🗓 6 weeks starting May 28th

🕰️ Tuesdays 6pm – 9pm

🗺 Highside Workshop (209 Evergreen Ave)

💰 $100 - $300 sliding scale, pay what you can

📋 Common Application

👥 6-8 people

About the course

If you have a motorcycle and want to learn to fix it yourself, this course is for you! If you don’t have one, but are curious about motorcycles and want to get your hands dirty, this course is for you too! By the end of the course, you should be comfortable tackling basic motorcycle repair and upkeep on your own. Join us!

The main goals of the course are:

• Learn the basics of how motorcycles work, and how to fix them
• Get comfortable working with a range of hand tools
• Learn strategies for figuring out how stuff works, in general

Let me back up. This course is ostensibly about fixing old motorcycles, but my real goal (shhh, don’t tell anyone) is to get you comfortable with taking apart, diagnosing, and repairing your built environment. Most of us live our lives surrounded by things that humans built, and those things have a nasty tendency to break. In my experience, my material surroundings feel a lot friendlier when I feel empowered to repair them myself.

Motorcycles are a great vehicle (heh) for gaining confidence in working with your hands for a few reasons:

• They strike a sweet spot in complexity: they have enough components to be interesting, but are simple enough to work on with basic tools
• They’re more interesting than, say, a refrigerator, but the skills you learn from troubleshooting and fixing a motorcycle translate well to all sorts of household items
• There’s a visceral connection to the end result. You fixed it, and now it can take you places!

Plus, I might be biased, but…motorcycles are just fuckin’ cool.

We will focus more on hands-on repair work than on theory – my goal is to teach just enough about how various parts of a motorcycle work for you to understand why we’re fixing it the way we are. There will be at least one non-functional motorcycle on site that we will be working on during each session. If all goes well, by the end, it’ll be working! (If enough people sign up, I’ll buy a second bike to make sure everyone gets plenty of time with their hands on the bike.)

Most repair courses involve tearing down an already-working machine and rebuilding it. This has one big advantage: if it doesn’t work when you put it back together, you know it’s because of something you did. We’re not going to do that, for two reasons:

1. Functional motorcycles are expensive :(
2. It’s more rewarding to make something broken work, than to break something that’s working!

That means that it’s possible we’ll hit roadblocks where we need to order parts to continue, and if that happens, we’ll just switch to another part of the bike. This is a bit of an experiment, and I want to be up-front about that.

If you have your own bike, and you want to work on it, feel free to bring it in. There’s plenty of room.

Syllabus

This is an ambitious syllabus. We might not make it through all this, but it’s what I’m shooting for.

May 28th: Shop safety, tools, and resources

• Basic protective equipment
• How to use hand tools safely
• Reading a factory service manual
• Introduction to the motorcycle

June 4th: Troubleshooting a motorcycle that won’t start

• The big three: compression, spark, and fuel
• Diagnose which one(s) of the big three the bike is missing
• Start fixing it!

June 11th: Carburetor repair and driveline maintenance

• Learn how a carburetor works
• Remove and tear down the carbs from the bike, and start cleaning them
• Chain and sprocket maintenance: checking and adjusting

June 18th: Carburetor assembly and fixing oil leaks

• Put the (now clean) carburetors back together!
• Learn to do an oil change
• Replace leaky engine gaskets

June 25th: Brakes

• Learn how disc and drum brakes work
• Learn how to bleed hydraulic brakes
• Disassemble and clean the brake assemblies
• Clean and reassemble them with fresh rubber

July 2nd: Suspension and Electronics

• Intro to motorcycle suspension and handling
• Front fork teardown and reassembly
• Overview of the standard electrical systems in (old) motorcycles
• How to use a multimeter to troubleshoot electrical issues

The facilitator

Jesse is a motorcycle fanatic. Riding em, fixing em, dreaming about em…he just really, really loves bikes. He got started in high school with a ‘79 Honda CX500, which he bought without any idea how to ride or fix a motorcycle. He couldn’t afford to pay someone else to fix it, so he learned from online forums, service manuals, and trial and error. Since then, he’s ridden that bike across the US twice, and just finished the second leg of a trip from LA to Argentina on a dirt bike. He’s served as the mechanic on all those rides, and learned a thing or two about the value of fixing the bike before you leave home.