I Somehow Broke Two Cars, A Motorcycle, And A Tiny Engine On The Same Day

Do you ever have days when it seems like the universe is plotting against you? I just had one of those. On Sunday, I tried to have some fun on what was one of the last warm days of the year, but not a single vehicle I had nearby wanted to play nice. My 2023 Zero DSR/X electric motorcycle press loaner refuses to charge, my BMW 530xi wagon immobilized itself, and my trusty Smart Fortwo even found a way to break. Oh, and for good measure, I somehow broke a once-running gasoline display engine, too!

The first week after my birthday was a rough one. I rung in 32 years on this planet with a fantastic visit to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry followed up by a chilly, but thrilling run in a Can-Am Maverick R X RS. Then things started sucking immediately. I spent the week sick and with my head pretty much in a fog.

I started to feel better on Friday, which was great because the weekend called for rather pleasing weather. I hung out with my wife on Saturday and planned on going for a fun motorcycle ride on Sunday. Clearly, the universe had other plans.

The Motorcycle

On Sunday morning, I decided to hook up my 2023 Zero DSR/X press loaner to a charger for one last ride. The company is sending a truck to pick up the bike this week, so if I want to enjoy this machine one last time, Sunday was my chance.

Unfortunately, the motorcycle was dead without any sign of life. The Zero has been sitting for well over a month. I stopped riding the motorcycle because the one public charger in my town that was able to top up the motorcycle went down indefinitely. I recently found another charger that I wanted to try. Unfortunately, sitting for over a month not only sapped the rest of the charge out of the high voltage battery (it was parked with about 19 percent charge) but the 12V battery was dead, too.

I didn’t think this was a huge deal because I knew that the home charger worked well. It was just slow. I figured if I could get about a 10 percent charge into the high-voltage battery I could ride it over to the public charger and top it up there. I just couldn’t do the full charge at home because not only would that have taken 15 hours, but charging an EV for too long trips the circuit breaker in a neighboring garage. Yeah, my garage shares a circuit with two other garages.

Anyway, I plugged in the home charger, got the green light that indicated the charger itself was ready, and plugged it into the Zero. I got nothing. The motorcycle didn’t react whatsoever.

I then tried to brute force things. I charged the 12V battery externally and then hooked it up. Alright, the bike finally had life again. I then checked the temperature. It was 55 degrees outside or more than warm enough to charge. I plugged in the charger and…nothing. I checked the bike’s error messages and I found some turn indicator and throttle input errors relating to the loss of 12V power, but that’s it. I cleared those errors and plugged it in again. Nothing happened.

Checking the battery status screen, I then saw that the motorcycle thought the charger wasn’t even plugged in. The charger had no errors and the bike showed no errors. As far as either the bike or the charger were concerned, nothing was plugged in. Great.

I checked fuses, checked the high-voltage connectors, and even tried different outlets. No vice. The Zero is zeroed out. As a last-ditch effort, I left the Zero connected to the charger all of Sunday. Would you be surprised if I told you nothing happened? Doing some digging, it sounds like Zero owners who have experienced similar symptoms often had a bad onboard charger. Is that what happened here? No idea, but the bike isn’t saying.

Zero is picking up the motorcycle this week, ending my 1 year, 6-month run with the bike. Unfortunately, my last experience with the Zero might be walking it a quarter mile to the pickup zone. Oh well, I could use the exercise.

The BMW

But that didn’t solve my desire to have Sunday fun. I have two other motorcycles at home — the teal BMW R60/7 and the Suzuki RE-5 rotary bike — but I don’t ride them in the winter. With the Zero out, I thought maybe I’d go for a luxurious ride in the BMW E61 wagon that I bought from the Bishop. This car has never failed me and in the worst case, I could just drive out to my warehouse and fire up my Buell Lightning and still get in a fun motorcycle ride. Surely the BMW would have to work, right?

I started the E61 just like I’d run any car that has sat for a few months. I let it sit, warm up for a while, and shake out the cobwebs. Once the BMW seemed warmed up, I topped up its tires, checked its oil, and made notes of anything I might want to replace soon. My only note was a power steering pump whine.

Eventually, I hopped in, fired up my tunes through the car’s glorious surround sound system, and set off. I didn’t even make it out of my neighborhood before I saw a James Bond-style cloud of smoke behind me, uh-oh.

In pretty much an instant, the car lost all of its coolant. This was as much impressive as it was shocking. The entire car became engulfed in steam and there was a trail of coolant blood leading from my parking space to the edge of the neighborhood. The smell of the coolant was sweet but without the sickly component. Yep, my nose could tell that the car was gushing out that expensive coolant you’d get at the BMW dealer. I always knew Bishop took great care of his cars.

I didn’t want to think about the exact value of coolant the car lost in less than a mile, but it probably wasn’t cheap. The immediate problem was preventing the engine from overheating, so I shut the car down where it sat. I tried looking for the source of the leak but couldn’t find it. So, I ran home, got a gallon of water, and got an extra pair of eyes in the form of a Sheryl.

With Sheryl’s help, I was able to determine that one radiator hose liberated itself from a Y-pipe fitting. In the darkness of night, this just seemed like an issue of putting the hose back on and replacing the clamp.

I checked the hose again this morning and discovered it’s way worse than that. The Y-pipe itself was so brittle that it broke off where the hose clamp put pressure on it. So, I’m going to need a whole new Y-pipe to fix this in the correct way. That means the BMW is immobilized until then.

