Altameroy Blog

Scooters expect habitual maintenance in order to extend the utilisation of the scooter to as many years as possible. Despite the fact that servicing is ordinarily fulfilled to maximise the motorcycle’s lifespan, many servicing jobs also have a positive impact on safety. From changing oil to changing tyres, properly carried out servicing is a crucial responsibility of possessing a motorcycle.

The Oil Change
Changing the oil is a important chore, particularly in air-cooled bike engines. Air cooled engines tend to generate more heat than engines cooled by water, for example those in trucks and cars. Scooters likewise run at very high revolutions, and that can can rapidly cause damage to the oil. Scooter oil changes ought to be done every 300 to 500 miles. The oil needs to be replaced utilising an oil made very hot temperatures. In colder climates, 10W40 oil runs better. In more humid regions, 20W40 is ordinarily called for.

Brake and Throttle Cables
Over time, throttle and break lines elongate and can influence bike performance and safety. Normal oil will assist in preventing the lines from tangling or prematurely stretching. Just a few drips of WD40 or machine oil on the areas where the lines leave the sleeves and go into the the controls can help lube the throttle and brake cables. Even though a good number of bikes possess self-tightening lines, it’s a good idea to have your cables examined on every occasion you make an oil change.

Bearings and Wheel Bolts
Wheel bolts and bearings, including other motorcycle fastenings, must be regularly examined for tautness. This task is frequently best executed with each change of oil, however in some cases you may need to do spot checks to make sure that all bolts and fastenings are tightened down well.

Tyre and Suspension Maintenance
You should on a regular basis examine your tyres for appropriate inflation air pressure. As time passes, shock absorbers get wear and tear and can cause tyres to not have proper contact with the road. Worn down shock absorbers and tyres have a negative influence on the safety of your moped and ought to be exchanged.

Lastly it’s a good move to go online to increase your understanding of scooter servicing - just enter associated key words in Google such as scooter manuals to get info on the matter of scooter servicing.

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Don’t let the excitement of your new purchase overwhelm your good sense. A new pocket bike must be broken in correctly if you want the bike to function correctly. If you do not take the proper steps, you will dramatically decrease your engine’s life. Opinions vary significantly on the correct way to break in a bike. We will discuss two widespread methods to break a pocket bike in. The most common method is often called “heat cycling.” Heat cycling means you run the engine at idle or barely above idle for approximately 5 to 10 minutes. After this time the engine will be right below the normal operating temperature. Then you turn the engine off and let the bike cool down. Once the engine is cool, you turn the bike on for another 10 minutes and then shut it down again. Do this process for a total of three to four times. When you have finished this process, run the bike at an easy pace for about 1 full tank of gas. Don’t put stress on the engine and avoid high RPM. When you have run through the tank of gas, your bike is ready to go and can be used at normal speeds.

The second method, called “racing break in” is less commonly used, though it is more fun. First, warm the engine for 5 minutes by letting it idle on the stand. Slowly bring the throttle up to figure out where the clutch engages. This way you can avoid getting ejected by applying too much throttle when riding. Then you hit the track. Take the first lap slowly to warm up the tires. On the second lap you can hit the gas and ride for 10 to 15 minutes. By accelerating, decelerating and hitting varying RPMS you will break in the engine. Remember to make sure that the engine has been sufficiently warmed up. Although you don’t have to ride the bike too hard, you also shouldn’t ride so slowly that the clutch never completely engages or you will burn out the clutch. You will be able to tell when the clutch is fully engaged by the sound of your motor and the feeling of the bike. It may be necessary to adjust the clutch to the rider’s weight.

When you are breaking your bike in, your oil and gas mixture will be slightly different than during normal riding. Some experts say that it is best to use a richer mixture of oil (40 parts gas to 1 one part oil) during break in instead of the standard ratio of 50 to 1, while others will say you should always stick with the normal mixture. Read your instruction manual to see what the manufacturer recommends. During break in you should use non-synthetic oil. This helps the piston ring to seat fully. After the first gallon of gas, you should use full or semi-synthetic oil.

