Well, it was bound to happen. Every project I have worked on up until this point has been successful without any major hiccups. No mechanical failures beyond some simple adjustments. No unfortunate wrecks. All of that changed during the 2023 riding season.
During the Spring thaw, I took out my 2006 Victory Vegas 8-Ball for a ride with my brother. 4th gear was still shifting weird, even after an oil change that I was hoping might help the issue. It had been “surging” for about a year prior to that and I was hoping that maybe the oil composition was just slightly off (which has happened on other bikes). On the ride back to my house, about 300 yards from my front door, 4th gear decided that it had enough of this life and checked out. 0 power to the wheels. Luckily the other gears still worked to limp me home that last little bit.
Upon arrival, the bike died. Trying to put it back in neutral only worked with the clutch. Great. Transmission was totally junked. This led me to some hard decisions I needed to make. Do I try to split the case and do all the work myself? Do I send it to a shop and hope they can do it? Or maybe I just do a full motor swap that has a working transmission in it. I eventually went with the second option and took it to a dealer hoping a “professional” could just take care of it. This was mistake number one.
Since I knew the shop fees were going to be expensive, I decided to sell my 96 Shadow Bobber: Jackpot. The money I would make off the sale would hopefully be able to cover a transmission rebuild at the dealer and I would be back to having a more powerful cruiser. It was not an easy decision to make as I really loved that bike. I lovingly referred to it as my “engagement bike” because when my wife and I got engaged, instead of a ring for me, she told me to buy a motorcycle of equal value. The reason I chose to sell it over just cutting the loss with the Victory is that I wanted a faster bike than the shadow and my newly built 1980 Honda CM400 Scrambler was a ton of fun for the lower speed stuff. This was mistake number two.
Fast forward a couple of months and the dealer still hadn’t fixed my Victory. They told me to go buy a motor from a 2008 Vegas because they thought the repairs would just be too costly to tear into the current motor. Having not done a ton of research, I trusted that that was the correct thing to do. After all, they were the “professionals” right? I asked them and the guy selling the motor to verify that it would fit in a 2006. They all assured me it would. Guess what? They were wrong. 2008 was the first year they changed the motor on the Victories to use different compression, throttle body, and a bunch of sensors. Of course, I found that out AFTER the dealer told me they can’t seem to make it work in the bike. Seeing as I am the one that had to try and troubleshoot all of these issues instead of the dealer doing it on their end, I told them I would just pick up the bike as it is and take it back to my place. Thanks…for…nothing!
So now I had a 2006 Victory Vegas pretty much all torn down. The engine was out. The tank and other bits were laying around. Oh, and a 2008 Victory Vegas engine that I had no use for now taking up space in my garage. Sweet. At least I still had my scrambler for some Autumn riding…I hopped on the bike and took it for a spin around my regular 20 mile loop. Immediately after leaving my neighborhood, it started to act temperamental and then really just started to bog. I looked for a place to pull off the road safely and turn around to go home. Apparently that wasn’t fast enough because the engine then makes a loud bang followed immediately by the rear wheel locking up and me sliding down the road at about 50mph. Luckily there were no cars around me and I was able to pull off onto a side street. I was also able to keep the bike upright during the full rear wheel slide. So I guess I had that going for me.
That’s now all 3 of my bikes either broken or sold in the span of about 6 months. As the saying goes, “when it rains, it pours.” That was a pretty rough pill to swallow at that point. No Fall riding. My main way to blow off steam, gone. But as per usual, I don’t like to sit idle and not take action. I tore apart the engine on the scrambler hoping that maybe it’s just a top end issue. Nope. The piston had somehow split in half at the connecting rod and threw the rod into the crankcase completely destroying the engine. I had heard the term “threw a rod” but never seen or experienced it for myself. It’s as bad as they say. 0/10. Would not recommend.
After some searching, I was able to locate another engine for that bike. Only trouble was, it’s not getting spark. So now I had to start swapping parts from the blown-up engine onto the new motor and hope I could get it running. Ooof. At least winter was almost here so I would feel less bad about having a bunch of bikes just sitting in the garage.
J. CURTIS CUSTOMS 