“I’m not questioning the work,” Caleb said. “I’m trying not to repeat it.”
That softened the older man a little. Donovan described the tests he had performed and admitted the engine had run clean on his stand. The failure appeared only when the machine was under the kind of load and vibration it experienced on the road. He had assumed a carburetor defect that emerged when the engine was hot, but replacing several components made no difference. Caleb thanked him, wrote down the details, and resisted the urge to offer his own guesses.
The call to Wyatt’s was worse. Wyatt did not want to discuss a customer who had paid him, complained, and left. He said he had replaced wiring that looked suspicious, run the machine, and found no electrical fault at normal operating speeds. When Caleb asked whether any of the new wiring had been routed through the frame, Wyatt was silent for a moment. “That was how it came in,” he said. “The owner wanted the same clean look. I followed the existing route.”
“Did you inspect the tube?”
“It’s a tube. What exactly did you expect me to inspect?”
Caleb apologized for the question and ended the call before he made an enemy he could not afford. He drew a small circle around the word FRAME. Nothing proved the chassis was involved, but his uneasiness deepened. The bike had not been dangerous immediately after the electrical work, according to Grip; the symptoms had begun afterward and gradually worsened. Caleb needed a way to reproduce them without risking a rider’s life on an open highway.
The dynamometer stood in the back bay beneath an old canvas cover. Ray had bought it secondhand more than twenty years earlier, when most customers brought in carbureted machines and a serious shop could still make good money tuning them. The machine had not seen regular use in months. Its rollers were dusty, its restraints hung from hooks like tired ropes, and a handwritten warning on the control cabinet reminded operators to inspect every attachment before loading a vehicle. Caleb lifted the cover, swept the platform clean, and spent nearly half an hour making sure the equipment itself was fit for the test he intended.
He remembered Ray saying that a dyno was no place to prove courage. It could reproduce certain road conditions, but it could also make a mistake catastrophically unforgiving. Caleb checked the restraints, kept the door open for ventilation, and set up a fan in front of the engine. He arranged his tools where he could reach them without approaching the moving parts, then studied the controls until he was certain the emergency shutdown would respond. By the time the Knucklehead was secured, the afternoon had nearly escaped him.