This week’s workshop horrors
Jason McCullum found that nature had been taking over during lockdown
‘I popped the panel off and dog biscuits fell out’
Curious animals were an interesting by-product of our recent lockdown but Mother Nature got a bit too close for comfort for two of mechanic Jason McCullum’s customers at JDL Motorcycles. First up was a Honda CRF450 which had been parked up before it came in for service. Its enduro design means that the easiest job is checking the air filter because the airbox isn’t hidden under the tank. Instead, it is tucked high up and can be inspected quickly by popping off a sidepanel, for example after the bike has been in a river.
So Jason crouched down by the bike and popped the panel off, only to have a pile of dog biscuits cascade all over the workshop floor. “Once I got over the surprise, I thought it was a practical joke, and his mates or kids thought it would be funny. But when I called him, he was as mystified as me for a few seconds, then blurted out ‘It’s the wife!’ I thought ‘she’s a livewire’, then he explained some more.
“She feeds the dogs and the dog food is stored in a plastic container in the garage. But there are inevitably spillages and we realised a rodent had been using the airbox as a larder.
“The twin air intakes are tucked up high under the seat and only slightly larger than the biscuits themselves, so it must have been a mouse doing it. Oddly, the owner didn’t report any drop off in performance when he brought the CRF in though,” Jason said.
The next ‘Call of the Wild’ was a low-mileage 2014 Kawasaki Z800. The bike had been parked up for a while too, this time in a barn, and needed a decent post-hibernation service and new battery to get it running sweetly.
When Jason came to check the air filter, he found strange blue scraps piled up inside.
“They looked like the coating for blue M&M sweets, but I’m a country lad and recognised it was the coating put around seed grain that is then used as rat poison,” he said.
But this time the rodent was one step ahead of the farmer because it had been picking it off carefully before eating the seed corn for quite some time judging by the pile of scraps there, and there was no sign of a corpse anywhere.