I can’t abandon this giant, crappy motorcycle—and I’ve tried

Sitting right in front of the garage door, perfectly centered under a warm incandescent 60-watt bulb, sits 850 pounds of five-speed, four-cylinder, three-shades-of-brown Honda Goldwing. It’s the motorcycle equivalent of a sad old shop dog. It mainly just sits around, but you know there will come a time—and soon—when it will be sent to a nice farm in Ohio.

I take pity on the Goldwing, but only when my tolerance for its bullshit stacks up high enough. This is the other side of tolerance stackup. If you’ve know that term, you probably heard it used in reference to a mechanical assembly that involves bearings or some other component that requires precise calculation to ensure a proper fit.

Think of something like a solid-lifter valvetrain in a cam-in-block V-8 engine. Change the deck height of the engine by milling the surface, add a thinner head gasket, and switch to an aftermarket roller-rocker cam, and a stock-sized pushrod will no longer be the correct length. You often cannot calculate correct sizing until you assemble all those parts, either, as the tolerance on each is a window, sometimes defined in thousandths of an inch, and those thousandths can stack up and create a very ill-fitting assembly.

Sloppy assemblies are side effects of production budget. Machining everything perfectly every time requires time and precision that is incredibly expensive to do at scale. In this garage, tolerance stackup is totally different. Here it is best described as the slow buildup of willpower required to accomplish jobs that are just plain unfun. That triple-brown Goldwing is a collection of exactly those.

In the middle of a busy summer, it got parked under that light, blocking the garage door. It became a nuisance—I had to roll its great heft around anytime I needed access to both garage doors. There was, and really is, no great place to park this behemoth.

This bike might photograph well, but it is scruffy. If you find Sam Smith’s Weissrat BMW project heroic, know that this Goldwing is truly garbage. There are missing and broken parts galore, yet the bike still runs. The wiring is hacked up. The seller provided no maintenance history, so the timing belt has likely been the same one for all of the 81,000 miles this bike has travelled. It got fresh fluids and a quick carb refresh when it arrived in my garage, and … nothing else. Then I took it on thousands of miles’ worth of adventures, waiting for the day it would leave me stranded.

It never has.

Often it would strand itself at home. I guess technically that is still stranding me, but the situation is not truly inconvenient, so I’m not sure. The latest instance was the expected culprit: the rack of four Keihin CV carburetors. It had reached a level of internal gunk buildup that meant the carbs acted more as air restrictors than as air/fuel mixing devices.

This bike gets the cheapest of everything, and that includes gas. Ethanol, the dreaded E word, had conspired to wreak havoc inside the carburetors’ bowls and passages. I knew this back in September. I took months to actually pull the rack of carbs.

The process is a pain in the butt. From removing the chrome farkles added by previous owners to re-routing the push-and-pull throttle cables so that they don’t bind when the airbox is installed, doing the job right takes all my patience. If just one piece of my proverbial mental assembly is out of spec, my will power evaporates and I avoid that project for another week.

My acquisition of this GL1100 is rooted in a joke. An off-hand comment about how cheap and shitty it was. A challenge to a group of friends that if they raised the funds to procure it I would not only get it running but do something stupid with it—a road trip, or jump, or any number of bad ideas involving a $450 vintage motorcycle.

Instead it became something I actually loved having around—a commuter whose hard luggage had plenty of space for anything I needed to carry, even if they weren’t waterproof any more. It is also the only motorcycle I have that is honestly street-legal and capable of highway speeds.

Even when I tried to let the Goldwing die, I couldn’t. Instead, I recruited a friend to help me push the stupid thing onto my motorcycle lift so I could clean and reassemble the carbs. This winter has been so mild I can still commute on this beast, so imagine my excitement when it fired right to life.

Then I went to start it this morning. The starter clutch died, and now the bike won’t start. A Goldwing’s starter clutch is chain-driven on the tail end of the engine and accessing it requires a lot of disassembly. The tolerance stackup inside that clutch finally hit the point it no longer works, and guess what? So have I. Sorry, Goldwing. I just don’t see my tolerance for the annoying parts of that repair building up anytime soon.

I’ll wait a bit, anyway. Maybe the way I’m measuring how annoying the job will be is wrong and I actually can tolerate the task. We’ll see. For now, it’s back under that lonely light bulb, blocking the garage door.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it.