Passes & Canyons Blog

If you spend time out on the road, something is bound to go wrong sooner or later. Then what?

OK, first let’s address the question, is it jury-rigging or jerry-rigging. We’ve all seen both. A quick search took me to Dictionary.com where I found this bit of clarification:

Jury-rigged means something was assembled quickly with the materials on hand. Jerry-built means it was cheaply or poorly built. Jerry-rigged is a variant of jury-rigged, and it may have been influenced by jerry-built. While some people consider it to be an incorrect version of jury-rigged, it’s widely used, especially in everyday speech.

So I’m going with jury-rigged.

On to topic.

Things go wrong sometimes, don’t they? And when you’re miles from home with no help nearby you just have to figure out how to make things work. Anyone who has done much traveling by motorcycle surely has run into this a time or two.

My first was early on in the life of the OFMC. Bill and John and I were heading for the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and I had taken my bike in for some significant work well in advance of the trip. Long story short, after promising me for weeks that it would be done in time it was not and Bill and John left without me. About three days later I finally had my bike and I took off to meet up with them at the North Rim.

I rode that first day to Durango, where I intended to spend the night with a friend and her husband. I had not gotten far when I discovered that the shop had failed to put one of my highway pegs back on. I really, really like highway pegs and I have them on all three of my bikes. But what could I do?

I mentioned this to the folks in Durango and he went out and got a six-inch length of aluminum tubing and some duct tape and presto, I had a highway peg where before there had been none. Thank you so much Neil. That thing held just fine for the whole trip and believe me, I used it.

A few years after this we were ready to head out and Bill was late. Finally he called (this was before cell phones) to say his bike had died on his way over to John’s house–could we come give him some assistance?

After nearly killing ourselves pushing him up and down this parking lot he finally got the bike started and headed off to his mechanic. He called later to say it was his stator and the bike would not be fixed soon. John and I took off without Bill.

I can’t remember but we must have had some arrangement to stay in touch because in a day or two we got word that Bill would be meeting up with us in Thermopolis. Great. When he showed up he explained to us that he still had no functioning stator but he had a battery charger and a long extension cord and he had removed the fuse powering his lights. The idea was to use as little electricity from the battery as possible all day and then fully charge the battery overnight. That’s what he did and the rest of the trip was uneventful. Needless to say, we didn’t do any night riding.

John was always into jury-rigging something on his bike. Back in the early days, when we all had bare bones bikes, none of us had throttle locks. Nowadays, we all consider throttle locks or cruise control to be essential. And sure, these things were available but they cost money and we were all pretty poor.

So John got a Popsicle stick, drilled a hole in the end through which he tied some string, and tied the other end to his handle bar. While cruising down the road he would shove this stick between the grip and whatever was next to the grip, wedging it in there so when he would release the throttle the thing would not rotate back off the gas.

These were simpler days. In this current day, any one of us would simply pull out the card and pay for whatever it is we want/need. It’s easier but I’m not sure it’s better.

Biker Quote for Today

You know you’re a biker if every time you spend money, you think about what you coulda bought for your bike.