Every time I visit most of motorcycling's user forums it leaves me shaking my head. Recently, one forum member posted asking what should the cylinder compression in his bike be. The first poster to answer said the number doesn't matter, and that it's more important that the cylinders be within ten percent of each other, and went on to state that compression gauges vary so much that the test is unreliable. I am not making this up. This are real posts! 1 The second "helper" offered that 35 years of testing compression has frustrated him so much he now relies solely on the thumb-in-the-hole method. 2 The next to chime in quoted a Clymer manual for the compression values. Yet another member recounted that he has never seen Honda-spec cylinder compression even on freshly-rebuilt engines, and one of the forum's revered, self-styled "experts" unashamedly affirmed that, further charging Honda with deliberate deception. 3

This goes on all the time. For years one of the biggie forum authorities has preached that vintage four-cylinder Hondas won't charge their batteries adequately if even a single non-original electrical component, such as a quartz headlight, is fitted. This same individual recommends using a feeler gauge for checking piston-to-cylinder clearances, using an automotive brake cylinder hone on motorcycle cylinders, demonstrates ignorance of the difference between detonation and preignition, and, though declaring to be a former authorized Honda dealer mechanic condones refacing post-1970 Honda valves. 4

Very recently I was on a forum where a member asked for advice for a situation in which his cylinder assembly had one sleeve sticking up above the deck. And he was advised by presumably very smart people to simply have it milled down! Incredible. 5 This stuff makes me crazy!

Daily, new people come to forums looking for answers, and they get no better advice than if they had engaged in conversation with the bag lady camped out at the laundromat. Soon they're converts, but of what? What are they being schooled in? An entirely false ethic. Every day I have this to deal with in engaging with my customers. I get that I have to allow for people finding their own way and that I don't have to be a prophet for best practices in every conversation about vintage Hondas. But when engaged in the technical aspects of these bikes, what is the alternative? A prophet for best practices is what I end up being because the advice of even the most revered person on a forum is often just plain silly, and frequently much worse. Teach them? Every time I have weighed in on these nonsense threads, it's like throwing a rock at a pack of long-fanged, fearless, odorous Javelinas. The result is not pleasant.

And there’s so much more. Checking steering bearings by shaking the fork, putting case sealer on an oil seal, excusing poor compression in a rebuilt engine on the need for "break-in", blaming oil consumption on non-staggered ring end gaps, encouraging resistance tests as the basis of troubleshooting. And on and on and on. What has happened to peoples' ability to reason? Bad information is accepted so readily no one stops to think.

Forums are completely out of touch with best maintenance and repair practices. I have never used a can of penetrating oil, a brake cylinder hone, a rubber-tipped compression tester, or a piercing-point electrical tester. Unitil a few years ago I had never owned a pair of Vise-Grip pliers, and I haven't owned a valve lapping stick for over 40 years. The veritable breadth of the universe exists between the real world and that of the most popular powersports user forums. They're completely different domains. Forum authorities teach that compression leans an engine when it actually does the opposite. They teach that 6mm cam bearing bolts break because they are defective while ignoring the almost universally incorrect factory-published torque specification for these fasteners. They ascribe to ethanol symptoms that stare them in the face as actually poor maintenance. They encourage milling engine parts to improve sealing while ignoring decades of Japanese engine history that negates that. Nothing is ever said of inch-pound torque wrenches. Nothing is ever said of correct electrical connector repair. Not a word about valve recession, the single most important issue facing vintage Honda owners; or clutch adjustment, a thing almost every owner views incorrectly, or even proper drive chain maintenance, or correct valve adjustment. They glibly, ignorantly, and incessantly promote in-service cylinder honing, by which many unsuspecting members have ruined their engines. They encourage yearly carburetor overhaul in place of proactive long-term fuel preservation. They recommend flaky, poorly-engineered aftermarket ignition primary and secondary components rather than educating members on points system maintenance and ignition coil testing. They blithely approve of Chinese parts of all kinds. They sneer at the importance of compression and leakdown testers, maintenance tools that should be as common as spark plug sockets—but sadly, aren't. The list is virtually endless of ways in which forums largely have established their alternate world, a planet called Exalted Ignorance. Remote, in another galaxy, this planet is isolated from and overtly hostile to nearby planet Earth. 6

Notes:

1. Why do I visit these forums? The discussions help me understand what my customers are thinking.

2. Talk about subjective! Not to mention lacking any kind of emperical value.

3. Run from such advice!

4. I like the guy, I've communicated with him, and I respect him for his efforts for the powersports community and for his Christian testimony. But really, there is some serious impersonation of a professional mechanic going on here.

5. Anyone who has been around Japanese engines in a repair context for even the shortest length of time knows why this happens and how to fix it. And machining is the very last thing you want to do.

6. Do you suppose I am being embarassingly Don Quixote -esqe, hopelessly "tilting at windmills", exercising angst? Conversations with other career powersports professionals assure me I am not. Most are less vocal about it, but they are just as perplexed, just as disgusted, and even more dismissive. This year's election circus brought something home to me. The news networks flood the unwary with dubious, subjective information calculated to change one's thinking, to move one to conclusions by force of empty rhetoric and ad-hominen narrative. Man, that seems a lot like forums!