Maintain

I have a history of ignoring maintenance on everything I own. After a few minutes of reflection, I think I have narrowed down the top 5 reasons for that:

1. I am not very mechanically inclined.
2. I procrastinate. A lot.
3. I have a natural flight response whenever a project becomes more difficult than what I originally signed up for.
4. I don't operate in the realm of exactness, just approximations (I am currently holding my car together with marine adhesive, steel epoxy, and a killer combo of disassembled pens and super glue).
5. I don't trust anyone who charges $75/hr plus the cost of parts to have my best interest in mind. Right or wrong, I assume that they don't care about addressing the actual problems as much as they care about maximizing their profit by recommending questionable, expensive, and unnecessary procedures.

All in all, I think it has just been a bad couple of months. Allow me to list my problems:

1. My Toyota station wagon suffered an exploded radiator (technical term) 5 days before I left Japan. The result: no return on my original purchase price. In the end, that's not so bad. The cost of the vehicle averaged out to about $9/day plus fuel, which is way less than the $55/day car rentals over there.

2. My sailboat got reamed by the Kona Winds right before I returned to Hawaii. My mast is still waiting for me on the bottom of the marina floor. While it is true that I ignored most maintenance on the boat, the actual piece of the boat that failed is not something I would have replaced during routine maintenance, anyway. The winds were so strong that the metal clasp holding the 1/4" wire to the boat sheared. Nature is strong.

3. My Honda Accord is limping badly. Despite feeding her $250 in parts (CV axle, distributor cap, spark plugs and wires) and giving her hours of TLC (oil change, brake bleeding, and tender words of encouragement motivating her to overcome her old age) these past two weeks, she is getting very poor gas mileage and shutters while driving. Per the mechanics advice back in 2003, I am going to try replacing the oxygen sensor this weekend. Maybe that will help.

4. My BMW K75 motorcycle is sluggish on the acceleration and overheats. I think it may be due to a clogged fuel filter. I didn't come up with this diagnosis on my own; internet discussion boards aren't just for the video-gaming crowd and desperately lonely. Also, I remember a seemingly related event from a few years ago while traveling. We were driving to Mt. Everest and our Tibetan driver stopped to clean the fuel filter (really dusty roads) because the Land Cruiser was very sluggish. His cleaning methods were pure: he simply took out the fuel filter, put the thing up to his mouth, sucked out the problem, gagged and possibly puked, put the filter back in, and pressed on. I think I will spend the $25 for a new filter and skip the middle steps, but I hope to have the same results.

As the old aphorism commands: "Know Thyself." This weekend if I can overcome reasons 1-3 from the top of the post, I shouldn't have to worry about #4. As for #5, I think Robert Persig had an admirable way of looking at it all in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." Basically, even if I exacerbate my original problem and have to pay someone to fix it plus the additional problems I cause, at least I will have learned something along the way.

When all is said and done, it's simply a matter of perspective. As long as I can come to the end of this project and write off expenses under "education" rather than "I have no idea what I am doing and I should have paid someone else to do it in the first place," I will consider it a success.