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Old Me rode nice motorcycles. They got washed and detailed regularly. They were accessorized with one eye toward function and the other toward aesthetics. Any part that broke or wore out was replaced with a new one, and damn the cost.
So when a well used, 15-year-old Kawasaki Ninja 650R came to live in my garage, Old Me shuddered. "What have I done? How will I ever bring this thing up to my lofty standards?"
That's when New Me rocked up and put a calming hand on my shoulder. "It’s a cheap old bike," he whispered. "By the time you make it look like a nice new one you’ll have spent so much money you could have actually bought a nice new one. Here’s what you do: Fix what needs to be fixed as cheaply as possible, as long as it’s safe. Now breathe."
New Me sidled into my life a few years ago when I realized I had many more years behind me than in front. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the knowledge you’re about to be hanged concentrates the mind wonderfully, and so does impending mortality. I slowed down — those aren’t chicken strips on my tires, they’re maturity margins — and stopped worrying about living up to other people’s expectations. It was very freeing, like riding a bike with a dual-clutch transmission and not having to shift gears. I never realized how much mental energy it took until I didn’t have to do it.
But there’s still an impulsive 24-year-old hiding out in the back of my brain who occasionally makes me do stupid, age-inappropriate things like buying a used sport bike instead of a cushy tourer or laid-back cruiser. He felt guilty. "Cool your jets, kid," New Me told him. "I got this."
New Me says riding a bike is more important than the looks of the bike I ride, and that I shouldn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone else thinks. I had my doubts when I shelved the fairing’s belly pan after it proved too difficult to put back on after an oil change, but I felt better when nobody noticed the difference. By now, I’m so used to it that when I see a 650R with the full fairing I do a double take.
Mark Twain once said this about getting old: "If you can’t make 70 by a comfortable road, don’t go." Despite lowered pegs and bar risers, the Ninja’s seating position still needed improvement. There was too much weight on my wrists — the left one has a titanium plate in it, the right is full of arthritis — and my aging back, weak from a fractured vertebrae and broken ribs suffered decades ago.
Old Me would have looked into a higher handlebar and a longer clutch cable, throttle cables, and brake hoses, but experience has shown me the results of such fixes are often mixed and seldom cost-effective. Then New Me stepped up with a novel suggestion: "Take off the fairing bubble and go for a ride." It was good advice. The added wind blast on my chest took enough weight off my wrists and back to make the forward lean tolerable. I put the bubble back on and trimmed it down until it was just big enough to keep rain off the instruments. It looked funny, but it worked.
The fairing-mounted mirrors were useless from mile one, too far forward and not far enough apart to give me a view of traffic behind me. I didn’t want my first hint of a tailgating truck to be its bumper tapping my taillight. Old Me would have scoured the net for fairing mirrors with longer stalks and the same bolt pattern. New Me pointed out the unused 10 mm holes threaded into the brake- and clutch-lever brackets and directed my attention to the aftermarket, where I found a pair of large, rectangular, generic mirrors. They looked absurdly out of place, like Elton John’s glasses on Jason Statham’s face, but they worked.
The Ninja’s parallel-twin engine is pretty smooth except at low rpm, where it shakes a bit. The right-side inner fairing panel buzzed loudly at these speeds so I took it off to see why. The front mounting tab was broken, allowing the inner panel to contact the outer panel. The tab was molded into the instrument surround, which was probably neither cheap nor easy to find. Old Me would have tried, but New Me pointed to the roll of Gorilla tape in my toolbox. I folded a narrow cushioning strip of tape along the edge of the inner panel, screwed the panel in place, and then ran another strip over the gap between it and the outer one. It looked tacky and improvised — which it was — but it worked.
By now the die was cast. I removed the voltmeter and the controller for the heated grips, both of which I plan to relocate. The round hole left by the controller was the same size as one of the blank-off plugs I pulled out of the mirror hole in the lever brackets, so I stuck it in there. The hole left by the voltmeter got the Gorilla treatment.
According to Old Me, I’m headed down the road to riding a hideous mutant motorcycle and eventually living in the desert in a rust-streaked single-wide raising rattlesnakes for meat. But I’m with New Me on this one. He’s already saved me a lot of time and money on a bike that’s not going to impress many people anyway, leaving me plenty of cash to spend on gas, oil, and tires, and more time to enjoy riding. Old Me isn’t entirely comfortable with this yet, but I’m betting he’ll come around in time.
Just don’t tell him I’ve had the bike for almost four months and have yet to wash it even once.
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