"Necessity is the Mother of Invention..."

At least that's what they say.

With my rear tire sliding down the side of a steep railroad bed, loose gravel shifting out from under me, my front tire bouncing over the trestles within inches of being edge-trapped by the rail, I was beginning to think I should have stayed at home. Because he was still nursing a broken wrist, our ride leader had promised an easy ride, but easy for him on his DR-Z400 and easy for me on the heavier F650GS Dakar are two different things.

Railroad tracks in downtown OKC ... a hidden byway for dualsport motorcycles?

I thought I wasn't going to make this Saturday morning ride. The BMW had been sitting in my garage with its chain hanging off to one side for the last week. At a little over 10,000 miles, my chain and sprockets were totally shot, victims of a great deal of offroad fun. I'm pretty aggressive about chain maintenance, but they just don't last very long when constantly subjected to Oklahoma's abrasive sand and red dirt. I'd already installed the new sprockets, but I didn't have a chain-breaking tool to remove the old chain and size the new one. Nor did I have a link press to join the ends of the new chain. Running to the bike shop and buying the tools was a simple solution, but I'd never used them before, so I had taken up a friend on his offer to come over with his tools and show me how it was done.

The only problem was I didn't know when my friend would make it over, as he was tied up with family for Thanksgiving weekend. And I seriously wanted to join the gang for their Saturday morning urban dualsport outing in downtown Oklahoma City. James Pratt's urban rides are something of a revolution in dualsporting, putting knobby tires to use in an environment where at first glance they might seem out of place. Better to cruise the mean streets with a nice low-slung cruiser and your favorite lady's arms wrapped around your waist, right? Catch your reflection from the storefront windows before they open for the season's Christmas shopping mayhem, early in the morning before traffic demands all of your attention. Why on Earth would you need a dualsport motorcycle to ride downtown?

What's not at first obvious when you're downtown is the hidden world between the buildings and behind the storefronts ... shipping and freight yards, alleyways, drainage culverts, vacant lots, railways, construction sites ... the secret places under the spaghetti system of interstate exchanges ... places probably better known by our nation's homeless than by any motorcycle riders. Pratt has made a fine art of finding these secret byways. The riding is great fun and at times very challenging.

You never know what you'll encounter downtown...

The roof of a vacant parking garage makes for an excellent racetrack!

But there sits my Dakar, temporarily out of commission. What to do?

Surely not everyone in the world has fancy tools for this job? What would you use if you were stuck somewhere a hundred miles from the nearest bike shop? Or in a third world country in the middle of a ride around the world? Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention.

I used my Dremel tool to grind off the ends of the roller pins on a link of the old chain, then wedged a screwdriver into the link to break it apart. Tossing the old chain aside, I congratulated myself on completing half the job ... only problem: that was the easy half. I stretched out the new chain and counted links to get the size I wanted. The stock chain on the BMW is 112 links, but I was going up two teeth on the rear sprocket to change the gearing on the bike, so I needed a 114 link chain. The chain I'd bought was the standard 120 links.

When your sprocket looks like this (asymmetrical valley between the teeth and the tips of the teeth hooked over), it's definitely time for a replacement!

Again, I ground off a couple pins. Because I didn't want to damage the new chain, I couldn't wrestle it apart with a screwdriver the way I had the old one. Instead, I placed the chain on a block of soft pine in which I had drilled a hole just slightly larger than the pin. Then I used a hammer and a punch to carefully tap the roller pin out of the chain. Now to run the chain over the sprockets on the bike, being sure to route it correctly through the chain rollers and match up the end links on the rear sprocket.

I thoroughly greased the pins on the masterlink, put the o-rings in place, and joined the ends of the chain. Pressing on the sideplate would be tricky. Too tight and you risk crushing the o-rings. Too loose and you'll never get the masterlink clip to seat and stay in the retaining groves on the pins. I solved the problem by taking a spare sideplate, drilling the holes out slightly so that it would slip over the ends of the roller pins, then used it with a pair of channel-lock pliers to press the new sideplate in place. By keeping the pliers over the end of the pin, you won't crush the o-rings.

Using a spare sideplate and channel-locks to press a masterlink.

I used needle-nosed pliers to snap on the masterlink clip, closed end in the direction of travel. With a magnifying glass, I verified that the clip was indeed seated in the retaining groves on the pin. Most people lose their clip because it was never properly seated. Last thing, I put silicon sealant over the clip to help keep it in place.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a firm believer in having the right tools for the job. And if I'd had the right tools, I could have probably done this job in a third the time. But it's good to know that I could change out a motorcycle chain in just about any situation.

New chain and sprockets: ready to rock-n-roll!

With a new chain and sprockets, my reward is finding myself sideways on the steep bank of a railroad bed. My rear tire is slipping downhill as the gravel bank crumbles away. My front tire is parallel to the track, pointed the way I want to go, and I know proper technique here is to probably get up on the pegs and manage my throttle, trusting the rear of the bike to eventually climb the slope and fall in line with the front. But I'm worried about the front tire getting up against the eight inches of exposed train track, knowing it'll throw me down. Traction would be a huge help, but the rear tire just keeps slipping in the loose gravel.

I wound up easing the bike, still mostly sideways, for forty or fifty feet, walking it with one foot on the ground and nursing what little traction I could out of the rear wheel, fighting the great enemy Gravity. Not pretty at all, but at least the Dakar and I stayed vertical. When I finally got to the other side of the series of railroad tracks, sweating under my gear and feeling the euphoria of tired muscles and subsiding adrenaline, I found my riding partners waiting. Pratt had his camera out, evidently thinking he was going to get a shot of me on the ground. Fooled ya, buddy!

Once again, I've learned a bit more about riding. When necessity demands I cross similar terrain in the future, I'll have experience to draw on. When I face my next two-wheeled challenge, whether it be a maintenance procedure I've never tackled or a rugged stretch of landscape, I'll have the confidence to know I can figure it out.

Hope to see you on the road soon. Right now, I'm off to the bike shop to buy some new tools!