RACV Total Care / Roadside Assist is a reasonably cheap form of peace of mind cover if your on the side of the road and at a little over $200 a year it covers all your motorcycles, cars, and a allocated second vehicle which in my case is my wife’s that’s around 12 vehicles in all plus if say I’m in your/on someone else’s car/motorcycle as a passenger that’s covered as well, also they will get you home in a 50 klm radius or get you to a workshop, garage, or dealer to get it fixed and or provide a vehicle and accommodation if your on holidays! Pretty impressive you say, an example of this was the manufacturers  roadside cover on my wife’s car was $185 annually and it only covered that car, you can see why RACV Total Care was on my agenda, recently it “lunched” a ESL (electronic steering lock) at 4.30pm on a Friday night so the “stealer” (dealer) was shut till Monday a the flat-bed truck delivered my car home for the week-end then on Monday delivered it to a repairer at Bayswater for nothing and because I have 3 breakdown covers a year and because it was that late in the afternoon they charged it out as only one pick-up so I still have two up my sleeve for the future all this for zilch! So ex-member Martyn Goodwyn decided to draft this list below to show what “bang for your buck” you get  and as you know this works in all states of Australia so the question is here why havent you joined , by the way they send out their excellent magazine each month and as a “member you has access to all the things sold to members only at their depots, just to good not to take advantage of

(click on the link below)

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That’s a hard question with Indians being painted any colour you like from the 1930’s & for an extra $5 over a thousand extra colour combinations became available, being owned by DuPont one of the largest paint suppliers to Detroit this all made sense. All H-D’S were drab and horrible colours some would say the wartime WLA’s were the best painted versions, Indian only had flash styling and good paint in the end, technology wise after the war they never got a countershaft 4 speed gearbox or a OHV engine but they still had rear suspension, if you wanted your Chief to stand out a stunning paint job with the right colours would do it, sure Indian listed a core 3 or 4 colours a year and there was always a red colour to be had most years which had been around since the early teens and before. I have seen plenty of Indian’s not painted solid colours and in seventies candy or metalflake they stand out like “a rat eating a watermelon” and don”t do much for me, two-tone I like the outfit above proves a point, solid black or the traditional red are striking as well  but all black contrasting against the black frame makes a Indian look to heavy I think, and the red well that varies from letter box to claret when the original late Indian Red is almost a rust brown shade which people don’t like! Early twenties Chiefs were a brighter red the later forties versions not so, awhile ago someone in the States re-produced a paint sample sign taken from original codes and a lot of people were really surprised how unoriginal their machine was painted, so why not pick your own, well that to can cause odd colours such as chocolate, purple and green or even mixture of these three or more, I can tell you one thing though never paint a Indian green (unless military) as they look like something a cat vomited up!

I believe that was a Frankie Howard movie in the sixties, but this is not about old Rome and is a dedicated Forum for Indian Owners in the Southern Hemisphere, its a little bit like our Association in that it covers all Indians of any era and is nothing to do with Polaris Indian

http://www.indianmotorcycleforum.com.au/

Recently I had the misfortune of commissioning a motorcycle that had sat for about 10 years and although the mechanicals were fine the fuel system was a mess, the old saying “If you can’t fix it with a hammer, then you have an electrical fault” was not an issue in this case. I had fitted new carby’s so that was one headache passed but the fuel tank had a pinhole in it which would be repaired when Ray Drever repainted it, Ray told me beside the horrible stink the tank was full of gunge his treatment of it with apple cider vinegar removed a small plastic bag of sediment, unfortunately when I received it back it was horrendous inside and very rusty for the fuel had eaten into it in the past, such is the state of the evil witches brew they call petrol today. At this point your asking yourself why not treat the tank with a tank sealer, well that’s the end of the road for fuel tanks as after that if it has a problem start looking for a new tank “it’s buggered” tank manufacturer John Bennett in Kinglake tells me he sees people with tears in their eyes after they bring a tank previously treated in such a way for him to repair, so the reason some people treat their tanks at random is beyond me! Meanwhile my tank was in a state that needed de-rusting and without damaging the paintwork, so I did it electronically with an old non automatic battery charger, some washing soda and two clothes pegs, a 10″ piece of mild steel 1/2″ tube and a chair leg rubber pushed onto one end the rest was only 24 hours. Now Woolworth’s sell the Lectric brand washing soda ( Sodium Carbonate, not baking soda) at $3.55 a bag and the mixture was a tablespoon to 3 litres of water so I put in 5 tablespoons mixing it in a bucket of water then after plugging the fuel tap holes with a couple of steel plugs, the inserting the sacrificial anode (mild steel tube) centrally in the filler hole and centralising it with the clothes pegs so it doesn’t touch the metal of the tank after your solution has been poured in the tank brim full, the 12V  charger was connected positive terminal to the anode and negative to the fuel tank plug, do not reverse the polarity! Immediately it starts “fizzing”and after an hour remove the anode after switching off the charger and its covered in shite dissolved rust, wipe it off and repeat the process over the 24 hours, you will know when the anode is contaminated as the battery charger gauge drops back towards zero,after the wiping process it’s around 5 amps as the tank gets cleaner and the rust dissolves it sits around 2 amps.  The next day after rinsing your tank it will be shiny bright steel and a rinse of kero will have it ready to place on the motorcycle. Fuel stabilizer is about $15 for a 850 ml bottle so guess who just bought some?