Give a man a tool - the joys of bike maintenance

One of the good things about returning to bikes as a forty something is that it gives me the chance to get my hands oily again.

Way back, when I had a mini I used to attempt most of its servicing/fault fixing. I even attended an evening course on car maintenance, the highlight of which was taking an engine to pieces (easy), putting it back together again (a bit harder) with no pieces left over (the tricky bit).

I must admit this was only with partial success and the occasional cockup. The most extravagant of these was a simple error of forgetting to close the bonnet properly after an oil change. This resulted in the bonnet popping up when we were doing 60, briefly obscuring all vision before coming off its hinges and flying over the roof. Fortunately nobody was behind us to be decapitated and a temporay fix with gaffer tape was applied.
(PS: this was in the early days of me courting Mrs M. I must say she reacted very calmy to this minor calamity as she did when she enquired regarding the state of the mini's body work "are you meant to be able to see the road through the floor of the car?")

Next car after the mini was a Ford Capri 2.8i and this very quickly got me to the point where the car's sophistication soon exceeded my capabilties and I fell into the clutches of the local garage.
(the next car we had/still have was a Toyata Previa. I have had this 16 years and not even seen the engine!!! (it is a mid engined car and it is under the seats)).

This meant that my rather lovely set of tools remained unused (slightly sad story regards these, I got these cheap via a woman who had brought them for her husband as a gift before he told her he wanted a divorce. You have to think if only she had given them to him earlier...)

But now I have bike I can dust my wrenches off and start to use them again. A bike is perfect, it is simple, even for a klutz like me, nothing can go too badly wrong even if you do cock it up and best of all it has no electrical system. (Another memory from my car mechanic days was the smoke pouring out of the car's dash when I put in a new stereo and mixed up a couple of wires...).

Also it has lots of special bolts & bits which in turn need special tools. And there is nothing to make a man happier than when he has a new tool to play with.