Judging by an e-mail I just received, I guess I ruffled Coupe's feathers a
bit with my admonition of his bike hauling scheme.  In the way of an explanation
of why I was so unrelenting I offer the following.

We all do stupid things.

I once had to cart the hulk of a car and an engine some 75 miles.  I had a
rolling 240 Volvo sedan and Volvo V-6 to deliver.  The engine was a DOHC built
by, I'm told, Renault, and it was the heaviest most complicated 6 cylinder car
engine I have ever seen.  I had a pickup with a step bumper, so I rented a tow
dolly for the trip.  Two of my friends came along for the hell of it and to
help empty the beer cooler.  Between beers, we managed to get the car cinched
down to the tow dolly and since we didn't want to fuss with dropping the engine
into the engine bay, we just chucked it into the spacious trunk of the 240.

All seemed to be fine until we got to the edge of town and I started to
accelerate to cruise speed.  As soon as I got to fifty, that tail of the dog
started to wag the brains out of the dog and, once it started, it did not want to
stop doing it.  It was all I could do to slow and regain control without
becoming the opening story on News at Eleven.

Fortunately, one of my friends had a buddy with a horse farm a few miles from
where we were.  We used his barn to hoist the engine from the trunk and to
dump it into the engine bay.  The farmer lent me a cable puller in order to suck
the engine down onto the crossmember and with his blessing, "That somabitch
ain't goin' nowhere," we were on our way.  I can imagine him telling his boys
at the roadhouse about how he saved the ass of the dumb city boy who didn't
know jackshit about hauling anything heavier than a sack of potatoes.

A favorite quote of mine is:  Experience is what prevents us from making
mistakes.  We get experience by making mistakes.

George