Don't break the chain-tweet

Chain-tweeting a mid-length anecdote is bogus, but I do it anyway because Twitter is where the people are, so now I'm out of practice at writing up short shit that would have been a fun little LJ post back in the day. Alas.

Well, be the change you etc. etc. etc., so here's a thing I chain-tweeted earlier.

I learned how to push-start a motorcycle today!

I also learned something else, which is that there is a good time to learn how to push-start, and a bad time. It turns out that even a tiny (300lb) bike gets incredibly heavy the fifth time you wheel it back up the hill?! WHO KNEW.

The root cause here is that my battery was seven or eight years old, so now the bike is in the shop waiting for an ordered battery and an opportunistic oil change. Should have it back in a day or three.

Bonus slapstick: My bike has a fussy neutral sensor, which I'd forgotten about because it usually isn't a big deal. But after I first nailed the push-start, I parked to go grab my helmet and jacket, and the safety interlock killed it as soon as I put the kickstand down, so I had to immediately do it AGAIN. D:<

How to Push-Start a Bike

Basically, you turn on the ignition, put it in gear (I'm told 2nd is smoother, but you kind of have to know how it feels before you can pull that off? 1st is jerkier, but easier to do), put on the choke if it's cold, pull in the clutch, and wheel it (preferably down a slight slope) as fast as you can.

Once it's going about 8mph, let out the clutch all at once, like thwack, and hopefully the engine will catch. Be ready to haul the clutch back in a bit to keep it from dying.

I was originally going to jump-start it, but I got on YouTube and looked this up while Ruth was packing some boxes, and I was like "eh, that looks doable."