A hundred dollars of lawn-mowing money
I bought my first motorcycle at twelve years old. A Yamaha YZ100F, a hundred dollars, from a kid across town who had somehow grown bored of it. I paid in cash I had made cutting grass all summer, bills that had been folded and counted until they had gone soft as cloth. My parents did not know, and they weren’t the adventurous sort. I would be grounded until college, but grounded with a motorcycle was a definite improvement.
Before there was a bike, there were the magazines. Dirt Bike and Dirt Rider, every issue, bought with the same lawn money and read until the staples let go. If I was lucky enough to catch a motocross event on TV, I would be glued to that nineteen-inch glass tube all afternoon. I knew 1986 dirt bikes the way other kids knew batting averages, and adorned my bedroom walls with my favorites like pin-up girls.
My mother had a competing hobby: keeping me alive. I considered this needlessly restrictive.
Finally, a school friend offered to take me with him to the local trails. Ian’s mullet put mine to shame, the girls adored him, and as far as I could tell he never noticed. He cared about BMX bikes, motorcycles, RC cars, BB guns, and anything else with wheels, gasoline, batteries, or a decent chance of getting hurt.
This was the eighties, and we had room to roam, nothing official, nothing posted, just a forest full of well-ridden trails and unicorns (I’m fairly certain). I remember every detail of that day, including the not-so-safe (or legal) ride across town, leaded fuel bought with pocket change, and lime green two-stroke oil measured from a slim-necked bottle in Ian’s canvas backpack.
“Here, hold this”
We got to the trailhead and the bike wouldn’t start. Kick after kick, my dreams were being crushed. I prayed while Ian swore with impressive fluency. Finally he pulled the spark plug wire and held it out to me.
“Here, hold this.” I held it. He kicked.
I have since learned that the magneto on a small two-stroke produces something in the tens of thousands of volts. An effective, if sadistic, diagnostic procedure. I felt it from my palm to my teeth and everywhere in between.
He took the wire back and nodded, satisfied. “Okay. Magneto’s fine.”
It was a fouled plug. A quick rub with sandpaper from the tool pouch, and we were in business. I rode on the back as we bounced around the trails and had the time of our lives.
The bike required some special techniques, it had no torque and no working clutch. We had to get it moving before kicking it into gear, then I would race to hop on the back of the seat before it stalled. It was amazing.
The handover
Some weeks after, Ian said he was thinking of selling the bike. I couldn’t believe a kid my age would voluntarily GET RID of a motorcycle, but I did not ask follow-up questions. We settled on $100. It was everything I had.
At his house, Ian took my soft handful of bills and said he would see me at school Monday. I had a few miles to get home, but now a motorcycle to do it on. Already familiar with the clutch technique, I was off.
It ran beautifully for about a quarter mile
Then it started to stumble. It surged, stumbled again, caught, and went quiet. Suddenly I was standing at the side of the road holding up a motorcycle that no longer worked, with no idea why.
Ian had shut off the petcock, probably the responsible thing to do. That possibility never crossed my mind because the bike had been running just fine, obviously fuel wasn’t the problem. Plus there was plenty in the tank.
I know now that the float bowl holds about a quarter mile.
The push
So I pushed it home.
A YZ100F is not especially heavy until you are twelve and pushing it uphill. I was an athletic kid, but scrawny and assembled out of coat hangers. That push must have left me sore for days. I have no memory of being sore, because by then there was a motorcycle in my garage.
The best day of my life turned into a long afternoon of work. I got it home anyway.
There was, predictably, some, uh, “discussion” when I got home (Mom: crying. Dad: “He already paid the kid, honey…”). After a couple days, my mother typed up a very long list of “motorcycle rules.” One of them was “No Racing Squirrels.” I couldn’t tell how much of this list was irrational fear or an attempt at humor. Anyway I eagerly agreed to the ridiculous terms. We had an understanding, and life moved on.
Then I took the whole thing apart
The clutch was the first order of business. It was the thing I knew was broken, and it was now my broken thing, which made it the best problem I had ever had.
I had no idea how a clutch worked. No manual, very few tools. So I did what any twelve-year-old mechanic with more confidence than knowledge would do: I started removing parts until I found it.
Half that bike spent the better part of a week on the front lawn. Fasteners went into coffee cans in an organizational scheme I would describe as optimistic. I was filthy and idiotically happy.
Eventually I got inside the engine case, and there it was — the clutch pack, and the push lever that works it. I moved that lever back and forth with my thumb and watched the plates pull apart and squeeze together, apart and together, doing the exact thing that the lever on the handlebar was supposed to make them do. To my untrained eye, this all looked fine.
Which left me precisely where I had started, minus one motorcycle, now in pieces on the grass. So I spent ten dollars on a new clutch cable at the local bike shop, hoping to get to the bottom of this complex engineering problem that even Ian was unable to solve.
I put the bike back together, hooked up the cable, kicked it over, and pulled the lever. The clutch worked perfectly.
The next two seconds arrived in a specific order.
First: pure, uncut triumph. I had fixed my motorcycle.
Second: Wait... Was the clutch always fine? Did I just disassemble an entire engine because Ian was too lazy to buy a cable?
Yes. That is exactly what happened.
The RC car
I did eventually find out what he spent my hundred dollars on. A radio-controlled car. Disassembled. A box of parts. He had traded a real motorcycle for a toy car that did not run and, from what I could tell, never had. I remember looking into that shoebox of plastic and springs thinking, with the full moral authority of a seventh grader, “What is wrong with you.”
Being twelve is a condition in which you can hold a motorcycle in one hand and a spectacularly bad idea in the other, and be genuinely unable to tell which is which. I had just spent three weeks in my own front yard demonstrating the same principle from the opposite direction.
Why I’m telling you this
Motorcycles have brought me joy my entire life. I still love riding them, taking them apart, wandering around dealerships, nerding out over engineering details, and disappearing into review videos about bikes I may never even see in real life. That is why Second Kickstart exists. It gives me an excuse to do more of that on purpose, and share it with people who get the same enjoyment from these machines.
Second Kickstart is where I let my inner twelve-year-old spend the lawn-mowing money.