Dave Brown

Goes with the territory, I guess

I tried to start my bike the other day, in the usual way: turn the key to “on”, grab the rear brake lever, and hit the starter button. Aprilia went to some lengths to make sure that you wouldn’t accidentally start it in a way which would have you roaring off into a wall, which is something that, say, Suzuki, would have done well to emulate. Not that I speak from personal experience or anything.

However, instead of the reassuring vrwrwrwrVROOOM! that I was expecting, all I heard was a forlorn clicking noise.

A friend of mine suggested that maybe my battery had become feeble on account of the cold weather, and lent me a charger to get it up to full charge absent taking the bike out for a good roar on the expressway. I spent a significant time on the bike roaring along expressways, so I was a bit dubious, but I did accept the merit of his idea at face value, and charged my battery up.

While I was doing so, I checked all the fuses in the fusebox just in case one of them had blown. If that had been the case, the bike is furnished with a complete collection of spares, so it would have been the work of a moment to make it go again, leaving me with the not-so-onerous task of finding a replacement fuse. But of course, as you might expect, all of the fuses were still in immaculate condition.

When I put the fully-charged battery back into the bike, I grabbed the brake, hit the starter button, and just for good measure, goosed the gas. And it responded with a healthy clicking noise just under the front of the seat near the battery. And nothing else.

Naturally, this meant that, being an Italian bike, something bad had happened in the electrical system, and it would most likely be amazingly involved to fix. It could have been anything from a loose wire going to the starter motor to one of the coils in the starter motor having melted for mysterious reasons, up to and including a random lightning strike. Or possibly one of the neighborhood cats pissing on it.

So I decided to see if I could find some help nearby with it, and hopped onto my smaller auxiliary bike to troll the nearby motorcycle shops. The first shop I went to explained that since they only deal with domestic bikes, if they needed any parts to fix my bike it would be excessively-complicated and expensive on their part; I would be better off finding a bike shop that was authorized to service Aprilia bikes.

So I went a little further afield to find the local shop that dealt with Aprilia bikes. They explained to me that since I hadn’t bought my bike there, getting it serviced would cost a pretty penny which would be sad if it were something that were covered by warranty; and further, having a truck come out to my place to haul my bike to the shop would cost forty thousand yen (somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred US dollars). The guy at the store pre-emptively told me that that was a bit on the excessive side, and I would most likely be better off getting hold of the place that sold me the bike, inasmuch as if it were covered by warranty, I wouldn’t be out of pocket at all. Hooray for honest mechanics!

So I fell back on the option I should have tried first, despite being far away and all: I called my dealer and told them what had happened. They immediately said, “Wait, we’ll get back to you and tell you when we can send a truck out to pick your bike up!”

Now my bike is at the dealer. I hope it’s just a loose wire somewhere; if that’s the case, that’ll mean I get it back tomorrow. If it’s not, and they have to order parts from Italy, I might get it back sometime next month. Maybe.