A machine that has done forty thousand kilometres and been rinsed every week is a better buy than one that has done twelve and lived on the seafront.
I have been opening up used bikes in this city for a long time, and if you let me look at one machine for ten minutes I can tell you roughly how it was kept. What I cannot tell you from the odometer is anything useful at all.
The reason is that the thing destroying vehicles here is not use. It is air. Salt air carries moisture and chloride onto every surface, and chloride is what turns a little surface rust into something that eats metal from inside a joint. Every machine on this island lives a few hundred metres from the water at most, and many live twenty metres from it. A bike that never moves is still being attacked all day.
So when I inspect a used machine, this is my order and it is deliberately the reverse of how most buyers look at one.
Wiring first. Under the seat, behind the headlight, at the fuse box. I am looking for green on the copper and for the powdery white on the connector bodies. A single corroded connector produces an intermittent fault that can take three hours to find, and three hours of labour on a fifteen thousand rufiyaa bike is a serious proportion of it. Wiring is also the repair that gets bodged, so I look for tape and for joints that were twisted rather than crimped.
Bearings second. Lift each wheel, spin it, feel it, rock it sideways. Wheel bearings and steering head bearings go early here and a rough one is both a cost and a warning about everything else.
Chain and sprockets third, and this is the honest witness. Hooked sprocket teeth mean the chain has been run dry and tight. Nobody who neglects a chain is meticulous about the oil, so what the sprocket is really telling me is how the whole machine was treated.
Brakes fourth: discs for pitting, caliper bolts for corrosion, and the fluid, which absorbs moisture and in this climate should be changed more often than anybody does.
Fork seals, then the exhaust and its mountings, which are where I can judge how close to the sea the machine has lived. A collapsing exhaust mount on a five year old bike tells me it was parked in spray.
Paint last, and mostly I ignore it. Paint is the final thing salt ruins, which is why a tidy looking bike can be quietly finished underneath, and a scruffy one can be sound.
Here is the part that actually matters to you, whether you buy from us or from anybody else. Nearly all of this damage is prevented by four minutes a week. Rinse the machine with fresh water, all over, underneath included, and the chain. Dry it. Spray the chain. That is the whole method. Do it every week and a bike stays good for twice as long as one that is washed when it looks dirty.
Cover it if it lives outside. Keep it out of direct spray if you have any choice. Twice a year, check the brake caliper bolts and the exhaust mountings, because those are the two places where corrosion stops being ugly and starts being dangerous.
I will show anybody how to do this at our counter, for nothing, including people who bought their bike somewhere else. It is a far better use of my afternoon than the electrical fault I would otherwise be chasing in two years.
