Your own kiwi ingenuity moment

[Conquiztador]

Most of us have been there. There is this problem that you need a quick solution for on the bike. So you sit down with a beer and do some thinking. And then it hits you. A solution so brilliant you should really get the Nobel prize for it!

This is your chance to show off and tell the rest of us how clever you really are.

So I start:

My first real bike was a Royal Enfield Meteor Minor Sport 500cc. It had one of those old type light switches on top of the big head light that you turn. But when I rode it home first time from the shop in the rain, the switch knob fell off. So I ended up using a pair of pliers to turn off the lights. Where I lived there was no shop to buy bits and I wanted to ride. So I needed to figure out something. At 16yo my contacts were limited. But not my imagination. So after some thinking and some looking around I noticed that the knobs on the stove were similar... I pulled one off, went down to the bike, pushed it on. And it fitted!!! I had the bike for over 2 years and never purchased the real knob, but I did get a new knob for the stove to get my mother off my back.

After that modification has become an important part of my biking.

[R6_kid:Me]

Was on my final coro loop riding the venerable old Team MILF racing ZXR-250A. Got up to Coromandel town and were all getting ready to leave when it was pointed out to me that my exhaust hanger was coming loose and i was at risk of losing my $300 carbon fibre exhaust.

The only thing on hand was a roll of race tape... so i taped my exhaust to the bike. 'Reinforced' the hanger and bracket with half a roll of tape.

[Holy Roller]

After my head on when riding my XZ400 back from Rotovegas to Jaffa land I had rebuilt it but it failed the warrent due to the frame being bent. It was just the tail section and the shop would not touch it. I was lying down on the seat in the bus that I was living in at the time thinking how I would be able to fix this problem
Then I got a brain wave on how to use the forklift tilt function and a steel bar. So get the bar, manouver the bike under the forks, had to lift the whole bike off the ground some distance before I could tilt the forks to straighten the frame. At that point the Mrs came around the corner and saw the bike up in the air..... had to convince her that it was alright, anyway it was almost done. A bit more on the tilt lever and the frame straightened a tad more for luck then back to terra firma and reattached all the bits again. Took it back for the warrant and they were amazed that I had fixed it overnight. Got the bit of paper and several more after that. that would have to be my eureka moment.

[gijoe1313]

I was riding around Mission Bay at night, as you do - when my lights failed. Neither low nor hi-beam worked... but the passing flasher did. I had yanked off bits in the carpark of Kelly Tarltons when I remembered I had a spare cable tie in my pocket (always handy to carry several of those around!).

Quick as a whip I had sorted it out, tilted the lights down a bit to stop giving oncoming cagers the evil glare and off home. Funnily enough, that's when I got Jeaves to help me out and take care of the prob once and for all!

[T.W.R]

Had a GSX250ES many many years ago that was a great little bike until it started having a nasty habit of running on one cylinder at the least appropriate time (twice happened while passing cars on the open road ). Sent it to the shop to fix the problem, it came back with the shop saying they couldn't find a fault.
Then a few days later same thing happened so off back to the shop again with the same result . So with little knowledge of what to look for one afternoon started exploring checking everything that I thought may be causing the problem. got to the sparkplug leads & caps, had a nosey and hey the caps come apart so dismantled each one to find little ceramic resistors in the core of the caps and #2's resistor was broken. Seeing it was roughly 3mm dia & 15mm long I started checking what I had of similar size, mmm a 4in nail is similar diameter so I cut one to the same length, put it in the cap, reassembled everything and took the bike for a blast and it never missed a beat. Had the bike for another 6mths and in that time it ran like a dream.

A few years later a mate on his SE Katana spat it's chain whilst playing silly buggers down the road from home, luckily the chain threw out the back of the bike but on it's way sheered the clutch push-rod (that runs just in front of the front sprocket) off at it's housing into the engine casings.

We pushed the bike home fixed the chain and opened up the sprocket cover & clutch slave cylinder to see what damage had been done, seeing the push-rod was missing 30mm off it's length. dredging through the workshop for something that could be used found a 8in nail that was the same diameter, checking the length there was just enough by cutting the head & tip off the nail so with a quick tidy up it was put in place, things put back together and tested. It worked perfectly and was still in the bike the day he sold it a year or so later.

[shcabbeh]

I was heading back towards New Plymouth from Auckland at dusk. Had just gotten past Mokau and ready to take on Mt. Messenger when a bolt from my gear lever fell out (I think from rust), never to be seen again.

I stopped the bike after seeing the lever dragging on the ground and being unable to shift. It was on a long stretch of road, deserted.

Had a look around on the road and beside a fence to see if there was anything I could use 'til I got home. Found a piece of fencing wire that was the perfect shape, so I bent it in and around the hole to secure it and away I went!

Nothing major but made me happy to think I'd passed my first minor test of roadside maintenance.

