Moto Joe

To all my friends and customers have a merry Christmas and a happy new year. I have some advice to share with all of you. If you have a liquid cooled Motorcycle, ATV or anything else do not use any products that is claimed to fix head gaskets or water leaks. This stuff does not work and causes more damage. Case in point I have a beautiful Triumph 955i in the shop that it head gasket let go, I began taking it apart to change out the head gasket only to find someone used so...me kind of head gasket sealer. The sealer attacked the aluminum and clogged up all the water passages. Not only did it destroy the head the mixture of water and sealer went into the crankcase and God only knows what else got destroyed with this mixture. Long story short the head gasket could have been changed out and everything would have been fine, but the person chose to do a quick cheap fix (that didn't work) and ended up destroying the entire engine. My advice if you have a head gasket or any type of gasket that is failing, fix it right and don't pore any of those chemicals into your engine hoping that it will some how fix the problems. Now that I have said this, in your cooling system the safe way to service it is to use distilled water and a product that helps keep it cool like Water Wedder or a mixture of antifreeze and distilled water. As well to keep you carb or your fuel injection clean use a good product such as Sea Foam, this will not only keep your intake clean but it will clean the valves and combustion chamber and also keep your gas fresh. See more

Well it is almost the end of 2019 and I want to wish everyone Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. 2019 has been an interesting year for me, it didn't start off to good since I got hurt and spent two weeks in the hospital and couldn't ride, work or race (bikes or Formula Fords)for a couple of months, but that is all behind me and I am all better now. This year for MotoJoe business it has been really busy and I want to thank all my customers, although this year should have b...een profitable but I have had a number of customers that have not paid there bills to the tune of around $8,000.00. As many of you know I only charge around $35.00 per hour which is very cheap and I mark up parts about 10% from my costs. I cannot think of any shop that charges less than I do and still stands behind the repairs. Although I have lower overhead than most shops I still have to pay rent, insurance and taxes just like everyone else, so when someone doesn't pay their bill it costs me money out of my pocket just to run the business. I plan on keeping my costs where their at for the time being, but if continue to get burned I will be forced to raise them just to recover my expenses. I am sorry that I am complaining as most of you always pay your bill on time and I value your business and I think of you all as friends. Enough of bad news the good news is that 2020 looks to be an exciting year of racing, I seen many new faces along with the old at the track. As well there are lots of articles written about Mini GP Bikes of how much fun there are and better yet much more affordable and safer than the bigger displacement bikes. Well let us look forward to 2020 and thank you all for a good time. Motojoe

Hey here in Southern California it is raining a cold even though it is May very unusable; but the good weather and fun times will be coming soon. So if your jet ski has been sitting all winter, or your motorcycle isn't running right and your quad needs help call me and make an appointment.

I haven't written a post lately, so I have some pictures of some of the broken engines that I have repaired in the shop. Note most of these damaged engines could have been prevented. Each picture tells a story. This engine sucked both intake and exhaust valve. Damage to the Head, Valves, Springs, Valve Keepers, Piston, Rod, and Crankshaft. 1. The reason for this engine failure is due to over revering the engine with no load on it. When you are revering a engine lets sa...y 5000 rpm or higher with no load on it, the engine will accelerate faster than with a load on it, thus the valves do not have time to close and will crash into the piston. When warming up a engine or running an engine without a load on it never run it at a RPM more than 1/2 the speed of the red line. 2. Picture #2 Once again this engine sucked the intake valve, resulting on Damage to the Head, Valves, Springs, Valve Keepers, Piston, Rod, and Crankshaft. Same reason for #2 engine failure as in picture #1. 3. Picture #3 and #4 are the internals of a Yamaha YZF 450. As I have written before these 250 and 450 motocross engines top end are only good for about 30 hours total. In pictures #3 and #4 if the customer would have replaced the piston in time it would have cost about $600 to refresh the engine, but they waited until the piston broke, thus the broken piston destroyed the Cylinder, Head, Valves, Piston, Rod and Crankshaft leaving the customer with a $2,200 repair bill. I cannot say it enough that these high performance 4 stroke engines have a limited life and they must be maintained, even if the are running just fine, the pistons will break so they must be changed out every 30 hours.

Just a quick note about how I am recovering from my accident. Well it has been about 7 weeks since I broke a bunch of ribs and my back, the recovery has been slower that I expected but now I feel about 85% recovered. Still have some pain in my lower back but thank God my ribs have healed. I have been back in the shop (Motojoe) for about 3 weeks now and feeling better every day. Thank all of you for all the support and well wishes. If everything continues to go as planned I should be back at the races in May. Since my injury a lot of friends and family have tried to get me to quit motorcycles, race cars and racing in general, this is something I refuse to consider since racing is in my blood and I would miss all the friends and people that I have met.