tube with the exhaust. I won’t repeat it here, but thought it was clever.

Lots of jobs you can do on a motorcycle yourself in a garage are like 100x harder on a car so it's nowhere near as accessible.

Stuff like needing a lift, or needing a hoist to lift heavy parts like the engine or transmission.

And even almost new motorcycles have minimal computer/electronic issues where the manufacturer is hiding how to do things. Get the Service manual and it tells you basically everything except how to hack the ECU.

I think the key is that motorcycle riding hooks you into the machine in a way that few car builds can replicate. Motorcycle maintenance and riding is a tighter loop, with far higher stakes if simple procedures are not followed. Troubleshooting may be similar across all machines, but the best troubleshooting is not having to do it at all.

If nothing else, the tight loop created by the motorcycle teaches preventative maintenance schedules in a way that is tough to replicate outside aviation. Or you die/stop riding.

For example, I've blown a front tire in my car at speed on the highway with no adverse consequences except having to steer off center for a moment and swap the wheel in 5 degree weather. No biggie.

My bikes get routine chain, tire, fluid and electrical checks however, as a similar failure could end me.

I am not even remotely an expert, but many motorcycles I've seen that spent couple of years in the storage, let alone ones as old as that, need a lot of gaskets, seals, tubing and what-nots worked on or replaced - or at least examined/tested/cleaned. Plus you want to give a conservative estimate.

Also remember - if I am doing repairs for fun, I only count the parts cost.

But if I go to professional mechanic, it's $100/hr in labour. So $1000 might be $300 of parts and a day of labour to restore to safe operation an old motorcycle.

That is quite in line with the amount of work I've seen friends do to bring old bikes back on road (well... my friends would spend weeks and dozens of hours, but we're assuming mechanics are more efficient:)

You obviously RTFA, but it's intellectually dishonest to state that all it needs is a new battery and a little carb cleaner. Sure, you get it running, and take it down the road. Now the forks seals demonstrate that they're dried out and cracked, and leaking oil. I don't know how old the bike was at the time of writing, but let's assume 30 years old. Odds are really good that the brake lines have never been replaced. Hell, it's possible that it's riding on original tires.

As one who has made the mistake of buying a bike that had been sitting a few years, if someone asked me to ball-park an estimate, $1000 might begin to cover it. One might very well get away with less, but I wouldn't count on it for my estimate.

(And I've owned several Honda V4s over the years: those carbs do NOT come out easily, and they go back in even harder.)

"The carbs will need to be gone through, it’ll need new fork seals, new battery, new tires, probably new hydraulic lines, and who knows what else."

The parts for that these days would probably be over $500, and around here shop labor is $100/hr, so it would probably be more than $1000 today.

My local motorcycle shop charges about $200 per mechanic hour. I would love a $1000 bill!

On the bright side, I’m learning more and more about sidewalk mechanic-ing. It’s a lot of fun. Very flow state in that way that programming just hasn’t been able to scratch in years. You go to replace some mufflers and what feels like 5 minutes was actually 2 hours.

He probably also replaced all gaskets, seals, possibly even belts. Flush and replace all fluids. Just had this done to an even simpler bike for $1300.

The article is on a collaborative online platform, so you can add comments or suggestions for corrections on the website :) https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everyth...

Carbs are also great. My xr650r can sit in a shed for 300 years and if it was clean when stored will start up in 2 kicks or at worst in 15min after opening the bowl with one screwdriver and cleaning the jets.

There is no fuel pump to break (or weight the bike down), I could run the carb with a soda bottle if I had to. There are no complex computers to break and brick the bike.

Beyond the reliability, the real value of the carbs is the FEEL. This bike is analog, the rumbling sounds, the brilliant popping and gurgle on deceleration. Its a motorcycle, mechanical gear changes, cable operated throttle, controlled explosions.

We loose something with tft displays, riding modes, non analog throttles, and every granny safety algorithm in between our brains and the rear tire.

As a long time gear-head with lots of various engines around (cars, motorcycles, snowmobiles, etc. etc.) I would second this. Never buying a carburated thingy again. Its electric motor or fuel injection.

I just revived a car that’d been sitting way too long, just needed a new battery and an oil change (actually, it already ran OK, but I got the oil change just in case). Fuel injection is magic. So, what car stuff has taught me about the universe is… mistreat objects, they aren’t sentient, you just make them do what you want.

Someone needs to write “Zen and the art of keeping my filesystem tidy” or “Zen and the art of keeping a rolling release distro up to date.”

...and shaft drives are the way to ride.