[scumdog]

Had the timing-plug unwind itself and fall out of my faithful old iron-heard Sporty once (I KNEW I shouldn'y have touched the dam thing just before heading to the Off-The-Rails rally!!!) while doing about 100kph and a 'bit' - so the plug is still 'somewhere near Waihola'.

Stuck at the side of the road with a threaded 3/4" hole in the side of the crankcase (riding it like that meant my fav.pair of cowboy boots got sprayed with oil!!) and no bung.

Looked around, got me trusty Schrade folding knife out and whacked a piece off a nearby willow tree branch.

Shaved the bark off the bit of branch, wrapped some insulation tape around it and screwed it in the hole.

Used my tent-string to tie it in place and carried on to the rally and back.

Bloody thing leaked less than the metal one I had fiddled with just before heading away to the rally

[pete376403]

Riding a borrowed Honda 350 twin long ago. The owner was a self proclaimed "mechanic" who liked to do things "good and tight" and scorned torque wrenches. Anyway puttering along and with a pretty loud bang, a spark plug blew out - threads stripped. No spare plug in the tool kit. Walked back along the road and found the plug - unbroken. Pushed it back into the hole, there was no thread left. Found a piece of wood and jammed it between the bottom of the tank and the plug cap. That got me home running on both cylinders. On another bike (350 Kawasaki Bighorn), fell off on a trail and the brake pedal broke a hole in the clutch cover. That was fixed sith a piece of willow jammed into the hole, which got me home so I could fix the hole properly with Araldite. Wood is handy stuff, especially when there's nothing else

[Jantar]

A real brain wave saved me $$$$. Described in
http://www.kiwibiker.co.nz/forums/sh...ad.php?t=16601

[sAsLEX]

Used 12 cable ties to hold on a broken foot peg.

Had a piece of No.8 wire as a drum brake rod.

Used a piece of stick to fix a fuel hose problem.

And all these are still in use.

[Oscar]

Blew a sump plug out of an XR (we won't go into why), in the middle of Tokoroa Forest. Couldn't find the plug, so I snapped a spark plug in half and used that. For oil, I took the oil out one fork leg on three bikes.

[MSTRS:Me]

Had a XJ750 with rotted mufflers. No money to replace. Ummmm.....
Under the bench I had a pair of stubby Cobys with a 2" bore and slashcut chrome extensions. They fitted perfectly. And not as loud as they were on the old Holden V8.

[vifferman]

Meh.

My bikes are always a mass of Kiwingenuity. Drives the vifferbabe up the wall, my constant fiddlin' and a-farklin', so much so, that the VifFerraRi is now no longer OUR bike, due to unauthorised modifications.

Examples: garage door opener switch, home-made stoplight flasher, home-made oxygen sensor eliminators, home-made confirminator replacements....
But the bestest examples are the things I made for the FahrtSturm when I had it, after realising I didn't have a centrestand, for the first time in years. from a piece of 2X1 pine, and a 4-inch nail, I made a prop to lift the back wheel off the ground for chain oiling and the like, and a piece of scrap aluminium 100mm X 20mm X 3mm was quickly fashioned into a parking brake that clipped over the brake lever. I made a portable underseat version of the stand from alumininiiniumium (actually an old TV aerial) for Fish one time, back when he had a zealous Zeal.

And then there's the HandyDandyChainCleaner'N'Lubing Tool, which was made out of scrap loitering in the gargre. I can clean the chain with kero or whatever, then lube it with melted pig fat or KY jelly or whatever, and have no mess to clean up when I've finished.

[Bonez]

A branch and duct tape to hold Phantoms foot peg in position to get him home from a cold kiwi.

Give cowboyz a bit off one of my hondas for his suzuki then the bastard sells the bike. The bit must have raised the value of the bike at least a grand .

Quick repair on my cb550 at the back of Vineger Hill to bypass the melted main fuse holder(using teeth to do the wire stripping/trimming-didn't have my trusty tupperware tool kit for a change OUCH!!).

Carried a master chain link on my first CX500(force of habit on my previous bikes) and fix me mates Suzi GT750 chain on the way to a cold kiwi(chain spat out about 3 miles away from the rally site).


Using myself to cushion Gerty from further damage after being t-boned and having my left tib/fib boken then trying to operate the side stand(that stuff that ambos give ya is good shit man).

[slopster]

I had a zxr 250 and lost the key 400km from home (it fell out while I was riding). I took the tank off and hotwired it (bloody easy on these bikes) and resumed my journey. At the next gas station I realised that I couldn't get into the tank to fill it up so I brought a 10L jerry can and 1m of fuel hose. I tied the jerry to the pillion seat with bailing twine and ran the fuel hose from the jerry to the carbs. I taped a big bolt to the end of the hose in the fuel so that it would stay at the bottom of the jerry. Worked just fine though I had to fill up all the time on the way home.