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Those were my Chetak Scooter years. I was so much in love with my scooter that every Saturday morning I would lug it onto my verandah, remove the engine side cover, sit down on a stool, clean the spark plug with petrol, tune the carburetor, wipe the engine with a wet cloth, close the cover, and, and, and...pour a couple of buckets of water on the scooter giving it a thorough body wash.
Every Saturday without fail.
After a decade of this love-affair, one day I brought the scooter out of our gate, asked my wife to sit on the pillion seat, started the engine, engaged the first gear and turned the throttle.
To my utter astonishment and my wife's panic, the scooter practically split itself into two, the front-end with me and the back end with my wife, lurched and stalled.
My wife and I got down and discovered that below the mat there was a huge crack, revealing a rusted foot board.
I brought Raghu and asked him to do the needful. He inspected the foot board and was amazed how I managed to break a Chetak into two clean halves (front tire and back tire severed apart...like cutting a log into two halves). The sight was apparently too painful for him to watch.
I told him about my weekend 'clean-up' of the scooter over a decade and more with a body-wash with a couple of buckets of tap water. And then he said it figures and explains the rusting. It would have been a wonderful objective lesson for a student of chemistry...what rust can do.
I asked him: "But you too have a pump and a nozzle and give our scooters a thorough wash with water (dirty)".
He then said:
"Sir, you might have noticed that before we wash the scooter, we rinse the body with a mixture of petrol and oil. That spreads a thin film of oil on the body and the water which we pump up on it subsequently doesn't 'stick' to the body but rolls down in droplets"
Moral: Don't ape an expert in a subject in which you are not trained.
See what an ass I made of myself with Jaan Saheb's Sewing Machine when I was just a kid of 12:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2009/10/teacher-is-born-with-lesson.html
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Those were my Chetak Scooter years. I was so much in love with my scooter that every Saturday morning I would lug it onto my verandah, remove the engine side cover, sit down on a stool, clean the spark plug with petrol, tune the carburetor, wipe the engine with a wet cloth, close the cover, and, and, and...pour a couple of buckets of water on the scooter giving it a thorough body wash.
Every Saturday without fail.
After a decade of this love-affair, one day I brought the scooter out of our gate, asked my wife to sit on the pillion seat, started the engine, engaged the first gear and turned the throttle.
To my utter astonishment and my wife's panic, the scooter practically split itself into two, the front-end with me and the back end with my wife, lurched and stalled.
My wife and I got down and discovered that below the mat there was a huge crack, revealing a rusted foot board.
I brought Raghu and asked him to do the needful. He inspected the foot board and was amazed how I managed to break a Chetak into two clean halves (front tire and back tire severed apart...like cutting a log into two halves). The sight was apparently too painful for him to watch.
I told him about my weekend 'clean-up' of the scooter over a decade and more with a body-wash with a couple of buckets of tap water. And then he said it figures and explains the rusting. It would have been a wonderful objective lesson for a student of chemistry...what rust can do.
I asked him: "But you too have a pump and a nozzle and give our scooters a thorough wash with water (dirty)".
He then said:
"Sir, you might have noticed that before we wash the scooter, we rinse the body with a mixture of petrol and oil. That spreads a thin film of oil on the body and the water which we pump up on it subsequently doesn't 'stick' to the body but rolls down in droplets"
Moral: Don't ape an expert in a subject in which you are not trained.
See what an ass I made of myself with Jaan Saheb's Sewing Machine when I was just a kid of 12:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2009/10/teacher-is-born-with-lesson.html
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