I missed a shift today on my old Magna. Twice, I missed it hard. Once accelerating away from home on US-23, the second time leaving the gas station, which I have to stop at every day when I ride. The 2nd to 3rd gear shift was the one giving me fits for some reason. It never did before, and I hope the transmission isn’t going bad. The old Honda Magnas have some sort of a history of doing that occasionally.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had missed shifts on a motorcycle. The first memorable one, coincided with my very first power wheelie. I was pulling out onto Grand River Ave going to work. I was riding my father’s ’83 Honda Nighthawk 550. The traffic was really heavy as usual, so I decided to shoot for a small gap, and use the turn lane as an acceleration lane. I know, it’s wrong, but I did it. I pulled hard through first gear, and power shifted into second, but I popped into Neutral instead, the engine over revved, and I got mad and jammed it into 2nd gear, while the engine was still at redline. When I popped the clutch, with the throttle wide open, I popped the biggest wheelie I have ever done, I didn’t know what else to do, so I just hung on for dear life, and held the power on. I must have been quite the sight. Wearing my long black duster, black helmet, and riding one wheel down the turn lane surrounded by traffic. Everything got back to normal when I shifted into third, and I motored my way into work.
The second memorable missed shift incident, was actually many. It was my ’74 Sportster, and among other problems, it liked to wreck the 2 to 3 shift as well., any time you tried to power shift even the slightest bit. The only way to get it to shift clean, was to completely let off the gas, and shift it hard and deliberately with your foot. Tom “Shorty” Palmer and I, tried about three times to fix it. Removing the transmission, measuring and shimming the shift forks differently. But it never shifted quite right. Dumb old thing.
That happens sometimes. I go like hell, and up shift hard, only to miss it somehow, and pop out of gear. The engine revving uselessly.
When Pratt & Whitney planned to shut down our facility in Plattsburgh, they gave us plenty of notice, and a severance package. They were quite good about it overall. So I had about 8 months notice that I’d have to move most likely. I decided to look around locally, and country wide, and see what was out there. The second half of 2008 wasn’t the best time to be looking for a job if you recall. 3 months went by, and I made a decision. I would contact my old employer back in Michigan, and try to get in with them. It worked, and I arranged to have a good position, set to start one week after I had to leave my job at Pratt. We put our house on the market, I sent the wife and kids out before school started, so they could start school at the right time in the new place. We even found a decent house we were able to buy on a land contract.
My time in Plattsburgh ended, I drove the last load of stuff out to Michigan. Leaving our wonderful house in NY empty, and for sale. I arrived in Michigan, the first thing I noticed, was that I had wrecked my truck’s transmission. I hauled it behind the U-haul on a dolly, and had ignored the “unhook driveshaft” label on the instructions. Apparently, that was important. Other than that, it went smoothly. Everything got unloaded, and I started my new job at the end of that week.
Two weeks after I started my new job, we were informed of some downsizing in the company, due to the economical climate, which was bad. I was demoted out of the Inspection department, to a floor mechanic. Ironically, working for a guy who was a helper on my crew back in the ‘90’s.
In the following couple months, I was very unhappy at work, as this wasn’t what I had wanted to do. Out in NY, our house ran out of fuel oil, and all the pipes froze, breaking the water radiators, and bathroom fixtures. And we still had no offers on it.
At the end of January, I took a layoff. From my new job, after only 2.5 months. It was pretty discouraging to say the least. Thus began almost 18 months of unemployment. There were sad times, such as when we lost the house in NY to foreclosure. There were good times, as when I got to do so much with the children and their school stuff. A lot of the time was spent being kind of listless, and depressed, playing Second Life, or World of Warcraft. Such was how I buried my sadness I think.
But overall, it was a good thing I think. It helped me put things into perspective, and get my head straight. I hadn’t been in such a good frame of mind after Pratt laid me off. I had been there more than 8 years, and was sort of looking at that as a really long term thing.
In the end, I went back to work, as an Inspector again. I’m pretty happy now, looking forward for the most part. It was just a really long transition period.
On my motorcycle today, I did slow down at one point and try accelerating again, just to see if the false neutral happened again. It didn’t. I just had to be more “manly”, and precise in the application of my foot when I shifted. That’s a pretty simple solution for that.
I only wish missed up shifts in Life, were so easy to recover from and compensate for.
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