When I was eight, I told him I wanted to be the strongest mechanic in California. He laughed until he had to wipe his eyes. "Strongest? Buy a gym membership. Learn to be the most careful."
He made me keep a notebook. Each vehicle received its own page: complaint, tests, observations, repair, verification. I hated the paperwork then. It felt like homework following me into the only place I loved. But when a customer returned six months later with an unrelated problem, Hector could open the notebook and remember the machine in ways the customer had forgotten.
He had another rule. He wouldn't let a customer pay for a repair we couldn't explain. Sometimes that meant returning a vehicle unrepaired. Sometimes it meant spending a whole afternoon on a problem and collecting almost nothing. The neighbors called him stubborn, and there were months when stubbornness made the rent hard to pay. He only shrugged and said, "A good reputation is what you keep when the money disappears."
I thought about that as I opened a clean page and wrote the date, eleven o'clock, the motorcycle's year, and the customer's complaint. Below it I wrote five short words: intermittent total ignition loss, hot.
I stood back from the machine. It had been carried through five shops, five invoices, five reassuring conversations, and three accidents. Somewhere in that history was a mistake, or several mistakes, or something none of us had considered. My job was not to look impressive. My job was to find the truth before sunset.
At a quarter past eleven, I picked up the first wrench.
I began with what I could confirm. Two cylinders, two spark plugs, one old V-twin whose age demanded more respect than speed. I photographed the ignition wiring before disturbing it, inspected the plugs and leads, and checked the compression against the figures written in the manual Hector kept on the back shelf. The readings were close enough to make a tired engine less likely to be the heart of the problem, though they told me nothing yet about why it died when hot.
The trouble with intermittent faults is that they tempt you to call an ordinary result a victory. A motorcycle starts on the first kick, and you want to believe the mystery has solved itself. A multimeter gives you a normal reading, and you want to put the tools away. Hector used to say that the worst answer in a shop was "seems fine" because it disguised uncertainty as confidence.
I checked the fuel supply, the tank vent, and the carburetor for obstructions. I looked for heat damage around the exhaust and for wiring strained by the way the engine moved in its mounts. There were small defects, of course. An old motorcycle always carries small defects, even a lovingly maintained one. But none explained the sudden, complete loss of power Grip had described.