This past month has been an eye-opener, as I have waded once again into the forum swamp. How utterly and caustically antagonistic forums are! I regularly get emails and phone calls from people who visit my website, and not just from noobs. Check out my testimonials page. The owner of Cycle X called me a few weeks ago. The owner of Factory Pro emailed me a while back. I'm on the industry advisory board of the most successful mechanics training school in the U.S. When I taught mechanics, the students were eager, receptive, both those just starting out and the 30-year veterans of the trade. By contrast, forum people are consistently confrontational, they always want to debate, to challenge, to rebut. They act threatened, victimized, triggered. I have no time for that, and I refuse to beat my head against the wall. I have better things to do with my life. Why would anyone disrespect formally qualified advice. It saddens me that forums are like that. Have you ever wondered why the techs who win Yamaha's yearly technician Gran Prix--the best mechanics in the industry-- aren't on forums? No Erv Kanamotos or Byron Hines or Mike Velascos or Nigel Patricks or Joe Mintons (now there was an iconoclast!), names even forum people have heard of but who are conspicuously absent? There are dozens of technical stars of this industry and forums don't know who they are. For example, Dave Trombley. Ron Dickey. Mike Norman. Doug McIntyre. TJ Jackson. Bill Getty. Why don't these guys visit forums? Because they know what they'll encounter: Forum "experts" who declare that Honda's head gaskets are "impregnated with graphite to allow movement of the head against the cylinder during heating and cooling", promote using "copper wire..." to bench sync carbs, advocate using Honda's idle drop procedure as a tuning method, claim ethanol-laced gasoline requires carb rejetting, and advocate "using a Dremel with a sanding drum to smooth the transition from the carb to the boot as well as the transition from the boot to the head for better flow". At the end of the day, forum ethos can be described as the presumption of original thought (Thank you Dr. John Wittner, the famous Guzzi racer). Think about this, it's an important concept. That is, the hubric of believing your ideas--simply because they're yours--are original, no one has ever thought them before. Thus many think they know better than anyone else, even Honda. This is what goes on in forums and it's juvenile and foolish and insidious and by nature it denies the existence of professional best practices. Some say, "but forums are just people helping people." Yes, it's true, help is obviously there. But by denying members access to a veritable thought-galaxy far outside their own, forum "experts" aren't serving others. They're keeping them ignorant.

Part 5