Special Tools

Anybody who has ridden a motorcycle for very long in Patagonia knows two things. One is that there are no spare parts for your bike. The other is that certain local mechanics can do things that you would never expect to be possible by those who call themselves mechanics "back home."

Here in Puerto Natales, one of the magicians is Samuel. He used to be with the Chilean KTM team for races like the Paris-Dakar. For people like Carlo de Gavardo.

Back in 2001 I had a problem with my 1997 KLR650. One of the fork seals had gotten a bit loose and was allowing oil to spray onto the front disc rotor. At the time it was not clear where the offending oil was coming from and I thought it might have been coming from the brake caliper. Samuel quickly found the problem and told me there were of course no spares within 1000 km or more. And he had no tools for disassembly of the forks. He did determine the internal hex size inside the fork for the tool that would need to fit into that recess so that the Allen bolt at the bottom of the fork, on the outside, could be removed. Samuel found a hex-headed bolt that was about 2 mm or so larger than the required size, and ground down the flats until it fit into the internal hex inside the fork. Then he disassembled both forks, cleaned them out properly, and eventually re-seated the Argentine fork seal that had been leaking (it had been installed in 1999 at a shop near Mendoza).

I was amazed to find fork oil in Natales back in 2001, and a bit dismayed last year when we went through the forks again and I found that nobody in Natales sold motorcycle fork oil anymore. But Samuel still had that "special tool" that he had kept around since there are a lot of KLR650s that come through these territories.

Fast forward to 2009, and Samuel is dealing with two KLRs with balancer system problems (including an offending 2008 KLR). He had no special tools for removing the craftshaft rotor bolt to do the repair. To hold the rotor to remove the rather substantial bolt, you need an offset wrench. So Samuel took a crescent-type wrench, adjusted it to the required opening, cut off the handle, and welded the head of the crescent-type wrench to an offset handle. As you see in the foto.

Now that the rotor bolt was out, he needed a rotor puller. Again, Samuel did not have the special tool, but he had the rotor bolt so he determined what the thread size was. Then he found a piece of pipe with about the right diameter - that is, the same outside diameter as the Kawasaki special tool used for rotor removal. He went to a machinist in Natales and got the proper threads cut into his new tool, and used a pipe wrench to turn it. Bingo, the rotor popped off nicely.

Now, if you bring in a BMW or other overly modernized bike and expect Samuel to fix a problem with an electronic item, you will probably be disappointed. There are certain limitations even for Patagonian magician mechanics.