BMW people, is this as easy as it looks to fix? It looks like I just need to yank that retainer clip, pull that lower hose off, replace the Y-pipe, and hook everything back up.

The Smart

Sunday already wasn’t going great. The bike refused to charge and now the BMW can’t stay cool. I lost all of my daylight diagnosing both of these vehicles, but it was still early enough in the day to enjoy a drive before dinner.

As my last resort, I fired up my 2008 Smart Fortwo Passion Coupe. I bought this car in 2020 as a Gambler 500 vehicle and then parked it in 2022 as I shifted to daily driving diesel Volkswagens. In other words, this car has sat for about two years as I didn’t really do much with it. That changed back in October as I’ve been selling cars left and right.

Reviving this car after its two-year outdoor nap was fun. It fired right up with a fresh battery and I’ve been doing a lot of little things like cleaning up the panels and removing all of the caked-up mud from the Gambler 500. I even have a cool tool to remove the graphics put on the car by the defunct company I bought the car from.

For a while, I’ve been thinking that things were ‘coming up Milhouse’ for this old and abused Smart. I even got it a new fancy license plate to celebrate the occasion. Then yesterday happened. In what was almost an instant, the car went from a quiet and tame vehicle to being ear-splitting loud, like I got an instant straight pipe that dumped right under my butt.

Now, as one of the foremost experts on the Smart Fortwo in America, I knew exactly what happened. Without even checking the exhaust I knew the muffler flex pipe failed. It’s a super common issue on Smarts. However, the failure isn’t usually that instant. It tends to take at least a little bit of time.

This morning, I checked under the car and honestly, I can’t even be surprised anymore. Structurally, the flex pipe mesh looks fine. Instead, it failed entirely where it meets the flange because of course it did.

Thankfully, this failure doesn’t stop the car from driving, but my fuel economy has plummeted and I’m sure I’m losing hearing. So, that needs to be fixed pronto.

The Micro Engine

So, with three vehicles broken in one day, I decided screw it, I’ll just stay home, play with my birds, and maybe screw around with my tiny BMW R90S engine model.

My mom gave me some money for my birthday, most of which I used on responsible, adult things, but then I did something irresponsible. For years, I’ve wanted one of those Toyan scale working engines. You know the ones. They’re nitro-powered or gasoline-powered RC engines that look like scale versions of your favorite engines from the Ford 300 straight-six to a Harley-Davidson panhead V-twin. Well, I found one that looked like a BMW R90S boxer engine. I thought what the heck, I’ll do a one-time splurge.

This little engine is freaking sweet. It puts out 3.2cc of displacement and is made of brass and stainless steel. The exhaust note? It’s exactly like my R60/7, but on a much smaller scale. The level of detail is impressive. There’s even a tiny oil cap to get oil in the engine!

The setup for this engine was also pretty easy. It takes premixed gasoline like a dirtbike, and needs some oil in its sump. Unfortunately, the folks in Hong Kong don’t specify how much oil the engine needed. I took a wild guess and put in two syringes of Rotella T4.

The engine ran gloriously at first. I didn’t have the carb tuning down just right, but it sounded beautiful and I’ll be dipped, it was indeed an actual running engine.

Then I made a big mistake. The guide that came with the engine said that cold starts sometimes require you to cover the intake with your finger. Now, I should have figured out something was iffy about this advice. I mean, it was definitely originally written in a different language and poorly translated to English. However, I was already having a bad day and was properly unhappy that three full-sized vehicles had failed me. Dang it, I just wanted to have some fun! I followed the instructions to the letter and covered the hole with my finger before letting my power drill rip.

The engine responded chaotically. I felt lots of pressure on my finger, signaling that an oopsie definitely occurred. The engine spat fuel out of both the carburetor and a spark plug well, straight into my face. The cylinders also filled with Rotella, presumably through the high pressures. So, the thing is oil fouled and flooded all over the place. I can still hear the teeny spark plugs trying to pop the thing into life, but it’s a mess.

As of this morning, I have it fixed. Turns out, the builder in Hong Kong didn’t do a great job putting things together tightly, and the spark plug gaps were GAPS. But that’s today. Last night I felt like I had been kicked, repeatedly.

Everything’s Fine

Last night, I pegged my failure count at four. I decided not to drive Sheryl’s car because knowing my luck, the CVT would grenade or something.

The motorcycle refused to charge, the BMW spat out all of its coolant, the Smart killed its exhaust, and the baby BMW boxer vomited out its fluids. So, you know what? I said I was done for the day. Clearly, everything I touched broke. Heck, I couldn’t even find my 10mm socket and its associated ratchet.

I thought bad days like this happened only in movies! Where did it even go?

From here, I need to figure out how I’m going to fix all of this. First up will be the BMW. I’ll buy the new Y-pipe and have that fixed as soon as possible. For the Smart, I’ll have to drag that to my local muffler shop and have them weld on a new flex pipe. The Zero is going back to its home. Hopefully, Zero will tell me what on Earth happened to the bike.

This better be the last day of catastrophes in a long time. I’m actually laughing about all of this. It sort of feels a bit like a cartoon where everything that can happen bad to the protagonist does happen. Thankfully, nothing here is permanently broken. I little wrenching here and a little money there and I’ll be back on the road in a jiffy. Next up, getting that Plymouth running!