<\/p>\n
As some of you may or may not know, my line of work is rather
\ninteresting.\u00a0 It’s downright hilarious if you consider that I’m
\nsomeone who spent the better part of his college years fitting as much
\npot smoke and beer as was humanly possible into my sizeable
\nframe.\u00a0 When I wasn’t engaged in those activities, I was busy
\nreading ancient novels and plays or writing slightly informed essays on
\nliterature hundreds of years old.<\/p>\n
Now,
\nroughly 6 years and 700 miles later, I’ve found out what most kids out
\nof college do just after they leave the halls of academia: Of all the
\nthings you study in school, roughly .05% of it will be applicable in
\nyour everyday, adult life.<\/p>\n
Most
\ndays you’ll find me doing any number of things around my office that
\nare in no way related to the academic experience I received while I was
\nin school.\u00a0 Mainly, I busy myself with typical, administrative
\ntype stuff.\u00a0 I answer phones, I take orders and I talk to the
\nvarious distributors of our products.\u00a0 I, as my “title” so aptly
\nputs it, direct sales.\u00a0 On any given day, I might also be
\nmanufacturing the product we sell in a number of ways, either by
\nrunning the CNC milling machine that cuts the billet aluminum we use to
\nhouse electronics or by assembling those electronics in one way or
\nanother.<\/p>\n
Aside
\nfrom all that non-English-major type stuff, my job as of late has
\ngotten even less literary and analytical.\u00a0 In addition to
\nmanufacturing the timing equipment we sell to amateur, club series
\nracers and motor sports enthusiasts all across America, we also have a
\nsmall motorcycle road racing team.<\/p>\n
As
\nthe 2004 season came to a close this past November, we were faced with
\na mounting budget to keep the team afloat and stay in business at the
\nsame time.\u00a0 Cuts had to be made and, ultimately, it was decided that
\nthe full-time mechanic we had traveling to all the events keeping the
\nbikes running during race weekends was just too expensive and we let
\nhim go.<\/p>\n
Now,
\nas the 2005 season is beginning, the mechanic’s departure means I’ve
\nsomehow managed to land myself in the thick of all this racing
\nmadness… Me, the consummate C student… Me, the guy who can barely
\neven change a flat tire and has used Cliff’s Notes only to find that
\nThoreau is still immensely confusing… Me, the consumate, all-around
\nklutz.\u00a0 I have somehow, in addition to my everyday, office-bound
\nself, become a miniature Crew Chief and will travel with the team to
\nall the various events to help keep everything in order.<\/p>\n
I
\nsay “miniature” because I really know no more than most of you about how a motorcycle actually works.\u00a0 Fill it with gas,
\nturn it on, sit down, twist the throttle and it goes.\u00a0 True, I am
\nlearning more and more each day, but I still find myself asking dumb
\nquestions or describing pieces of the motorcycle as “that springy
\nthing” and “that bar dealy” when I don’t know the proper name.
\nAsk me for a wrench, and I’ll probably hand you any number of different
\nthings, a screwdriver or pliers or an allen.\u00a0 Ask me for a 10mm
\nwrench and I’ll probably just start crying.<\/p>\n
Over
\nthe course of the next 9 months, I will travel to approximately 25
\ndifferent race events scattered all over the country from Alabama to
\nNew Hampshire.\u00a0 Whether there is any interest in our exploits as a
\nteam remains to be seen, but I spoke with Nacho and will try to
\nmaintain a column of sorts about our many trials, tribulations and
\n(hopefully) victories over the course of the 2005 season.<\/p>\n
The
\ninaugural race for us this year was a combined 4-day event at Daytona
\nSuper Speedway in Florida.\u00a0 Going into it, we were facing a number
\nof hurdles varying in severity.\u00a0 Firstly, Daytona is the only
\nNASCAR track that we will race on all year, meaning close walls, banked
\nturns and massive straightaway where speeds upwards of 180 miles an
\nhour are possible.\u00a0 Included in this straightaway is the turn that
\ncut Dale Earnhardt’s life short.\u00a0 The track itself was probably
\nthe biggest and most threatening aspect of the weekend.\u00a0 Secondly
\ncame the fact that our rider, (known henceforth as Riderman), had never
\nbeen on this track before in his life.\u00a0 Thirdly, we are riding on
\na different, structurally suspicious brand of tire this year and,
\nfourthly, there’s me… Klutzman.<\/p>\n
Going into it, we were all just
\na big bundle of nerves.\u00a0 Can we do this?\u00a0 Can we get
\neverything right?\u00a0 Will everything fall into place?\u00a0 Can we
\nremember everything?<\/p>\n
I
\nsuppose I should backtrack a little bit here and give you an idea of
\nwhat, truly, was my very first weekend working on the
\nmotorcycles.\u00a0 Somewhere in the middle of the season last year, I
\nbegan going to racetracks around the Atlanta area with the team.
