The garage door was open and the workout was already under way when a stranger walked up the driveway. “My fiancé and I were lifting in our garage,” the man explains in the captions on his video. “We had this stranger come up to us and ask me a question I did not expect.” The question was whether he had ever put a chain on a bike. The bike was a 1999 Honda Shadow Ace.
The video comes from @blainerileylifts, whose garage holds a weight rack on one side and a red motorcycle lift on the other. He knows how the next part sounds. “Call me crazy down below if you want for working on a stranger’s bike for free,” he says, “but I love doing this stuff.”
The owner had already bought the parts. He needed help, the captions say, with the “front sprocket, rear sprocket, and new chain he got for his bike.” The blue and white cruiser goes up on the lift, a new sprocket comes out of its packaging, and the work starts at the front of the drivetrain with the chrome side cover off. “This one is really easy to do,” he says of the front sprocket.
He stops there to answer the obvious question. “Now you might be wondering why am I doing this for this guy?” Part of it is that he enjoys the work. Part of it is how he sees other riders. And part of it is memory. He says he knows that if it were “broke 20 year old Blaine” trying to get help on his own bike, he would have wanted someone to say yes.
Then the job gets hard. The rear wheel comes off and ends up on the garage floor, whitewall tire and all, while he crouches over it to fit the new rear sprocket. One caption calls that part “really easy.” The next one says “Just kidding.”
Getting the wheel back into the bike is worse. He sits behind the rear fender shoving at the tire, and the caption is honest: “And about this time I was really questioning why I did it for free.” His father-in-law comes out to help, and the two of them still cannot get it to line up.
The cause turns out to be small. “Turns out my spacers were flipped to the wrong side,” he says, in a shot of himself flat on his back on a sheet of cardboard on the garage floor. He jokes that they ended up sleeping out in the garage, then gives the real answer: “We got some rest and came back to it the next day.”
The second day goes better. With the spacers on the correct sides, everything is ready to go back together, and the rear end is bolted up and locked down. He takes a break in the driveway to flex with the new chain hung around his neck. “You know I had to pose down real quick.”
The chain is gold. “The gold chain looks really cool with the blue of the bike,” he says, calling it “a unique little twist.” Once it is on, he pushes it up and down with his fingers to check the slack. He says he had to make sure it had enough give, “usually three quarters to an inch of up and down movement.” The side cover goes back over the front sprocket, and the bike comes down off the lift.
He has a word about the lift as well. “Harbor Freight lift, don’t knock it til you try it guys. I know people like to trash talk em but they get the job done.”
He rolls the bike out, starts it, and reports that it is “sounding great.” But he is not finished. The rear of the bike was filthy, so he decided to wash all of it, sitting on the concrete with a hose and scrubbing the whitewalls by hand. They are, he says, the main reason he does not run whitewalls himself: “They’re super hard to clean and annoying but they look cool, I’ll admit that.”
He dries the bike and explains why he bothered. He wanted to give it back “better than he gave it to me. That’s a value my parents taught me.”
They take the bike to the owner’s house. The owner, a bearded man in a black shirt and cap, was “freaking stoked,” according to the captions. He swings a leg over, and the last shots show him riding off down the street. The mechanic says it is awesome to help someone who loves to ride get “back onto the road for the summer.” In the post’s caption he adds, “I hope yall can help someone today.”
For anyone about to do the same job, the video is a decent guide to where it goes wrong. The spacers are the big one. Rear wheel spacers on many bikes are different lengths from left to right, and they fall out the moment the axle is pulled. Take a photo of each side before you pull anything, and lay the parts out in the order they came off. That one mistake cost two people an evening here.
Chain slack is the other. A chain needs some play, and he gives his usual range as three quarters of an inch to an inch of movement. The correct figure for a particular bike is in its owner’s manual and often on a sticker on the swingarm, so check that number before trusting a rule of thumb. Too tight is as bad as too loose.
The owner also did something right before he ever asked for help. He bought both sprockets with the chain. A new chain on worn sprockets wears out fast, which is why the three parts are normally replaced as a set.
And when a job stops making sense late in the day, do what he did. Put the tools down and look again in the morning. The wheel that would not go in with two men pushing on it went in the next day once the spacers were swapped.
The last lesson costs nothing. If you borrow or work on someone else’s machine, hand it back cleaner than it arrived.