I turn away a lot of work these days. My competitors think I'm getting senile, my friends dismiss me as a crotchety old man, the potential customers I refer elsewhere are mystified altogether. I've given up trying to explain. Neil Young sang the lyric, "...searching for a heart of gold...and I'm getting old." That's a little like me.

In my work I expect to connect with like-minded enthusiasts, riders of 70s Hondas who are "in all the way". Who get the archaic ethos of frequent maintenance. But there are not many left. There are so many of the other kind in fact that I have concluded it no longer pays to rebuild carburetors for those machines most demanding of a maintenance ethic. Their owners just don't get it. They refuse to be educated, won't believe that their bikes are more than carburetors. It's a deeply unsatisfying, incredible loss for me. Not just of business, but of emotional connectiveness with those machines I love most. And in the "adding insult to injury" department there is the sohc4 forum, that iconoclastic "enabler" of today's anti-maintenance ethos and the least authoritative voice in the vintage Honda space.

I want to ask, where did the maintenance ethos go? But I know where it went. It went with its champions, those knowledgeable and experienced in 70s Hondas and in tune with that era of the company's pulse. There are not many left. And I'm getting old.