A light screwdriver
Sorted
It's a little known fact that I found out how to raise the headlamps from the CD-ROM manual I picked up from Ebay.
The manual was sourced from a mong with no idea on Copyright Law and absolutely no sense when it comes to the presentation of an electronic document set. Seriously, I paid £5 to have a selection of junk that some ponce downloaded from the Internet and, as this was all, "in the Public Domain", he thought it was his right to sell it! What really pissed me off was the poor quality of his scanning from the official Workshop Manual and his creating of a PDF without bookmarks. Pratt.
I did offer to help him out with my on-line eLearning skills, but for some reason, because I gave his shite product a Negative feedback comment on Ebay, breaking his un-broken record of 100% feedback (how'd he get that selling shit?) he took great offense! I don't often lie, and I was not about to admit that my being ripped off was a great experience or that the product was as described where the only description that made sense was that it came on a CD!
Anyway, I found out where to poke a screwdriver to adjust a light; a long-handled screwdriver I don't own. So I used a variety of shorter-handled screwdrivers and some fisting-dexterity up the underside of Shadowfax's forward fairing. Unfortunately, none of the buggers seemed to fit; Pro-drive, Posidrive, or spade-end. In desperation I dug out my little, tiny electric-testing screwdriver (you know, clear plastic handle with a light inside for shoving into 3-pin sockets to test they're live: "Bzzzzzzzzdt". (Gentle Smoke). One fried kidney and a bucket of black piss later you know you should have turned off at the mains first), which fitted, but only with my fingers at full-stretch and with finger-tip-only control of the twisting required to turn the adjuster screw in the light-adjusting motor assembly.
Just like mineAnyway, the inevitable (no lessons learned from Dilbert); the screwdriver slipped out of my fingers and into Shadowfax's fairing. It lodged between the radiator bracket and the strangely satisfying cleft of his fairing. It took some hours and bloody knuckles to determine it wasn't going to come out.
Now, this was some time back so consider it a confession borne of reflection and the need to unburden the guilt with which I admit I rode for a week with this bloody screwdriver shoved into Shadowfax's anatomical equivelent of inside his bra-strap; and just after he had just received his new front tyre.
There's a certain degree of denial when it comes to 90mph with the side-thought of, "what if the thing drops out...?"
The last weekend, when I gave Shadowfax his big clean and applied his wheel reflecting tapes I gave dislodging the screwdriver one more shot.
The edges of the fairing curl pleasingly around on themselves at the edges making a finger's width gully from under the light assembly down to the bottom of the radiator where the black filler covers the engine from stray objects catapulting off the front wheel. I had to prize this back a little - not enough to break anything - and insert fingers of two hands to sandwich the screwdriver handle to walk it upward enough to twist its angle to where its shaft could be exposed (steady on, Pat) and then grabbed a hold of with two spare thumbs before being worked out of its hole. (And that's YOU being smuty; not me).
Honestly, I was huffing and puffing, cursing like a trooper, and giving it vinegar looks with the efort of trying to squeeze the bugger out from the cleft while taking the pain like a man. Anyone walking past daren't even glance my way as all they could see was my feet in the air trying to counterbalance me leaning backward with my arms shoved so far up Shadowfax's fairing with blood trickling down my forearm from my knuckles, I must have looked like I was delivering a foal!
Anyway, it's out now and I feel good for coming clean.
Oh, and did it make a difference? I've convinced myself it has and that, with a longer shaft, I will be able to get it up even higher in the future.
Comments