<< So it was possible to implement an un-maintainable system even in the 80's, >>

Ed, it would probably be maintainable if you hadn't waited so long before trying ? I guess most things would become unmaintainable after waiting long enough.

Well this is true,

Abandoned/neglected motorcycles are probably commoner than ditto cars, partly because they take up less space.

BUT there are for sure design factors involved.

The brakes on the Skywing had probably been neglected for as long or longer .(Taiwanese are very big on the "You never have to change your brake fluid" :philosophy particularly unfortunate given the humidity here) but there were proper reasonably sized bolt heads that suggested it might have been actually intended to be taken apart, and it came apart, without access to the engineering deck resources of the Starship Enterprise.

I dont know if that applies to contemporary cars, which arent generally built with maintenance in mind, and so I shouldnt have originally implied these were necessarily easy to strip, since I dont know.

It certainly doesnt apply to this motorcycle, which demonstrates that design awfulness is easily achievable.

More generally, motorcycles are infested with tiny recessed and corroded cross-head screws which may or may not be JIS, no way of telling that I know of, which need undone with an impact driver that has bits that may or may not be JIS, no way of telling that I know of.. A couple of these hold the lid on the master cylinder reservoir and will need drilled out.

This probably does not apply to contemporary cars, which have electronics to make them un-maintainable.

I could go on at length about other features of motorcycle design-for-maintenance awfulness, a sore point at the moment, but I wont.

More generally, motorcycles are infested with tiny recessed and corroded cross-head screws which may or may not be JIS, no way of telling that I know of

Here you go (may need a microscope): rtstools.com/jis-vs-phillips-screwdrivers-and-wher.../

Jeez!

According to that article, there is real JIS and neo-JIS, and only one known maker of real JIS screwdrivers on the planet.

(SUNFLAG otherwise known as New Turtle - obviously they couldnt only have one name. That'd cause confusion)

So even my Vessel JIS screwdriver. bought by me in Yokohama, in Genuine Japan, from a Genuine Japanese, probably isn't quite right for real JIS screws, if such screws did in fact exist on my old Japanese (or Taiwanese copy of an old Japanese) machine, which I can neither confirm nor deny.

The situation is worse than I thought, and I already thought it was hard to believe how b***** awful it was.

Edited by edlithgow on 13/04/2024 at 03:58