Although a pint at the Still and West marked a small milestone on my journey it wasn’t quite the end of the day, I still had to meet up with the Village People and catch the boat to St Malo. I saw them standing by Tony’s camper, waving, as we rolled down the bike lane to passport control. My own lack of confidence in the adequacy of my preparation had made me extremely cautious and I’d primed them for a negative outcome. This was to be a feature of each new leg of my trip, which must have begun to chafe on their sensibilities, but they endured my wittering on about blowing up in good humour and continued to offer their support for which I was grateful.
Among them was one of my oldest friends, Rob, who has endured far more of these amateur dramatics than anyone else.
“Hey, you made it, well done,” said Rob coming over, proverbial fag in hand.
“Thanks mate, it was a good ride in the end, apart from the rain.”
“Yeah, we thought of you when it came down, wondered if you got caught in it. How was the bike?”
“Sweet, no problems, even in the rain. Still losing oil though, need to keep an eye on it.”
Before we set off, Rob had come over to help me swill out the tank and change the fuel lines (TBB 6.14). We also intended to remove the chainguard to look for the source of this oil leak but I couldn’t figure out how to get it off, so we left it.
Fixing can easily become breaking when you’re ignorant of the principles and processes involved, you have to be cautious until you get through this stage. Of course experience doesn't grow on trees and the only way to get it is to mess up a few times, I just didn't want to do that right before my trip. So when I removed the fixings and one turned out to be an oil drain plug, which didn’t make sense at all, I stopped. No chainguard I’d ever seen had an oil compartment, what was that about? The skimpy user’s manual shed no light on the situation.
I imagined the oil leak was due to a failing engine or gearbox drive shaft seal but there was no way to check this without removing the guard. In truth, I wouldn't have had time to replace such a seal anyway so my temporary measure was to just keep an eye on the engine oil level which was dropping consistently. Gearbox oil tends to be thicker and leak more slowly so, right or wrong, my priority was the engine.
Thinking about it now, I'd drawn an obvious connection between the familiar patches under the bike and the disappearance of oil from the engine but automatically linking these two things together turned out to be a weak diagnosis. There was a clue I'd failed to give full credit to, in that the leak was directly beneath the gearbox, not the engine. I may have discounted this, reasoning that oil could have blown backwards off the engine onto the gearbox housing and dripped off the bike from there but there was no evidence of this.
I have to face the fact that I was more inclined to believe that which suited my situation at the time than to undertake any proper investigation. This had undoubtedly contributed heavily to my pre-trip nerves. The question was, what else I may have overlooked?
