Shameless plugs
UP FRONT
David Edwards
SEEMED LIKE A SIMPLE ENOUGH QUEStion at the time. It really did.
Matt Miles and I had winged into Rapid City, South Dakota, to take delivery of two new-for-’01 testbikes, the Victory V92C Deluxe and the Harley-Davidson T-Sport (see “Path to the Pacific,” this issue). V-Twins for the open road, they cover both ends of the “bagger” spectrum, the Victory a nicely done iteration of the retrowagon theme, the T-Sport more of a blue-highways special-it takes one of our favorite Big Twins, the FXDX Sport, and adds clever clip-on saddlebags and a small fairing. Sport-touring, Milwaukee-style.
The idea was to hang out at the big Sturgis Rally, shooting photos and soaking up atmosphere, before shuffling across Wyoming, Utah, a patch of Arizona, Nevada, then California’s Mojave Desert en route to the home office in Newport Beach, 1500 miles distant, give or take. Nothing like a pair of lunker Vees to mow down miles in the Great American West. The right tools for the job, like a GS Beemer in the Alps, an XR650 in Baja or a scooter in the city.
Turns out two days of $300 motel rooms (non-rally rate, $79), hour-long waits for mediocre food and having it up to here with the life-saving properties of a few hundred thousand sets of loud pipes was all the Sturgis we could handle. So long, Black Hills, time to gas up and go.
It was while packing the saddlebags that I discovered the chink in our crosscountry armor. I’d remembered my trusty Rev-Pack tool roll-10 pounds of security blanket that includes everything from zip-ties to metal epoxy to those green, glow-in-the-dark sticksbut left my flat-tire kit back home in my dual-sport backpack. Doh!
It’s one of those nifty Progressive Suspension nylon pouches with patches for tube-type tires, plugs for tubeless and vials of compressed air for re-inflation. Fits almost anywhere, costs about $40. With it, anything short of a long gash or sidewall tear in the Harley’s tubeless rubber could be fixed, downtime maybe 15 minutes. A puncture on the Victory-wearing old-style spoked rims that require inner tubes-would be harder to deal with, even if I’d not also forgotten my dirtbike tire irons. No centerstand, see, so the 700-pound, $15,000 beauty would have to be hoisted (good luck) onto a nearby boulder or laid on its side before the offending wheel could be extracted. Not exactly handy.
Our return route had us on deserted two-laners most of the way to SoCal, maybe some gravel, maybe some dirt. Places where cell phones don’t work and the AAA fears to tread-even if they retrieved motorcycles, which they don’t. On some stretches, our bones might be picked over and bleached white before help arrived.
We’d stop at a shop before too many miles passed and buy some plugs. That way, at least the T-Sport could be kept rolling and sent ahead for help if the Deluxe snagged a nail.
Pulling into Casper, Wyoming, towards the end of our first day, I couldn’t help but notice a huge sign for the local Harley-Davidson dealership beckoning from 100 feet in the air next to the highway. Time for a rest stop, anyway. Perfect!
A neat, new place, as it turned out, the kind old-school Shovelhead pilots deride as Motor Company-mandated “boutiques.” I have no opinion on the subject. Anyway, there it was, just visible beyond the forest of overpriced Tshirts and commemorative figurines, a parts counter long enough to land an F-18, ringed with all manner of bubble-pack arrays. A cute young girl apparently ditching cheerleader drills greeted me with a bright smile, asking what I might need.
“Your finest tubeless-tire repair kit, please.”
From the blank stare she shot back, I might as well have asked for the secrets of the tantric org*sm. A more detailed explanation of what I wanted, complete with hand gestures, failed to span the communications chasm.
All would be put right by the parts manager, I was told, a woman with the air of authority that comes from 18 years’ experience behind the counter.
No dice.
“We don’t put plugs in flats, we just replace the tire,” she informed me. “Plugs are dangerous.”
I explained that I did not, in fact, have a flat, that I just wanted to be prepared in case one came up out in the middle of freakin’ nowhere, which just in case she hadn’t noticed, was all around us. And tire plugs dangerous? Not if installed properly. I’ve ridden thousands of miles on plugged tires and patched tubes with no mishaps. More life-threatening, I’d say, to hike 10 miles in 105-degree heat to the next outpost, or wait roadside to flag down another backroad traveler while the buzzards circled overhead.
Be that as it may, Harley-Davidson listed no such thing as a flat-tire repair kit, she pronounced after paging though a parts bible thicker than the local phone book. Just then, another employee, an earnest young man this time, chimed in. He’d heard of the kits, he said, but never actually seen one-which, strangely enough, is my take on tantric org*sms.
Lucky for us, just down the street was Karst Motorsports, a Polaris dealership selling Victorys and ATVs. Because four-wheelers run tubeless tires, the shop stocked just what we needed. With that bit of insurance tucked in my tankbag, we continued westward. Happy to report that the plugs were not needed.
But flats do happen. In just the last couple of months, three of our testbikes have been sidelined. Getting going again was always more of a hassle than it should be. Can you imagine a carmaker selling a model not equipped with a spare tire or the means (jack, lug wrench) of attaching it? Yet among motorcycle manufacturers, only BMW insists that its bikes, every single one, comes with a centerstand, quality tools and, yes, even a flat-tire repair kit.
There should be more.
