Where do you draw a line on forum member responcibility?

My first ALL street bike was a '76 XS650 Special.

I joined an MG car forum. I put a motorcycle engine in one. You would laugh at all the negative feedback I got for 'ruining' an old 'classic'.

https://www.mgexp.com/forum/mg-midget-forum.3/1973-midget-build.1645751/

kshansen said:

I'm on another forum devoted to the old XS650 Yamahas. That has to be one of the best forums around. The people there don't have any problems talking about weak points of the various versions of the bike and they have workarounds for just about every one.

What I think may be the problem with a forum like ww's RV forum is too many of the ones there just dumped a tone or two of money on their new toy and just don't want to admit it is not perfect. Where someone owning a 40 year old XS650 they found in a barn has no trouble admitting it needs help. And some of those 40+ year Yamahas now look and run better than when they left the factory. Same can be said for some of the old yellow machines guys on this site have!

Can't help but think what one of those RV's will look like in 40 years!

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You nailed it right on the head Ken.

These were not new RV's by a long shot, primo in the day but getting on in age.

I really felt sorry for one of the new guys. He found a unit and bought it. Never even made it back home and he was on the side of the road waiting for a tow. The key pad for the Allison had crapped.

He got it towed to a shop closer to his home town and made it home from there. While it was in the shop, they found a cracked exhaust manifold so of course he had them change it out.

Man was he PI$$ED, not even home and dumping thousands into it. His wife was not a happy camper at all.

So he is back on the forum and posting his issues and the collective turned on him.

Well, it is a 20 year old unit, what do you expect...
When we bought ours we put $40K into it...
Mine cost me another $20K to get home ...
They were all laughing at him.

That didn't go over well at all and he told them.
Next thing you know, all of his posts are being monitored, they all had to be approved by a mod and posted by the mod.
That went over even worse.

That was about the time I bailed.

Tell a guy how great they are, all the best components, never break, run for years.

Oh, it broke. Well what do you expect.

At least you didn't buy brand z, they are so much worse.

Vomit

ianjoub said:

I joined an MG car forum. I put a motorcycle engine in one. You would laugh at all the negative feedback I got for 'ruining' an old 'classic'.

https://www.mgexp.com/forum/mg-midget-forum.3/1973-midget-build.1645751/

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Crazy, maybe
Fun, OH HELL YES!

Did you have that posted on HEF before or did I find it somewhere else. Have watched a few of the Youtubes.

Looks like fun.

DMiller said:

My first ALL street bike was a '76 XS650 Special.

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My first bike was a 1966 Bridgestone, yea the tire company, all of a wild 60 cc's of two-stroke power! But it would do 60 mph on the flat! I'd like to see any other bike even come close to half the MPH of their displacement!

wornout wrench said:

Crazy, maybe
Fun, OH HELL YES!

Did you have that posted on HEF before or did I find it somewhere else. Have watched a few of the Youtubes.

Looks like fun.

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May have posted it before.

I don't have that much going on in my life, sometimes I repeat myself

After I posted that above, I went and reread all 66 pages of the thread. Wow, what a journey. I still have it in my shop, worked on reassembly yesterday until I got side tracked byt fitting out a trailer to hold all my MTL attachments.

My first street bike was a1980 XS650 Special II. I always thought is was a little short on power. I put about 23,000 miles on it and tore it down to the cylinders. Honed the cylinders a bit, installed new rings and found out the cam was timed wrong from the factory. It was running a tooth or two retarded for all those miles. Anyway when I fired it up the performance was eye opening. It was pretty tame before but it had a lot better response and a few more ponies. I taught my son in law how to ride it and sold it to him. It went back to Spokane and the daughter and son in law had a great time with it. They let it go when they were doing college and the first kid came along. They were nice simple bikes that just ran on and on.

I ran Kawasaki 175 endure street/trail dirt primarily bikes a few years after initiating my riding love on the old Honda 90 in the sixties. Moved on to bigger better badder with Yamaha Street Bikes the last being a 81 XS 1100 which tended to scared the crap out of anyone else that rode it. Been on old FL Harleys a few times, hard tails have a LOT of drawbacks, built a couple of basket cases around a Pan and Shovel and lost a lot of money doing so. More into soft ride HD now, 2012 Road Glide Ultra and is what I will have until my back says no more.

Dontcha just love it when you've got pages of "trying" to help someone out & they come back & start "yelling" at u about how THAT didn't work.??

Especially when they screwed it up in entirety.

U wouldn't believe the pumps I get AFTER the customer shot the engine full of ether, "trying to get it to run"..

How does ether screw up an injection pump?

Sorry, I somehow erased the rest of the tale..
& when they get the pump back & the engine still doesn't start, its somehow "my fault" their engine doesnt have any compression & pistons are broken.??!!
99% of the time when I get a pump in, its FULL of crud, mud, water, rust & internal parts are broken or completely worn out.. but "somehow" I was supposed to use my xray vision & see they destroyed the engine before THEY diagnosed it as a pump problem..

thepumpguysc said:

... AFTER the customer shot the engine full of ether, "trying to get it to run"..

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Pains me to say I was ignorant. I used to be a regular user of ether to start. Thought it to be a normal procedure since the machine had a built-in ether injector. After replacing the block heater, starter and batteries, I haven't used ether on the BH in several years. Not once... Even removed the ether injector system.

If they can't spell responsibility, I tend to look at the post with one eye closed until I see who's posting.

Sorry vtech 63- I can't help myself sometimes....

I was thinkin the same thing CO.. Lol
HOSS, U COULD SELL THAT ETHER INJ. SYSTEM..

thepumpguysc said:

I was thinkin the same thing CO.. Lol
HOSS, U COULD SELL THAT ETHER INJ. SYSTEM..

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Too late … Dumped in the scrap barrel, long gone. Reminds me of the time I scrapped an old rusty farm fertilizer sign. As I was leaving, guy picked it up, saying "city folk will pay good money for this"

How many of us look around the "Cracker Barrel" restaurant and think... "I have one of those..."
or worse …
"I just threw one of those away "

hosspuller said:

How many of us look around the "Cracker Barrel" restaurant and think... "I have one of those..."
or worse …
"I just threw one of those away "

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The thing is if everyone had saved all those old signs or parts the market would be saturated and they would have no real value!

What about all the metal toy trucks and cars so many of us old guys destroyed out in the sand box? And then there are all the old balloon tired bicycles my father would bring home when he was cleaning out houses for people, those things bring big money these days and when we got done with them they went to the scrap yard for a few pennies scrap prices.

crane operator said:

If they can't spell responsibility, I tend to look at the post with one eye closed until I see who's posting.

Sorry vtech 63- I can't help myself sometimes....

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LOL...…...I swear I just noticed that! Spell check failed me again!!!!!

Vetech63 said:

LOL...…...I swear I just noticed that! Spell check failed me again!!!!!

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Spelling was never one of my good points, can't count how many times I can screw up a word so bad my spell-checker can't even figure it out! There have even been a couple time I had to resort to an old paper dictionary to find how to spell a word! Then again there are times I can be maybe one letter off, like use an "e" where it should have an "i", and the spell-checker gets stuck!