Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Even with all these precautions, however, out-of-sequence-reassemblies sometimes occur and when they do you’ve got to watch the gumption. Watch out for gumption desperation, in which you hurry up wildly in an effort to restore gumption by making up for lost time. That just creates more mistakes. When you first see that you have to go back and take it apart all over again it’s definitely time for that long break.

It’s important to distinguish from these the reassemblies that were out of sequence because you lacked certain information. Frequently the whole reassembly process becomes a cut-and-try technique in which you have to take it apart to make a change and then put it together again to see if the change works. If it doesn’t work, that isn’t a setback because the information gained is a real progress.

But if you’ve made just a plain old dumb mistake in reassembly, some gumption can still be salvaged by the knowledge that the second disassembly and reassembly is likely to go much faster than the first one. You’ve unconsciously memorized all sorts of things you won’t have to relearn.

From Baker the cycle has taken us up through forests. The forest road takes us through a pass and down through more forests on the other side.

As we move again down the side of the mountain we see the trees thin out even more until we are in desert again.

The intermittent failure setback is next. In this the thing that is wrong becomes right all of a sudden just as you start to fix it. Electrical short circuits are often in this class. The short occurs only when the machine’s bouncing around. As soon as you stop everything’s okay. It’s almost impossible to fix it then. All you can do is try to get it to go wrong again and if it won’t, forget it. Intermittents become gumption traps when they fool you into thinking you’ve really got the machine fixed. It’s always a good idea on any job to wait a few hundred miles before coming to that conclusion. They’re discouraging when they crop up again and again, but when they do you’re no worse off than someone who goes to a commercial mechanic. In fact you’re better off. They’re much more of a gumption trap for the owner who has to drive his machine to the shop again and again and never get satisfaction. On your own machine you can study them over a long period of time, something a commercial mechanic can’t do, and you can just carry around the tools you think you’ll need until the intermittent happens again, and then, when it happens, stop and work on it.

When intermittents recur, try to correlate them with other things the cycle is doing. Do the misfires, for example, occur only on bumps, only on turns, only on acceleration? Only on hot days? These correlations are clues for cause-and-effect hypotheses. In some intermittents you have to resign yourself to a long fishing expedition, but no matter how tedious that gets it’s never as tedious as taking the machine to a commercial mechanic five times. I’m tempted to go into long detail about “Intermittents I Have Known” with a blow-by-blow description of how these were solved. But this gets like those fishing stories, of interest mainly to the fisherman, who doesn’t quite catch on to why everybody yawns. He enjoyed it.

Next to misassemblies and intermittents I think the most common external gumption trap is the parts setback. Here a person who does his own work can get depressed in a number of ways. Parts are something you never plan on buying when you originally get the machine. Dealers like to keep their inventories small. Wholesalers are slow and always understaffed in the spring when everybody buys motorcycle parts.

The pricing on parts is the second part of this gumption trap. It’s a well-known industrial policy to price the original equipment competitively, because the customer can always go somewhere else, but on parts to overprice and clean up. The price of the part is not only jacked up way beyond its new price; you get a special price because you’re not a commercial mechanic. This is a sly arrangement that allows the commercial mechanic to get rich by putting in parts that aren’t needed.

One more hurdle yet. The part may not fit. Parts lists always contain mistakes. Make and model changes are confusing. Out-of-tolerance parts runs sometimes get through quality control because there’s no operating checkout at the factory. Some of the parts you buy are made by specialty houses who don’t have access to the engineering data needed to make them right. Sometimes they get confused about make and model changes. Sometimes the parts man you’re dealing with jots down the wrong number. Sometimes you don’t give him the right identification. But it’s always a major gumption trap to get all the way home and discover that a new part won’t work.

The parts traps may be overcome by a combination of a number of techniques. First, if there’s more than one supplier in town by all means choose the one with the most cooperative parts man. Get to know him on a first-name basis. Often he will have been a mechanic once himself and can provide a lot of information you need.

Keep an eye out for price cutters and give them a try. Some of them have good deals. Auto stores and mail-order houses frequently stock the commoner cycle parts at prices way below those of the cycle dealers. You can buy roller chain from chain manufacturers, for example, at way below the inflated cycle-shop prices.

Always take the old part with you to prevent getting a wrong part. Take along some machinist’s calipers for comparing dimensions.

Finally, if you’re as exasperated as I am by the parts problem and have some money to invest, you can take up the really fascinating hobby of machining your own parts. I have a little 6-by-18-inch lathe with a milling attachment and a full complement of welding equipment: arc, heli-arc, gas and mini-gas for this kind of work. With the welding equipment you can build up worn surfaces with better than original metal and then machine it back to tolerance with carbide tools. You can’t really believe how versatile that lathe-plus-milling-plus-welding arrangement is until you’ve used it. If you can’t do the job directly you can always make something that will do it. The work of machining a part is very slow, and some parts, such as ball bearings, you’re never going to machine, but you’d be amazed at how you can modify parts designs so that you can make them with your equipment, and the work isn’t nearly as slow or frustrating as a wait for some smirking parts man to send away to the factory. And the work is gumption building, not gumption destroying. To run a cycle with parts in it you’ve made yourself gives you a special feeling you can’t possibly get from strictly store-bought parts.

We’ve come into the sage and sand of the desert and the engine’s started to sputter. I switch to the reserve gas tank and study the map. We fill up at a town called Unity and down the hot black road, through the sagebrush we go.

Well, those were the commonest setbacks I can think of: out-of-sequence reassembly, intermittent failure and parts problems. But although setbacks are the commonest gumption traps they’re only the external cause of gumption loss. Time now to consider some of the internal gumption traps that operate at the same time.

As the course description of gumptionology indicated, this internal part of the field can be broken down into three main types of internal gumption traps: those that block affective understanding, called “value traps”; those that block cognitive understanding, called “truth traps”; and those that block psychomotor behavior, called “muscle traps.” The value traps are by far the largest and the most dangerous group.

Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values. In motorcycle maintenance, you must rediscover what you do as you go. Rigid values make this impossible.