WINTER WOES

In the mid-’70s, I had a friend who was a Sachs-Penton-Rokon-Bultaco dealer. He lived on the outer fringes of poverty in the winter months and, seeking to correct that, ran a special in the local cycle paper to bring in some business during those gray days.

The deal was this: Bring in your Sachs or Penton, and he would rebuild the gearbox for a real bargain-basement price, and even guarantee that the thing would shift in a reasonable fashion for a while. Every Sachs/Penton owner in a 200-mile radius hustled into the grungy little shop, engine in hand, and even bought something while they were there, which was the original intent of the promotional deal in the first place.

The only problem was, the shop got awfully crowded very quickly. Our friend—let’s call him Sam—came up with a semi-solution. He bought a huge number of empty 35mm movie film canisters at a swap meet, cleaned the dust off them and spread them out on a long, wooden workbench in the shop.

He then split the cases on each and every engine, put the gears carefully in the film cans, and marked each can with a felt-tip pen to show which parts went to which engine. After an entire weekend of work, he had 43 engines emptied of their ill-shifting innards and had those innards neatly laid out in the film cans. It looked like a good winter ahead.

Two days after Sam had accomplished all of this, a regular customer brought his snowmobile into the shop for some troubleshooting. The guy always paid cash and never complained, so Sam stopped his work on the trannies and squatted down to inspect the massive snowmobile.

It was a brute with a three-cylinder, two-stroke engine that had been built to state of the art. And, as such, it was temperamental. Sam did all the usual checks and noticed that the plugs were wet and oily looking. So he slapped in three new plugs and thumbed the electric starter button.
  
 The sled made the usual grinding sounds, gave out a few reluctant ka-paffs, then emitted a low-level moan and started to bang on one cylinder. Then the second cylinder cut in, and with a sudden roar, so did the third one.

Sam jumped back, startled, because the engine was obviously building rpm, and he wasn’t even touching the throttle. As soon as all three cylinders caught, the engine burst into full song, and the tread started churning away at the floor, heaving and tossing chunks of oil-stained linoleum, clattering off the parts washer, looking for traction.

Sam grabbed the side of the rampant snowmobile and tried with all his might to hold it back. The tips of his work shoes dug splintery furrows in the floor as the shuddering snowmobile moved forward, slowly at first, then with increasing speed.

Sam couldn’t hold it back any longer, and the massive sled leapt off the ground and hurtled forward like a wounded rhino.  First it glanced off the far wall, taking off a hefty chunk of plaster at right about knee level. It then careened off like a 400-pound pool ball and headed back across the shop, toward the workbench.

Sam’s eyes opened to pure endo-white as the snub nose of the runaway snowmobile hit the first leg of the workbench and then snorted, took a deep breath and proceeded to blast down the entire length of the bench, snapping off the flimsy two-by-four legs like jackstraws.

The bottom shelf collapsed first, dumping about 20 of the film cans, spilling gears, shims and shafts all over the floor.   Gears jangled and bounced everywhere, and shafts spun crazily around like batons. The sound of ringing metal filled the room, overpowering even the howling sound of the snowmobile engine.

The snowmobile then started darting at random across the shop, making figure eights and tossing parts through the air until more metal was suspended above the floor than on it.

Sam was frantically trying to keep from getting run over by the snowmobile while dodging flying debris.

At long last the frenzied snowmobile flipped on its side, the revs rose to fever pitch, and it seized its guts solid. Sam picked himself up from behind a battered 340 Rokon and looked around the room, panting.

The snowmobile lay on its side, the engine making tic-tic-ticking sounds as it started the cool-down process. A small pool of oil gurgled out from somewhere. There was a mainshaft speared neatly into the center of the big white clock on the wall. Various gears were stuck in the plaster walls like a Ninja training school. The workbench was a crumpled heap of plywood and two-by-fours.

Sam looked at the calendar on the wall. It was December 6. I wouldn’t be warm enough to ride dirt bikes until the end of February. His evenings would be filled, he thought, as he flipped off the light switch and headed down to Joe’s Bar and Grill and Bar, hoping he could reach unconsciousness for six dollars or less.