I spend more time on a bicycle , including commuting , and ride a motorcycle regularly. The two hobbies complement each other well. The riding experience and maintenance skills are complementary .

Motorcycles naturally offer more range for explanation and carry more load . i use mine to discover new routes and destinations and later hit them on the bike

Motorcycle handling requires similar techniques and the mindfulness that is developed on a bike . Though handling doesn’t translate 1:1– an expert cyclist will quickly develop expert moto handling – especially off road

Maintenance has similar parallels. Bike maintenance is a great intro to moto maintenance . Troubleshooting , understanding systems , experimentation , observation , patience , using hand tools etc are all skills that are foundational for motorcycle maintenance

I would encourage every cyclist to take on motorcycle riding . Motorcycling benefits from a similar mindset and expands on the skills and experiences

Very much into both!

I'm at an extreme end on of the cycling hobby by hours spent on the bike and miles covered (mountain biking, road biking, racing) and currently ride a very modern, and very red Italian sport bike - just for pleasure on quiet roads, no commuting or errand running. From a maintenance perspective given my use patterns (~8,000 miles/year human powered, ~4,000 miles moto powered) I'm wrenching, fixing, replacing parts far more often on my bicycles. An absolute money pit, but one that gives me the best emotional and physical ROI. YMMV but my experience with modern motorcycles has been they are almost shockingly reliable given their power output, electrical and rider aid improvements, etc.

I've had vintage motorcycles that required more tinkering which is engaging in its own right but am thankful modern tech has gotten to a point where I'm not constantly doing maintenance on my entire two wheeled fleet. I get my joy from the use of the machine, rather than the upkeep. I'm eternally grateful to those who view things the other way. My preference is to wrench on bicycles though, mainly because of their relative simplicity and limited number of specialty tools required. With 2mm-8mm allen keys, and a small screw driver you can do most basics of maintenance. Not counting suspension service, bearing service, and the like.

Side note: Being deep into both worlds I feel that my bike (motorcycle) handling skills have vastly improved because of my mountain biking: Body positioning, threshold braking, leaning the bike independently of the body vs. leaning with the bike etc. Curious if anyone else here has had that same realization. I've tried converting some cycling team mates to the moto world... few takers but I believe there is true cross-training to be had there.

I don't motorcycle anymore but did for a long time and did both a huge amount of riding and some very serious maintenance jobs. I have kept bicycling thousands of miles a year since. In the past I did a bunch of different types of bicycle racing. Never did motorcycle racing but I did go to quite a few track days.

In general with a few exceptions everything on motorcycles is far more competently engineered.

Bicycle manufacturers brag about engineering a lot but actually seem to employ very few engineers. The bicycle industry is still re-engineering things like brakes over and over when all those lessons were learned on motorcycles decades ago and the bike companies could have copied almost all of it from motorcycles.

There's just a lot of stuff on bicycles where the tools are more expensive than the motorcycle equivalents and the maintenance procedures are more annoying. Motorcycle brakes are a great example. Things are relatively standard and all the tools are affordable and the maintenance procedures are great. Do the same job on hydraulic disc brakes on a bicycle and it's all terrible. Tools cost 3x more and might be vendor specific, procedures are terrible because of the design of the brakes, and the job probably takes longer.

You can go spend more on a Trek or a Specialized than a lot of motorcycles at this point. Other than the amount of carbon fiber there is almost no justification for the price, especially since 99% of the bicycle is outsourced.

I always found the education level among motorcyclists in terms of how a bike actually rides much higher. The % of "expert cyclists" who understand basics like counter steering is shockingly low, and bicyclists are far more likely to have poor understanding of how to ride in traffic safely. Mostly because motorcycling actually has a training & education system. I always felt like motorcycling actually taught me more about bicycling than the reverse.

Motorcycle:

- long distance trips through N America led me close to a ton of wildlife I would not have seen or dared come close to on bicycle. Mama bears with curious cubs, moose drinking water by the roadside, wolves in one case

- allowed me to tackle trails in a day I would not be able to do on a mountain bike (eg. the trails around Moab)

- ability to go on roads Bikes are not legal (crossing the confederation bridge to get to PEI; don’t think bikes are allowed)

- ability to traverse distances equivalent to a car, but while feeling much more connected to your surroundings. Helps when you only have so much vacation time you can take.

Bicycle:

- much more enjoyable trips through Toronto via routes not possible on motorcycle (parks, ravines, etc.)

- many trails do not allow motorcycles but allow mountain bikes

- allowed a limited freedom at a young age to explore the city around me

- the wonderful post exercise feeling

Sometimes going fast is the point, there's a certain peace of being so fast the world can't touch you.

