Anger on the Job

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Kevin Cameron has been writing about motorcycles for nearly 50 years, first for <em>Cycle magazine</em> and, since 1992, for <em>Cycle World</em>. (Robert Martin/)

Moviemakers, believing the majority of viewers to be dull-witted, feel they must simplify every message. When the script requires viewers to know that a commercial airliner is in trouble, they cue up a sound track that plays the rising “wind in the wires” effect, “code” for this situation since the talkies began in 1927. The comic aspect is that aircraft have not had wire-braced wings for nearly 100 years.

In like fashion, again and again we see anger and frustration presented in the same tired old movie way: by the protagonist banging his/her forehead against the steering wheel of a car.

Bringing that situation a little closer to home, anger and frustration do occur during mechanical work, and it can be tempting to put on a little show to sharpen the drama. Here, what can I throw that isn’t too valuable? What can I hammer without making too much extra work for myself?

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A Mechanic’s First Frustrations

I was in that very situation in the mid-1950s. I had pulled a wagon of tools back into the woods where some long-ago motorist had parked a worn-out Model T Ford, taken its wheels and other usable parts, and left it there to eventually return to ore. After all, at the height of the Great Depression you could buy a running car for as little as five bucks.

I was a raw novice mechanic and my tools were hand-me-downs. I was learning things for the first time. When I tried A, tried B, and so on, nothing worked. The parts I had hoped to remove as treasures weren’t coming loose. I was frustrated, and growing more so. So I shouted and I hammered.

Then I was embarrassed. There was no one there but myself, my tools, the Model T, and the trees and sky. I, the only audience, wasn’t impressed. And the disassembly process remained stuck. I didn’t know what I was doing.

Energy and determination are good. There had to be features in this design that I wasn’t understanding, and I needed to work them out before the work would go forward.

As longtime Triumph dealer Mack McConney would put it in 1963, “Machines are devised and made by humans, so therefore other humans can also understand them.”

Concentrating the Mind

It took time and concentrated thinking about how these parts must have been assembled and retained, but I was eventually able to make progress and remove, examine, and understand. In the future, when I would see Model T rear-axle shafts pounded into the earth as pegs for giant tents, I would recognize them. Ford produced 30 million! I would also recognize Model T driveshafts in their second careers as large pry bars down on the farm.

Thirty years later at 10 p.m. on a pre-race weekend night, realizing that the gearbox I was assembling became tight when I torqued the output sprocket nut, I thought of that boy and his extreme frustration. I was upset at the prospect of more hours of work that I could have avoided had I obeyed my own rule: Always test for free rotation before closing the cases, and with clutch and sprocket nuts torqued. The only solution was to split the cases, find and correct the internal problem, and reassemble. Inwardly I was furious but there was only one effective outlet for that energy: to do the job over again and do it right.

At 4 a.m. the bike was ready to be loaded and taken to the circuit.

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