After your first ride look the bike over for any loosened fasteners. You should also periodically check your spark plug to verify that you are using the correct fuel mixture. If your ratio is correct the plug’s insulator will be a medium tan-ish color. However, if you see that your plug is white-ish or grey than you know that your engine is running lean.

Gerry maintains the website Pocket Bike Info which is dedicated to pocktbike maintanance and information. http://www.pocketbikeinfo.org

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William Harley and Arthur Davidson, both in their early twenties, built their first motorcycle in 1903. During their first year, the company’s entire output was only 1 motorbike; however, by 1910, the company had sold 3,200. Movies such as Easy Rider made Harleys a cultural icon and soon the company attracted people who loved its bad-boy mystique, powerfulness, rumbling voice, distinctive roar, and toughness. It sounded like nothing else on the road, and even Elvis Presley and Steve McQueen longed to ride one.

The Harley-Davidson Motor Company has had its ups and downs, and at times, the downs seemed as if they would end in bankruptcy. In the sixties, Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha invaded the American market, and when sales at Harley-Davidson dropped drastically due to decreasing quality and increasing competition, the company began to look for buyers and was finally sold. However, the new owners of Harley Davidson knew little about how to restore profitability. The quality became so bad that dealers had to place cardboard under bikes in the showroom to absorb the oil leaking.

Daniel Gross, in Forbes Greatest Business Stories of all Times, recounts how in 1981, with the aid of Citibank, a team of former Harley-Davidson executives began negotiations to reacquire the company and rescue it from bankruptcy. Among these executives was William Davidson, the grandson of the founder Arthur Davidson. In a classic leveraged buyout, they pooled $1 million in equity and borrowed $80 million from a consortium of banks lead by Citibank.

Harley’s rescue team of loyal executives knew that the Japanese motorbike manufacturers were far ahead in regard to quality management, and they made a bold decision to tour a nearby Honda plant. Paradoxically, the Japanese had learned Total Quality Management from the Americans, Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran. The new business concept outlined by these two pioneers was a new management approach that, interestingly enough, had been rejected by American manufacturers. As a result, they offered this approach to Japanese manufactures that were eager to learn and implement it. Therefore, soon after their tour of the Honda plant, the Harley Davidson Motor Company decided to put into practice this originally rejected approach.

After implementing just-in-time inventory (JIT) and employee involvement, costs at Harley had dropped significantly; this meant that the company only needed to sell 35,000 bikes instead of 53,000 in order to break even. Their lobbying at Washington also helped, and import tariffs were raised temporarily from 4 to 40 percent on Japanese bikes. This extra breathing space was something that the U.S. motorbike company desperately needed for its recovery.

The combination of visiting a Japanese motorbike manufacturing plant and lobbying in Washington for import tariffs was a daring move on behalf of Harley’s executives in their attempt to bring back profitability and growth to the company. Another important strategic move was the company’s unique marketing and branding campaigns. Studies showed that about 75 % of Harley customers made repeat purchases, and executives quickly recognized a pattern that refocused the company’s overall strategy. Simply put, they needed to find a way to appeal to the extraordinary loyalty of customers, which they found in creating a community that valued the experience of riding a Harley more than the product itself.

The sponsorship of a “Harley Owners’ Group” has been one of the most creative and innovative strategies that has helped create the experience of this product. Without realizing it, Harley executives had pioneered a new paradigm that would be increasingly embraced by other industries in their quest to increase profitability by converting their product into an experience. The company started to organize rallies to strengthen the relationship between its members, dealers, and employees, while also promoting the Harley experience to potential customers. The Harley Owners’ Groups became immensely popular; it allowed motorcycle owners to feel as if they belonged to one big family. In 1987, there were 73,000 registered members, and Harley now boasts to have no less than 450,000 members.

In 1983, the company launched a marketing campaign called SuperRide, which authorized over 600 dealerships to invite people to test-drive Harleys. Over 40,000 potential new customers accepted the invitation, and from then on, many customers were not just buying a motorcycle when they bought a Harley; instead, they were buying “the Harley Experience.”

