Do it your way

ULTIMATE RECYCLING

Recently, the plastic base plate that mounts the top box that sits on the rear carrier of my 2001 Honda Africa Twin developed a nasty crack, probably from all the off-road work I’ve subjected the machine to. With the chances of finding a replacement part for that 17-year-old aftermarket item extremely unlikely, I had to make plan to fix it myself.

What I needed was a very high quality, strong, smooth, perfectly shaped and rounded, small piece of steel of just the right width with the holes positioned in such a way as to best join two ends of a broken piece of something tightly together. So, scratching through the odds-and-ends junk box, I found one of the surgical plates that had been inserted into my arm back when I snapped both bones clean through in a massive bike wipeout back in 2004 and the surgeons had to bolt the whole arm back together again, with a number of these little plates to fix it. When they took them out a year later, I insisted on keeping them for some reason and those plates have been lying around in my toolbox since forever, and now one of them has been repurposed for its new task – and is doing the job surprisingly well.

So, from inside my arm for a year to now on the outside of my motorcycle, this little piece of metal is doing the ultimate recycling job, holding the two ends of a broken something tightly together. Now if only the plastic in the plate would grow better by itself like arms do, then life would be wonderful.