I thought some might find this interesting. When dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I made a living repairing Ducati motorcycles, this was a tune and service as determined by me. It was a flat rate, 8 hours labour + parts, so the customer knew the cost of everything beforehand. change oil and filter (first if engine was warm when customer arrived) remove cylinder heads decoke, seat valves, set valve clearances, new valve guide seals and gaskets, reassemble heads and fit change fork oil strip rear shocks and reassemble (with fresh oil of course) remove chain, clean, boil in Duckhams, refit tighten countershaft sprocket if necessary remove clutch pushrods, grease, reassemble lubricate and adjust clutch and throttle cables remove foot and hand controls, clean, lubricate, reassemble change front and rear brake fluid check brake pads replace spark plugs check/adjust steering head bearings fit chain check wheel alignment remove carburettor float bowls and clean check/adjust electrolyte level, clean terminals and lubricate (silicon grease) clean air filters check/adjust ignition timing adjust tyre pressures test ride synchronise, adjust carburettor idle and mixture I think I got it all. Everything was itemised and reported to the customer. If anything cropped up during the service the customer would be phoned and consulted about how they wished to proceed. After the customer paid the bill (the unhappy part), I would ask them to take the bike for a ride and come back to report (the very happy part). cheers Blair
Hate to think what that would cost at a bike shop these days A service these days would be oil change,oil filter and plugs and maybe an air filter.
Yes it might seem a bit long, so I best quantify that. That is for a desmo twin cylinder 2 valve. Because there are no valve springs the valves often suffer damage to the seat area, so 'seat valves' is not 5 minutes with some lapping compound. It usually entailed grinding the valve faces and seats (something that your local bike shop cannot do because they don't have the equipment). Setting the valve clearances correctly is also quite a tedious task as there is no margin on the closing shims. They have to be perfect. That means the finished size of the shim is done by hand. If any valve gudes needed replacing (quite often on the gear driven cam models because they are too short) then the schedule was blown, as was the budget. cheers
That's it, strong advocate of the KISS principle, when it beats me I take it to someone who is trained and has the knowledge to fix it, that's my mechanic. He's the go to person that gets me back promptly to where I want to be, on the road.
The HSV ad actually. Endless fun to be had if your a Ford fan on that one. Someone looked at that list and said "8 hours labour? Bahahaha. Yeah right that's excessive." I looked at that list and thought. "8 hours labour? How THE HELL he do all that in 8 hours? Is he Flash Gordon?" It would take me 8 days!
