Stuart’s GoldWing Blog

I kept the filter to show you....

I kept the old filter to show you, said the mechanic, when Nigel had his bike serviced recently.

It was quite a while ago when he saw some evidence of a mouse having been  in his garage and there had been no evidence of any harm coming to his bike or of it moving in long term.  The bike had also been running perfectly satisfactorily so far this year, with no hint of power loss or increased fuel consumption.

Yet when the mechanic took the lid of the air filter housing this is what he discovered.  Mice had clearly been in residence there, tucked away cosily during the winter.  The GL1800 has dual forward-facing air inlets to the air filter housing and these are of course plenty big enough to admit a mouse or indeed something much larger and easily accessible to an agile climber.  There are no grills or other barriers until you get to the air filter itself, which fortunately blocks access to the inlet manifold completely.

Mice have squashable skulls and they like squeezing into tiny dark holes; if a hole is big enough to poke a pencil into, a mouse can get in there too.  Presumably they close their eyes and use their whiskers.  I’m too claustrophobic to be reincarnated as a mouse; I’d quite like to be an albatros next time around, although I suppose if I’m honest my natural physical predisposition would lean towards being an elephant.  Indian rather than African hopefully; I am getting much more docile with advancing years and I haven’t had a proper Musth for many a year.  Anyway, from a mouse’s perspective a GL1800′s air filter chamber is an easily accessible and well sheltered hideaway which has built-in comfortable flooring and is just the right size to make a first class family home.  All it needs to make it perfect is a bit of soft furnishing, hence the leaves, bits of shredded paper and insulating material.  All of which were foraged for, brought into Nigel’s garage and then up into the bike’s innards by one (or possibly a pair of) very industrious little creatures.

The filter needed changing anyway!

A few years earlier a mouse had tried to set up home in Nigel’s bike’s trunk.  It had imported some soft furnishings then too, as well as using the existing carpet as a source of shredable material for nest construction.

Nigel does 8-10,000 miles per year on his bike, so a 12,000 comes around about every eighteen months.  Lots of GoldWings do less miles, so the interval between checking the air filter would be much longer.  I wonder how many miles the mice did before their home got invaded?   Nigel’s  pretty decent rider so maybe they enjoyed it; nice and warm in there too once they got back in the garage.

As far as the mechanic could tell, there was no damage to the wiring loom on Nigel’s bike.  Rodents have very sharp teeth and when they occupy a vehicle they often chew at the wiring and can do enormous damage by doing so.  Modern autoelectrics are complicated enough without wiring loom shorts and open circuit faults to contend with.  It’s a big and expensive job repacing the wiring loom of a GL1800, which could easily have been necessary.

There has been a big increase in vermin infestations in UK this past winter; it’s been suggested that the widespread abandonment by local councils of weekly bin collections is a factor, although global warming has been mentioned too – but then everything that goes wrong these days is something to do with global warming, so some would have us believe.

Rural locations (like Nigel’s home and mine) are always prone to mice invasions during late autumn as they sek shelter from the nearby fields where they spend their summers.  But they say that you’re never more than 50 feet away from a rat when you’re in a big city, so to enjoy a completely vermin-free environment you’d have to live somewhere like the International Space Station.  Shelter and warmth are just as attractive to mice (and rats) in winter as they are to humans.  They like to be close to a source of food too.

I found some shredded insulation and traces of rat droppings under my car’s bonnet this winter but it looked like I had found it in time – I left the bonnet up each night in the garage thereafter, hoping that would be enough to discourage further attempts to set up home.  I aslo set traps, took professional advice and bought an electronic trap and some sticks pads.  The traps caught nothing, nor did the sticky pads.  The electronic trap caught one mouse. We eventually resorted to setting poisoned bait and within a few days all went completely quiet and apart from one more dead mouse on the floor, which had presumably keeled over and died in transit, I found nothing further, inspite of quite a thorough search.  Poison is very effective but the problem is that they all crawled away somewhere to die and then stink the place out for several weeks while they decompose at leisure.

Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of it either.  When I next drove the car after finding damage under the bonnet I had only gone about half a mile (and I was driving through some roadworks where they were using pneumatic drills) when all of a sudden there was a heck of a clattering noise and I could even feel the steering wheel juddering.  I pulled off the road as quickly as possible into a hotel car park as I did so, even before I switched the engine off,  the noise and juddering suddenly stopped.

There was nothing obvious under the bonnet and everything seemed normal when I started the engine again and drove home.  I assumed the noise and vibration was some freak effect of the road drills.  Unfortunately it later became clear that the heater fan had stopped working and that it needed replacement – at considerable cost.  An unwelcome passenger must have been hiding in the heaters air inlet trunking and lots its footing or got sucked in.  It made enough noise and caused enough vibration to have been a sheep never mind a mouse or a rat.

A couple of years ago I had a mouse living in my bike’s trunk in the garage; it ruined the carpet and for some strange reason chewed the helmet hanger release levers – both of them.  Goodness knows why.  Fortunately I’ve seen no evidence of vermin anywhere near the bike this past two winters.

Somehow when a mouse (or even worse a rat) attacks your car or your bike it’s got personal – I had no qualms about poisoning the little bastards when humane traps failed to solve the problem.

I now either leave the trunk open in the garage during winter or set a mouse trap in the trunk, and I’m careful not to leave any traces of food in the bike either.  Maybe I’ll have to think again in the light of Nigel’s experience – about blocking up the engine air intakes too next winter for example.

Or maybe the real answer is either to buy one of those ventilated plastic cocoons for the bike over winter and leave the car outside the garage to make it less inviting to vermin.  At least cars don’t go rusty if they’re left outdoors these days.

By the way Nigel’s bike was serviced by Colwyn Bay Motorcycles, a long established but relatively recently refurbished Honda Dealership, and he thinks they did a very good job for a very reasonable price – and they even lent him a brand new GL1800 for the day rent-free while they worked on his bike – on which he did 250 miles enjoying some of North Wales’s lovely biking roads.  He’s thinking about changing his bike for a new one as a result of this excellent service and the opportunity to ride the latest GL1800 – well done Colwyn Bay Motorcycles!