One aspect of maintenance is understanding the mindset of the original designer. This is pleasant for very well designed machinery. Here's a long description of a Teletype restoration I did a decade ago.[1] Mostly this is about the mechanical processes, but sometimes I wrote about the thinking behind the design.

Teletypes were originally rented, with maintenance included. So they were intended to be reliable and repairable, and capable of a long life with periodic maintenance. All parts outside the motor are individually replaceable. Parts were treated against corrosion by Parkerizing, a chemical treatment involving hot caustic baths that leaves a rust-resistant coating. Few parts are unreasonably tiny, so you don't need tweezers and magnifiers. This did result in a bulkier machine than really necessary. Most moving parts are powered in one direction and spring return in the other direction. If something sticks, that doesn't cause further damage. Almost every screw has a lock washer. One of the few exceptions was due to a drafting error, as I mention in my writeup.

Mechanism design balances size, cost, ease of repair, wear, and lubrication requirements. The number of people really good at that is not large. All the good Teletype machines were designed by two men, Howard Krum and, later, Ed Klienschmidt. There were some other, inferior designs best forgotten. (The Teletype Model 26 was what happened when management wanted a cheaper machine than the classic Model 15. Many Model 15 machines are still running; few Model 26 machines are. And the Model 26 turned out to be no cheaper to make.)

Once you can appreciate this, you'll see good and bad mechanical designs more clearly. It's clearer in the mechanical realm than the software realm, because failure is more obvious.

[1] http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=43672

As someone who read Zen the first time many years ago, the book talks about the joy you get from seeing the world on a motorcycle (or bicycle) over being in a tank like car where you don't fully experience your environment. At its heart though, Pirsig used the concept of motorcycle maintenance as an examination of quality, value, and what brings people fulfillment. It takes a meandering path to get there which is probably why so many people don't finish it. The most memorable thing in the book for me was the topic of gumption and how it can so easily be destroyed. In my work in tech, gumption traps are everywhere. Reading this book made me recognize them so that I could logically decide my next action rather than making an emotional decision.

I wish I was articulate enough to properly detail how really interesting the book is even for someone who has absolutely zero interest in maintaining a combustion engine

I find the root premise flawed. I have known many people that loved working on cars. The plethora of very old vehicles where I live kind of holds that up, as well. My truck is 23 years old, and I'm positive it isn't even close to the oldest around here.

Even closer to the general idea, the radio show "Car Talk" was less about cars than the name would have implied. Would love to see it revived in spirit.

That said, still a fun read. Not entirely sure there are general learnings that can't be found anywhere. Such that I would push for the takeaway of "don't stop looking for lessons when out of the job or classroom."

I maintain my motorcycles but the romance around it is just a way to moralize fixing the consequences of my own negligence and incompetence:) That said, there's a life or death gravity to it, as the failure mode of a bike in motion can get a bit runny - and the romance is an instance of the idea that physical competence is fundamentally moral, which goes back to the stoics and Aristotle, and it underpins a lot of the hacker ethic.

The shortest summary of it I could describe is from the concept of "trueness," where you have a wheel or a reference point, a straight edge, or even just geometry, so you can physically apprehend what something is supposed to do as an objective ideal, and then you use that reference to reason, refine, and gauge your effort against it. Like the process of truing a wheel. Once you have an idea of what the perfect case is, chosing to align to that case is essentially moral.

In the case of a motorcycle, someones life depends on the integrity of your alignment to ensuring the trueness of the moving parts together. The effect of people generally choosing this now-moral alignment to precise measures and ideals produces desirable outcomes. This is what I think makes bike maintenance and other physical competencies philosophical, as their logic translates into metaphors pretty seamlessly.

Great article anyway. His comment on the public good of providing live saving organs is funny and accurate:

> The supply of organs and tissue from motorcycle riders has gone up in recent decades, especially in the 22 states that still don’t have helmet laws.

It's why EMT's call them donor-cycles.

>In Pirsig’s book there is never a mention of the make and model of his motorcycle.

This past weekend I was on a road trip to South Carolina. On the way, most every motorcycle that I saw was a BMW. I told my girlfriend after seeing the Nth that it can't be a coincidence, and I went and found out there was a BMW motorcycle rally taking place that weekend. Anyway, seeing some old BMWs made me remember the book, and I mentioned it to my GF. She had read it too but may years ago like myself - like 40 years ago. But one thing that I had remembered was that the bike was a BMW.

After reading the above quoted line about Pirsig not mentioning the make, I looked it up, and I had to reset my memory. It's the Sutherland's who are riding a BMW, and they don't have an interest initially in doing any of their own maintenance. Well, at least I remembered that there was a BMW in the story. ;)

I've been watching mechanic channels on YouTube recently when I need some background noise, and It's very interesting to see them do their once overs on the car, and hear their initial theories get confirmed or disconfirmed as they move through the vehicle. You can feel their experience for the sorts of issues that are likely or unlikely, and the focus on root cause (whether a botched repair job or something broken from the factory) is very... motivational? Difficult to describe, but it's uplifting.

One channel is mostly teardowns of different busted car engines, and as those are essentially all postmortem operations, they play out like murder mysteries as different parts of the engine face varying degrees of damage from whatever went wrong (oil starvation/clogging typically, sometimes hydrolock or more exotic combustion failures). Apart from absorbing some small amount of understanding of how internal combustion engines work, the need for regular oil changes and inspections has been impressed on me about 20x.