Harley-Davidson offered its customers a free one-year membership to a local riding group, motorcycle publications, private receptions at motorcycle events, insurance, emergency roadside service, rental arrangements on vacation, and a host of other member benefits. Branding the experience, not just the product, has allowed the company to expand how it captures value, including a line of clothing, a parts and accessories business, and Harley-Davidson Visa card.

If you were to scan the list of companies that delivered the greatest returns on investment during the 1990s, you would discover Harley-Davidson. Only a few companies have been successful in inventing entirely new business models, or profoundly reinventing existing ones. Harley-Davidson went from supplying motorcycles to antisocial raiders to selling a lifestyle to the aging bad boy wannabes caught in their midlife crises. Traditionally, Harley-Davidson bike owners came from the working and middle classes, but as quality and prices of the bad-boy-bikes rose, and with energetic marketing, the company soon attracted a different class of buyerscurrently one third of Harley buyers are professionals or managers, and 60% are college graduates. The new customer segments of Harley are the Rolex Riders or the Rich Urban Bikers. Hell’s Angels do not run in the same group anymore. Now there are groups of accountants, lawyers and doctors. Women also account for a significant portion of the new riders, and there are women-only riders clubs spreading all over the globe.

The future looks bright for the U.S. motorbike company. According to The Economist, overall U.S. sales increased over 20% in 2000, and more than 650,000 new motorcycles were sold in the U.S. in the same year, up from 539,000 the year before. Bike buyers spent an estimated $5.45 billion on new bikes in 2000.

Stay alert and get it early. The new branding paradigm is to sell a lifestyle, a personality and it is also about appealing to emotions of your customers. Increasingly, it will be more and more about creating an experience around the product. Brand managers and executives will need a new set of lenses. The rules have changed as well as the opportunities to maximize profitability and create value in the process. Nonetheless, the majority of companies continue to follow traditional ad campaigns and they seem to ignore the fact that the media has fragmented into hundreds of cable channels, thousands of magazine titles and millions of Internet pages.

Consumers are no longer sitting ducks for commercials; they are looking for new experiences. Whether it is the bad-boy-aura of the Harley riding experience, the exquisite coffee experience in Starbucks cafés, or the active participation in Net communities, more and more companies will need to follow these early new branding pioneers. They will need to look into the dynamics of their relationships with customers and the nature of their interaction. They will need to ask themselves some serious “out-of-the-box” questions if they want to move with the shifting value that is the result of constantly changing market conditions.

Branding has changed and so have marketing and advertising campaigns. New variability, heterogeneity where there was once homogeneity, newly emerging stratifications of wealth, new preferences, and new life styles are all characteristics of the 21st century customer that are here to stay. We better get used to it, at lease until the next paradigm is discovered. Remember, the companies that are creating new wealth are not just getting better; they are becoming differentmind-bogglingly different!

Bibliography:
Barker, Joel. Paradigms. Harper Business, 1993.

Bedbury, Scott. A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century, Viking Press, 2002.

Gross, Daniel: Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time, John Wiley & Sons, 1997.

Hamel, Gary. “Innovation Now,” in Fast Company
(http://www.fastcompany.com/online/65/innovation.html), December 2002

Kotter, John P., Leading Change, Harvard Business School Press, 1996, pp. 4 - 14.

Teerlink, Rich, and Ozley, Lee: More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson, Harvard Business School Press, 2000.
Young, James Webb. Technique for Producing Ideas, McGraw-Hill, p. 14.

Josef Schinwald is consultant in Performance Measurement and professor in Business Strategy at the University of Belgrano, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and his didactic material must not be replicated without the given permission to do so. Copyright © 2003-2005 Business Design Innovation. Josef is also owner of ValueQuest, LLC, a e-commerce business, and you can visit his sites at My Motorcycle Leather http://www.my-motorcycle-leather.com and Stylish Wedding Favors http://www.stylish-wedding-favors.com.

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