Sometimes going slow is the point, and there's a certain peace of be able to view and interact with the world in that way.

To me bicycle maintenance is tedious. It’s something I do too on keep my bike running smoothly but not something I look forward to.

Motorcycle maintenance is more rewarding. I have a 70s bike so it requires a lot of work to keep it running smoothly. Motorcycle maintenance more complex and I find far more enjoyment in it. It can be tedious, but it’s not as bad as adjusting a derailleur or lubricating a chain.

I think this article could be summarized as “problem solving offers many learning opportunities”

Motorcycles these days need little maintenance, except washing it. I know I know you need to look after the chain and do the pre-ride checks, but that is it. I own 2 motorcycles, one new and the other old. The old one needs some stuff done but I cannot do that myself because of a couple of issues: do not have a garage, do not have all the tools. The new one needs nothing, it just rides and I need to bring it for servicing once in a year.

The most annoying thing for me is that I can leave the motorcycle outside with a lock but I need to bring in my bicycle into the garden shed (it is just too light).

Bicycle on the other hand is different, it is much easier to get a puncture, the bolts get lose, it wears off much more quickly. You can also fix it in your home, e.g. change tubes and tires easily.

Maybe bicycle racers / crazy downhill mountain bikers will disagree, but half-assed YOLO cowboy maintenance, and deferring of maintenance, feels much less risky on a bicycle than on a motorcycle.

Of course the powertrain and packing of components is orders of magnitide more complicated too, it's more similar to car maintenance that doesn't require a lift

I’m into all things two-wheeled, have done lots of road & mountain biking on bicycles, and road & dirt motorcycling. I’ll share my perspective, and apologize in advance for the length. I wouldn’t put them on a single 1D spectrum and presume to call one better than another, for me they all serve rather different functions. I’d completely agree with the advantages you list for road bikes, I just think there are other different advantages for mountain bikes, dirt bikes (off-road motorcycles), and road motorcycles.

Road motorcycling, especially if you can fix anything on the motorcycle, comes with a strong sense of freedom compared to car driving, and it’s for traveling longer distances. There’s an aspect of shedding all your dependencies, not needing to rely on a huge machine that you can’t fix, but still being able to go fast & far. Weird analogy, but I find it similar to long distance running - there’s a threshold for me above about 15 or 20 miles where it suddenly starts to feel like I can go anywhere with my feet.

Dirt biking is technical motorcycling, shares some aspects of downhill mountain biking, but requires a lot of very different skills from any other kind of riding. Learning those skills is really fun, and being able to get far out into the wilderness and access places you can’t go by any other means is also very fun. The technical riding requires a lot more simultaneous clutch, brake, and throttle work than road riding, and I find it similar in certain ways to playing the drums in the sense that you need a lot of body awareness and the ability to do things with hands and feet at the same time. Technical uphill riding is very different from downhill and/or mountain biking. BTW technical dirt biking can be insane amounts of exercise. Some dirt moto rides I’ve done are equivalent to doing 50-100 miles with big climbs on a bicycle, everyone in the group burned thousands of calories and started bonking by the end. Can’t talk while you ride, but it’s very social; riding with others is an absolute must, there’s planning beforehand, there’s lots of stoping and talking, and you can end up with a lot of camaraderie when working through difficult features and pushing your abilities or helping others.

Mountain biking has all the advantages you mentioned for cycling, it can quiet and serene. Even better than road biking sometimes since you don’t have to deal with traffic. I usually ride with others, but sometimes alone is very zen. There’s anything from riding dirt roads, to cross-country single track through the forest, to adrenaline: technical downhill or mountain bike park with jumps. Fabulous exercise, and a great way to experience the outdoors.

For the maintenance question, I’d say I probably spend as much or more time on bicycle maintenance, but it’s mainly because I currently ride bicycles much more frequently. The maintenance tasks are smaller, shorter, and simpler, but need doing more often. Cleaning, chain & joint lube, and fixing flats is the majority of bicycle maintenance. I bled my mountain bike brakes once, and that was pretty involved for a noob, required a special kit & a couple hours. The moto maintenance tasks take longer per session, they’re more difficult, and require more tools and knowledge, but they’ve been less frequent. Changing oil, bleeding shocks, fixing electrical, replacing parts. A tire/tube change on a bicycle is a 5 minute task, while a tire change on a motorcycle can easily take an hour or two if you try to do it yourself with tire irons (not recommended!). The big stuff goes to a professional mechanic, of course.