>One time, when a customer asked him to help revive a beloved 1983 Honda Magma V45 that hadn’t been driven for two years, Crawford responded harshly: “Assuming it’s got all the usual problems from sitting, you’re looking at a thousand dollars to get it back on the road.

First, it is the Honda Magna. Second, this mechanic took him to the cleaners. The Magna isn't nearly as complex as a Goldwing. $1000 for cleaning the carbs and a new battery simply isn't honest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7txrxM-NCc

What Motorcycles Teach About Maintenance: fuel injection is great.

There is a major step change in maintenance difficulty from motorcycles to cars .

motorcycles are more exposed and intimate so it’s easier to detect issues earlier .

Modern cars have adopted more non-user-serviceable tech. Intermediate procedures like clutch replacement , brake maintenance , tune ups are accessible to beginners on a motorcycle .

in general motorcycle maintenance is more accessible due to the open drive train, smaller footprint and user-serviceable technology .

For those discouraged to put their life in their own hands – it’s much riskier to put your life into someone else’s . You can mitigate the risks with checklists and solid testing procedures . Trust me , you will develop safety and quality standards that are much more rigorous than a shop .

I've read ZATAOMM some time ago and remember it highlighting my bias in perception. Mostly you look at things for what "they are" or "how they look" but not "how they work" or "their potential uses". I found that quite insightful and thought it was applicable in my work as well. I can't tell if it actually was though. :)

I expected the writer's footnote regarding organ donation to be anecdotal, but was surprised to find studies confirming a small, but significant basis in fact: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33334475/ https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/motorcycle-rallies-and-o...

Having tried to read Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I struggle to understand the book's popularity. The more I read the more I was convinced it was not the work of a healthy mind. Maybe he was schizophrenic? Wikipedia says yes, he was.

As someone who enjoys working on my own car and motorcycle - and as someone who does find a certain zen in maintaining the machines that I own - the book was a profound disappointment. Instead of finding philosophical insight from a relatable perspective, I found the ungrounded ramblings of a man who is seeking to understand a world which only quite exists inside his own mind.

I'm about as diy shade tree mechanic as it gets. Every car my extended family owns is over 200k miles, and we havent paid for a mechanic in over 25 years. I do it all, from general maintenance to swapping or rebuilding an automatic transmission.

A motorcycle actually taught me my main lesson of maintenance: sometimes it's just better to leave a well working system alone instead of servicing it for fun. I once did a task that was 2x behind schedule, and while doing so exposed a problem that almost caused it to fail hard the following weeks commute. If I had done that before a long trip, it would have been a serious problem.

I told this story to a prior air force mechanic and he laughed. He told me the military learned long ago that there is a limit to preemptive maintenance such that the likelyhood of problems from human error and just chance overshadows the benefit of the preemptive maintenance. I now no longer do any "might as well!" maintenance at all, and never do major maintenance before a trip without a good chunk of time prior devoted to road testing the vehicle again before the trip.

While not the key point of the article, if this made you at all curious about engine maintenance then I would recommend checking out howacarworks.com

It was posted here a while back and I’ve been enjoying the detailed build up.

A seasoned mechanic told me the 3 stages of a mechanics career progress.

1st a mechanic learns to fix things without breaking things along the way.

2nd a mechanic learns to do things quickly.

3rd a mechanic learns to do things without getting dirty.

I’m curious to hear the perspective of someone who is both into motorcycles and bicycles, as I’ve only ridden on a motorcycle a handful of times, while I cycle nearly daily.

Bicycle maintenance can be annoying, but it doesn’t seem nearly as time-intensive as motorcycle maintenance. On the other hand, the process of cycling feels better to me compared to being on a motor bike. It’s quieter, slower, and great exercise. I can talk with others. I feel as though I can get into a state of peace on lower effort rides, as well as a state of flow while racing.

I use metaphors like this when talking about programming: Any system of systems complex enough can easily be anthropomorphized...

But they both come back to basics: What is the overall model of how it should work? What are the symptoms? What do we know about the possible underlying causes of those symptoms? How do we design a test to see if the hypothesis is right? When we run the test, do we get confirmation, denial, or something else entirely? Did the test properly test the right thing?

And so on...

And at some point, is it worth fixing?

The author also cites sailors Knox-Johnston and Moitessier. I learned about both here on HN and found their respective books bingeworthy.

By Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, author of The Media Lab, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, assistant to Douglas Engelbart on The Mother of All Demos, and subject of the recent film We Are as Gods. Glad to see he's still busy!

I wish I could find a good enduro (KTM, Beta, Sherco) or motocross bike (KTM, Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki) with zerk fittings for the suspension. The expectation is that you take apart the whole suspension and grease it every 25-50 hours.

> Maintainers learn to be causation experts when dealing with repair. They build two narratives, one for finding the problem, and one for solving the problem.

I'd prefer to have those narratives delivered as part of the product when maintainer is hired.

The motocycle maintenance metaphor was very popular at Facebook.

Talking loudly about your accomplishment too, on the dedicated Workspace/Facebook @ Work—too much to the taste of several of my colleagues.

Someone once connected the two. They did so using a metaphor that compared the sound at the end of the digestive tube with the exhaust. I won’t repeat it here, but thought it was clever.