\nInitially, it was vacation time for me and filled my weekends with some
\nexcitement.\u00a0 I’d been to many races, but hadn’t actually done
\nanything more than hand tools to people or wrap warmers around the
\ntires.\u00a0 On one particular weekend we were in Alabama at Talladega
\n(Little Talladega, not the famous one) and my brother, Spanky, had come
\nalong to see what this whole “racing” thing I constantly yammered on
\nabout was like.<\/p>\n
It
\nwas a Thursday. Thursdays and Fridays on race weekends are always
\npractice days.\u00a0 Days are divided into 15 minute segments of track
\ntime for each particular class of motorcycle.\u00a0 First, there are
\nthe 600cc Novices, followed by 600cc Experts, then 750cc and up
\nNovices, 750cc and up Experts, etc.\u00a0 They give the teams the
\nopportunity to go out and run laps, then tinker with the bikes so that
\nthey can get gear ratios set and suspensions tuned just the way they
\nlike them.\u00a0 Any kinks the motorcycles may have are worked through
\nduring these days.\u00a0 This Thursday, with my brother watching,
\nRiderman and the mechanic, having the bikes set where they wanted them,
\ndecided to show me how to change a front tire.<\/p>\n
Really,
\nchanging a front tire is much easier than you’d think.\u00a0 The front
\ntire on a motorcycle has two large brake rotors on either side with
\nbrake calipers attached around the top of each rotor.\u00a0 First, you
\nunfasten the brake calipers, then unscrew the main axle and afterwards
\nthe tire comes right off.\u00a0 After some brief instruction from the
\ntwo, I did this.\u00a0 I did this extremely gingerly.\u00a0 I did it in
\nroughly 5 times the amount of time it takes a normal person, but I did
\nit and I was proud.\u00a0 My brother watched and, secretly, I think he
\nwas clapping on the inside.<\/p>\n
With
\nthe old tire off, it was time for the new tire to go on.\u00a0 I slid
\nit into position, stuck the axle back through and tightened it.
\nThen I re-attached the brake calipers, spun the tire around a few times
\nto make sure nothing exploded and told Riderman and the mechanic that
\nthey needed to look over my work to see that I’d done everything
\ncorrectly.\u00a0 Everything appeared to be in order, they patted me on
\nthe back and I was officially the proudest person at the track.<\/p>\n
I When Needless Fortunately But, ————<\/p>\n http:\/\/img.photobucket.com\/albums\/v194\/Nubbins\/Racing\/18.jpg<\/p>\n http:\/\/img.photobucket.com\/albums\/v194\/Nubbins\/Racing\/11-esses.jpg<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[362,353],"class_list":["post-2565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-articles-by-hooded-nubbins","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2565"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2739,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2565\/revisions\/2739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nwas amazed at myself.\u00a0 Here I was in a place doing a thing that, 3
\nyears prior, I never could have possibly imagined I was even capable of
\ndoing.\u00a0 The fact that I’d just changed a tire and was officially
\nlearning to put a wrench to a race vehicle made me immensely
\nproud.\u00a0 Prouder even than I’d been after getting an A on my 25
\npage Senior Seminar paper comparing Edmund Spenser’s Faerie
\nQueene<\/em> to The Matrix<\/em> (and it was a killer
\npaper).\u00a0 That immense sense of pride and wonder lasted
\napproximately 10 minutes.<\/p>\n
\nRiderman took the bike out on the track and started racing it around,
\neverything appeared to be in order, but it most definitely was
\nnot.\u00a0 You see, what Riderman and the mechanic had
\nneglected to tell me or check for themselves is that anytime you remove
\nbrake calipers from a tire, be it the front or the back, they get
\nspread out a little bit.\u00a0 As a result, when the new tire is put
\nback on the bike, the pads aren’t actually touching the brake rotor;
\nthere is a little bit of space.\u00a0 So, anytime you futz with brakes
\n(and this goes for cars too), once they’re back in place, the brakes
\nneed to be pumped so that the pads are resting on the rotor.\u00a0 The
\nprocess of changing tires had become second nature to them and they’d
\nunderestimated my prowess as an English major completely incapable of
\nunderstanding the mechanics of a brake pad on a rotor.<\/p>\n
\nto say, Riderman’s pads were not resting on his rotors and he found
\nthis out at about 120 miles an hour going into a turn when he squeezed
\nthe lever and got nothing but thin air in response.<\/p>\n
\nfor us, there were 200 feet or so of flat grass off that particular
\nturn, so he was able to keep the bike upright as he careened off the
\ntrack and into a pasture.\u00a0 In the end, he was no worse for the
\nwear.\u00a0 When he came off the track, I had no idea that I’d done
\nanything wrong, but when he told me that my minor oversight was nearly
\ncatastrophic, I was devastated.\u00a0 I had no idea that something so
\nsmall, something that I hadn’t thought to check — something I didn’t
\neven know to check — could have such disastrous repercussions on the
\ntrack.\u00a0 He just shrugged it off and laughed because, hey, he
\nhadn’t crashed, so no harm no foul.<\/p>\n
\ngoing into Daytona, this incident was all I could think about.
\nI could only think of the things I didn’t know about.\u00a0 Every time
\nI touched the motorcycle, I looked for things to squeeze or tighten
\nafterwards.\u00a0 I read motorcycle manuals and studied engine
\nmechanics, reading things about piston movement, combustion and
\ntop-dead-center that I can’t possibly begin to understand.\u00a0 At
\nDaytona, there are no 200 feet of flat grass to pad a mistake, there is
\nonly an unforgiving 33 degree banked turn met with concrete walls on
\nall sides, everywhere you look.\u00a0 Forgetting to squeeze a lever or
\ntighten a bolt at Daytona has dire consequences.<\/p>\n