The bill for a five minute roadside wash arrives about eight months later, and it is not a wash bill.
I spent nine years on a repair bench before opening this place, and the job I got tired of was pressing out wheel bearings on bikes that were barely two years old.
A bearing is a sealed thing with grease inside it and a lip seal keeping water out. That seal is designed for rain and for spray off the road, which arrive at a few hundred grams of force. A pressure washer at working pressure arrives at something closer to a hundred times that, and held six inches from the hub it walks straight past the lip.
The water does not wreck the bearing that afternoon. It sits in the grease, it emulsifies it, and over the following months the grease stops being grease. Then one morning the front end hums at fifty and the owner blames the tyre.
The same story applies to switch housings, which fill and corrode from inside and then stick; to chain rollers, where water and grit are pushed under the old lubricant; and to the underside of the engine cases, where the lance points up and drives grit into the countershaft seal.
None of that is an argument against pressure washing. It is an argument about distance and angle. A hand span away, never pointing up, never at a seal, and everything within a hand span of a seal done by hand with a bucket and a mitt.
That is the whole reason a quick wash here is fifteen minutes instead of five, and why we charge sixty rather than twenty five. The difference between those two prices, once, is a great deal less than a pair of bearings and an afternoon of labour.