Cold Boot
What a fifty-cent clip and a military boot lace taught me about the parts nobody thinks to check. - BMW R850R
The metal clip that held my fuel line to the injector was smaller than a quarter. I never saw it again. I doubt anyone ever will, unless a farmer somewhere in Isle of Wight County finds it in the grass and wonders what it belongs to.
I was riding my BMW R850R home to Hampton Roads, east on a two-lane through Virginia farm country, well past midnight. Newport News was still over an hour off over the James River Bridge. Dark peanuts fields on both sides, a house light here and there, the kind of road where your headlight is the only thing proving the road still exists ahead of you.
All of a sudden, my right boot went cold. Very cold.
Not sore-cold, not numb-cold. Sharp-cold, as if I had suddenly plunged my foot into an ice bath. I registered it as strange before I registered it as a problem, which is usually how problems start. Then the engine started missing, then sputtering, then the whole bike lost its nerve and rolled to a stop on the shoulder.
Side stand down, engine off. With my helmet off the cool evening air of late autumn welcomed me. All I heard was the clicking of the cooling fins dissipating heat, and crickets in the distance. The nearest house was a good ways away. I was in the middle of nowhere.
That’s when I felt it. My foot wasn’t just cold, it was wet. Soaked, even. Boot full of gasoline. Sock squishy in the boot, soaked through. I stood there in the dark smelling like a gas spill and thinking some version of what the hell, though more colorfully.
Fuel had exited the engine the engine somehow, and gone straight into my pants and boot. I knew the fuel injector on this engine stuck out on the right side, so I wanted to see it.
Using my small flashlight I probed around the engine and quickly found the culprit: the fuel hose behind the right injector had let go, its plastic end piece dangling to the side of the engine, a gaping hole that poured gasoline out of the engine instead of inside it. A small metal clip, the kind that just presses into place and holds on by friction and hope, had worked itself free somewhere on that road, and the fuel pump, still running, still doing its one job faithfully, had been spraying gasoline directly onto my boot for the last quarter mile or so. That’s a design that trusts a two-dollar part with a job that matters quite a bit. Not BMW’s best.
I walked back with my puny flashlight, maybe a quarter mile, scanning asphalt, gravel and weeds for something looking like an expensive paper clip, at one in the morning, with a light meant for reading text messages. I want to be honest about how stupid this looked, because it did. A grown man in leathers, sweeping a narrow light beam across a Virginia ditch in the middle of nowhere, looking for a clip he was never going to find. Fortunately no one drove past at one a.m, forcing me to face the indignity of looking like a fool.
I didn’t find the clip.
Back at the bike I ran the arithmetic. One cylinder wasn’t an option, the bike barely ran, not with fuel spraying loose under the tank at speed. No clip meant no fix meant no ride, unless I MacGyvered my way out of here. I wasn’t calling anyone. Not at that hour, not out there. I looked around for anything I could use to fasten that fuel line to the injector, a piece of twine, perhaps.
I was wearing military boots. Boots have laces. Laces are cordage, and cordage is the oldest fix in the world. I pulled the lace out of the wet boot, the one already ruined, cut it roughly in half, and used one length to lash the plastic end of the fuel hose down onto the back of the injector. The other half went around the boot itself, snugged enough to stop flapping. It wasn’t elegant, but it held.
The bike started after pressing the starter button for longer than normal. I rode the rest of the way home on a boot lace holding a fuel line together, two hours of highway and back roads, waiting the entire time to feel that cold wet feeling come back. It never did. That lace held fast, outlasted the ride, got me home a bit past three a.m.
The very next day I replaced the boot lace quick repair with something sturdier, aviation grade corrosion proof safety wire. A simple job for any aircraft mechanic: anchor the safety wire around the body of the injector, wire twist to the plastic bit at the end of the hose, loop one and a half around it, then wire twist back to the other side of the injector, then a standard pigtail. That’s it, done by FAA standards. I want to say it’s still on there, but that would be a better story than the truth, and I don’t know what the new owner of the bike did after it left my home.
Here’s the part that sits with me now, longer after the fact than the breakdown itself ever did.
I inspect helicopters for a living. Eighteen years of that before that night on the side of the road in Virginia. I’ve spent my career on the other side of exactly this kind of part, the small unglamorous ones nobody thinks about until they fail: retaining clips, cotter pins, safety wire, the quiet hardware that keeps fuel and hydraulic fluid where it’s supposed to be instead of where gravity wants it. I sign my name to the idea that someone else’s aircraft is safe to fly. That’s the job. Somebody has to look at the boring parts as if they matter, because they do, and most people who use the machine never think about them at all.
I did not think about mine.
I never inspected that clip. I never had reason to. It was original equipment, another piece on the side of the engine, exactly the kind of fastener that lives its whole life unnoticed until it doesn’t. And there’s a version of me that wants to say the job made me careless on my own bike, some ironic little parable about the cobbler’s children. I don’t think that’s quite it. I think it’s simpler and less comfortable than that. The eye I bring to other people’s machines doesn’t automatically turn around and look at my own. It has to be pointed. Nobody was pointing mine that night.
I made it home that night, tired and reeking of gasoline. Went to work on Monday, presumably, teaching new soldiers to be aircraft mechanics, telling them to pay attention to the little details with the same eye that had missed a fifty-cent clip on my own bike a day earlier.
I still have the boots. Different laces now, but the smell of fuel is gone.
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