sin, who eventually moved to Urbana about 30 years ago. Tom is an engineer with a knack for inventing anything out of anything, and is like MacGyver on acid (No, still cooler than MacGruber).Before the ride, I put on the ThrottleRockers I recieved a few weeks ago to give them another shot. I rode from my house from the gas station and decided I wasn't going to use them, but on the ride up to UNI, I experienced extreme vibration (AKA "Honda Hand"), so I decided to stop and put them on in Urbana for the ride home. It's hard to gauge where to place the device on the grip,(The device needs to be placed where the throttle will be turned during highway speeds and cannot be adjusted while riding- try figuring that out at a gas station) so I asked my dad for his opinion. He fussed with it for about five seconds, then we heard a "cllliick" and then we both let out a "shiiitttttttttt". We figured that the throttle cable under the grip had broken, so we wheeled the bike over to a set of abandoned diesel pumps and busted out the tool kit and took a look at it. Sure enough, it snapped and there was no way for us to come up with an improvised fix.
Luckily, we were ten minutes from my dad's friend's place, which was well-equipped with a giant garage, bike trailer with tiedowns, a car, welding machines, any tool imaginable and a pair of helping hands. I decided to stay at the gas station with my immobile machine while my dad went down the road to his house, thinking he'd be back for me in about half an hour. Unfortunately, we found out that he was out of town and in Wisconsin for the weekend. It took us an hour to get ahold of him, but the garage was unlocked so my dad made his way in, and made a bunch of calls. Thankfully we eventually got ahold of his son Mike, who lives in Cedar Rapids and was willing to come up and help us get everything together to haul the bike back to their place.
While my dad was at their house away from the heat, I was stuck at the Urbana Casey's for three hours, with not much to do. I went in and bought a few drinks to keep hydrated in the 93-degree weather, and sat under a canopy with a nice breeze. Eventually, Mike came and picked me up and we went back to Tom's place to hook up the trailer and brought it back to the gas station to pick up the bike. Everything went smoothly; we strapped the bike to the trailer six different ways, and it survived a bumpy 3 mile gravel road. So, the bike is sitting up in Urbana somewhere right now, and will sit there for a week until we can get over to it with a new cable so I can ride it home.
The whole point of this ride was to find problems and get them fixed before we take our big trip. We had a few issues like intermittent turn signals and brake adjustments, but we certainly didn't expect this to happen. My dad carries spare cables with him all the time, but I didn't have any spares on me. He stopped into Brenny's (Our local MC dealer) this morning and ordered a new cable, which will hopefully be delivered by Saturday. While we're fortunate that we found this problem this weekend and this soon, we didn't count on arriving home at 9pm instead of 3pm.
And the worst part wasn't even the cable breaking-It was having to ride bitch on the back of my dad's bike for 75 miles to get home. "I have no shame", I kept telling myself...
