It’s pronounced bee-bee-zed, like BB8 but with a zed. I’ll write more about the name in a later post, this post is just a status update.
Friday two weeks ago (5th of June) I picked up my motorbike from the garage where it had been stuck for almost three months. A sad combination of the Corona lock-down and well, the garage being a bit slow.
Because this blog is mainly read by me, and serves as my memoir, here a short timeline of what happened since “Bring him home“.
On the 11th of March, I dropped off the bike + sidecar at my garage/dealer. My main concern at the time was getting it looked at for the awefull steaming/smoking that happened on the Stadtautobahn. However, the guy from the transport company advised me to have the insurance assess the bike after the fall and take over those reparations as well. I mean, that’s why I do pay a fortune on insurance, so why not. I gave the garage my keys and the guidelines to a) check with insurance about the ‘fall’ reparations b) more importantly investigate the smoking. I’m not gonna bore you with the details about what the insurance said, but long story short: they’ll cover the damages due to the fall, but nothing else, so if the smoking wasn’t due to the fall, it’ll be on me.
On the 20th of March (after harassing both my insurance company and the garage) I learned about the cost of the damages caused by the fall: 4,917eur. Keeping in mind that only bumped into a wall at 1km/h, it kinda makes you wonder how much it would have been if I had an actual accident. Touching wood that won’t happen anytime soon, or at all. Additionally the expert who assessed the damages recommended they measure my frame again, just to be sure. I mean, you can’t be too sure with such an extreme impact I may have bent everything out of place.
On the 24th of April (after several follow-up emails and calls from my side) the Head Engineer informed me that they had measured out the frame and that everything was good. Thanks gods! But what about the smoke? Well, they hadn’t checked yet.
On the 18th of May (after yet another follow-up email from my side) I was informed that my bike made it to the actual garage for inspection (smoking problem). At this point I had told them not to take care of re-doing the Air Brush design because it would have required sending the boat back to Karlsruhe, and I thought that would take too much time – naive me, thinking that would be the reason for delay.
On the 26 or 27th of May (a Tuesday/Wednesday) I received a call from the garage, it went roughly like that:
"So, your bike is basically done, but I have one question - Yes? - Where did you get your handlebar from? - What do you mean? It came with the bike when I bought it form you. - No. We ordered a replacement handlebar for your bike and it's chrome, your current one is matte black. Did you have it changed? - No, it came with the bike. Matte black is the standard colour for my version of the machine. You know it comes in 3 colours right? - I don't know, that's not what the system says. I'll look into it and hopefully you can pick up the bike before the weekend. - Sure."
Of course it wasn’t finished for the weekend, did you really think it would be?
On the 4th of June (a Thursday) I received another call: “your bike is ready, you can come pick it up tomorrow anytime.” – I was in shock, I couldn’t believe it, after only 3 months my machine was ready.
On Friday the 5th of June, I made my way to the garage. After waiting for roughly 45 minutes (because “come around anytime” was a lie) I was finally shown my machine.
Pretty much everything related to ‘the fall’ had been fixed apart from the scratch on the boat (it’s not something that can be done locally, everything would have needed to be done again). And now you may wonder: but what about the smoke? Well, I wondered that too, and the answer was: “we couldn’t find anything, most likely it was just some rain water that go onto the cooling system before it got activated, so it was just water steam“. I am so glad it took 3 months to have that figured out, but hey, it’s done now.
We wrapped things up (I asked them if they had checked the battery and the tire pressure, after 3 months that seemed relevant and of course they didn’t) and as I finished putting my stuff in my bag the Engineer looked at me and went: “Wait. So we did your 1,000km check in November 2018, then last year we installed your windshield (that’s another 10 pages of story right there) but we didn’t do an inspection, and now it’s 2020 and we haven’t done an inspection yet either. You should make an appointment soon for your yearly inspection.” – I shall be looking for a new garage.
Today is the 17th of June, I haven’t ridden the bike again yet. It’s currently parked in my neighborhood where it gets the pleasure of getting peed and pooped on by random dogs and serves as a shelf for empty beer bottles. #BigCityLife
Next steps: training Loki to ride in the side car and then FREEDOM. Stay tuned!
