It's the Little Things

It's the Little Things

Aerostich Building in snow
Snow clean up at Aerostich after a blizzard came through last weekend, dropping over 20 inches of snow in Duluth. It's been a wild week.

A couple of nights ago I discovered a slowly deflating rear tire on my electric ‘winter commuter’ bicycle. A little sliver of metal had penetrated the studded tire’s casing and innertube. This puncture was easy to find and fix. Sometimes ultra-slow leaks can be hard to find, even with a tub full of water, but this one made a nice stream of bubbles.

After the patch had been applied and was ‘self-vulcanizing’ I looked around the garage for something productive to do start-to-finish which would take only a few minutes, just to be positive the patch would be solidly bonded to the tube before putting everything back together. Patching inner tubes is super easy. I’ve done this job too many times to count and being O.C.D. about these repairs is important.

Now what to do for the next few minutes? Sweep the garage floor? Naah. It wasn’t that bad. Finish connecting in the Suzuki’s new electric grips?  No, that would be a longer job. What else?...What else?

I was surrounded by half-done and long-procrastinated projects and was hoping something would appear which required only the very short time it would take to be sure this patch would be permanent. This waiting is probably unnecessary, but somehow it adds certainty, so any other small garage job requiring between two and fifteen minutes would be fine.

Attempting to fix the sticky turn signal switch on my old (94) XR 650L was the most appealing option so I walked over to that bike with a non-JIS Philips to give it a try. Until then I’d never taken any turn signal switches apart, not even once. The button’s sliding action was terrible, with a pepper-grinder’s gritty feeling, and its on-center push-in-to-cancel function was sticky and slow to pop back up.

After parking this bike five or six years ago I’d recently decided to start using it again. This involved taking care of the usual older bike-neglect items: replacing its battery, cleaning out the insides of its carburetor, changing out old oil and rebuilding both brake hydraulics. Until I was sure this bike would still be a pretty good commuter it was easy to not even notice its gritty, sticky turn signal switch. (And slighlty too-dry tires.)

Fortunately, the Honda turned out to be a good commuter, except for it’s icky turn signal switch feel.

Two unscrewed Philips’s later I was looking at a cad-plated internal switch cover held in place by a third slightly smaller Philips. After lifting that away the quarter-century accumulation of dirt and grit was obvious. The button-lever moving part of the switch was held in place between a spacer and a washer, and all three were mounted by a fourth little Philips. With those three parts removed the button lever simply lifted out.

All that was left was a liberal spray bath of electrical contact cleaner, a clean toothbrush scrub, another contact cleaner spray rinse and paper towel wipe up, followed by some strategically applied dielectric grease and the sequenced reassembly.  What a difference!

I hesitate to compare this little procedure with how people enjoy bathing, exfoliatingly drying themselves, and then sometimes applying various kinds of healthful skin lotions –- But this wasn’t all that different, and the little switch now felt almost as smooth under my left thumb as if one was stroking somebody’s well-pampered and well-lotioned skin.

Don’t ask me how many times I stood there idly enjoying sliding that switch from side to side and turning it on and off. I didn’t count, but it was more than twice and less than fifty.

Ten minutes later the studded electric bicycle’s winter tire was back in place, fully inflated, and that machine was also ready to go.

After the tire patching kit and tools were put away, and my hands were washed, I left the garage wearing a helluva stupid smile, just as very small children sometimes do.

It’s always the little things.

-- Mr. Subjective, 12/2019


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