Maintenance of Everything

Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going.

Ref. F456-A

Ever the responsible merchant marine officer, Knox-Johnston concluded his book with an 11-page “Pilot’s Notes,” spelling out in detail everything he had learned about gear and technique on the voyage. He quoted from his journal this lesson in particular: The only way to overcome my present feeling of depression is to fully occupy myself, so I cleaned and served the remaining bottle screw threads and then gave all the servings a coat of Stockholm Tar. Next I polished the vents and gave them a coating of boiled oil. Whilst I had it out I dabbed the oil on wire and rust patches.12 Doing maintenance cures depression.

Ref. AB48-B

He overprepared for what he knew well and underprepared for nearly everything else.

Ref. D732-C

Traditional systems (like wood-plank keeled boats) have an advantage over innovative systems (like the then-novel plywood trimarans) in that the whole process of maintaining traditional things is well explored and widely understood. Old systems break in familiar ways. New systems break in unexpected ways.

Ref. 3B5C-D

Optimists like Crowhurst—and me, I confess—tend to resent the need for maintenance and resist doing it. Maybe we prefer to think in ideals, and the gritty reality of things constantly decaying and breaking offends our sense of the world. Crowhurst referred to doing maintenance as “sailorizing.” To keep himself motivated, whenever he completed something unpleasant he would reward himself with a drink. Before long, he was running out of rum and wine. In his journal he would diligently make a list of projects that needed to be done, do a few of them half-heartedly, and then lose interest. Since he never got around to organizing his stowage, he had to ransack everywhere to find things.

Ref. D4C3-E

Poor preparation and maintenance led to Crowhurst’s cheat. The cheat led to his death. His excessively optimistic view of the world and of himself, which had worked well enough on land, was lethal for a man alone at sea in an unfit small boat, marinating for months in two contradictory realities. He had invested so much of himself in an illusion that when it shattered, he shattered.

Ref. DCE5-F

Moitessier had dealt with most of his maintenance issues in advance. Everything about the design and construction of his boat and everything about his outfitting for the race was the result of his decades of learning exactly what it takes for a small boat to thrive in the brutal Southern Ocean. He knew that once at sea, the need for maintenance had to be minimal, and doing it had to be easy.

Ref. B5ED-G

The critical maintenance issue with steel is corrosion. The answer, he wrote, is “paint, paint, and more paint.”21 Noting that the French Navy puts on 10 coats of paint before any launch, he went with seven coats. But not just any paint. It had to be what he considered the best paints in the best sequence: two coats of anticorrosion zinc silicate Doxanode, followed, after two weeks of drying, by two coats of a zinc chromate paint and three coats of two-part epoxy. (Obsession with detail is a hallmark of the most successful maintainers.)

Ref. 4F1C-H

Moitessier’s sails were made of the same high-strength synthetic as Knox-Johnston’s, but he had no need to spend countless hours repairing them because he had his made “small, light, easy to handle, with very high reef bands and reinforcements that would take a sailmaker’s breath away.”23 He was six months at sea before he had to get out his sewing palm at all. He even added a unique element for heavy-weather sailing. In order to steer Joshua from inside the cabin, he made a small windowed dome out of a wash basin and attached it to the roof of the main hatch. Perched safe and dry on a seat under the dome next to the interior wheel, he could see conditions outside and adjust his course as needed.

Ref. 44BB-I

“Joshua is just simple,” Moitessier once told an interviewer. “Simplicity is a form of beauty.”24 That principle governed everything for him. “Given a choice between something simple and something complicated,” he wrote, “choose what is simple without hesitation; sooner or later, what is complicated will almost always lead to problems.”25 Only simple things, he noted, can be reliably repaired with what you have on board.

Ref. 60C8-J

Moitessier emptied his boat of absolutely everything but the basics. With less stuff, there was less to maintain. With less weight, he would sail faster. Before departure, he off-loaded his engine, his dinghy, four anchors, 900 pounds of anchor chain, the anchor windlass, surplus books, surplus paint, and half the water he usually carried. It added up to a ton of weight and distractions gone. Later, at sea, he purged still more, heaving over the side 375 pounds of food, kerosene, and rope he decided he wouldn’t need.

Ref. C37E-K

I once got to know Moitessier a little bit. In 1981 he was living aboard Joshua in Sausalito, California, close to where I had a sailboat berthed. One time, when I remarked on how fit his boat looked, he said, “My rule is, a new boat every day.” His years at sea had taught him that if you don’t fix something when you first see it beginning to fail, it is very likely to finish failing just when it is the most dangerous and the hardest to deal with, such as in the midst of a storm. Moitessier loved doing routine maintenance. He wrote: I work calmly at the odd jobs that make up my universe, without haste: I glue the sextant leg back on with epoxy, adjust the mirrors, replace five worn slide lashings on the mainsail and three on the mizzen, splice the staysail and mizzen halyards… to freshen the nip on the sheaves.27 His reward for a boat functioning like new every day was this: “I spend my time reading, sleeping, eating. The good, quiet life, with nothing to do.”28 That was in fair weather. Storms were as arduous for him as ever, but he was unafflicted with worry that his gear might fail.

Ref. 8A6B-L

also took care to maintain his own health, physical and mental. When he found himself exhausted after rounding the Cape of Good Hope, plagued by an ulcer and considering giving up, he began doing yoga every day. “My ulcer stopped bothering me,” he wrote, “and I no longer suffered from lumbago. But above all, I found something more. A kind of undefinable state of grace.”29 Moitessier was at the peak of his skills—at one with his boat, the sea, and himself. He began wanting it to go on and on.

Ref. D5F0-M

famous. Moitessier dreaded all that. He wrote, “I really felt sick at the thought of getting back to Europe, back to the snakepit.”30 He asked himself, “How long will it last, this peace I have found at sea?… Don’t look beyond Joshua, my little red and white planet made of space, pure air, stars, clouds and freedom.”31 And yet he longed to see his wife and friends. He could really use the prize money. What had he sailed so fast for, if not to win? Race watchers in England calculated that Moitessier must be far up the Atlantic toward a double victory when word came from South Africa of a message received by slingshot on a tanker in Cape Town Harbour. It read: My intention is to continue the voyage, still nonstop, toward the Pacific Islands, where there is plenty of sun and more peace than in Europe… I am continuing nonstop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul.32

Ref. DF6E-N

For the investigation that led to The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, the authors sought the advice of psychiatrist Glin Bennet. Bennet wrote that Crowhurst’s final writings amounted to the most completely documented account of a psychological breakdown… The steps towards the final disintegration proceed with the remorselessness of a Greek tragedy… It is a private tragedy but with a richness of texture that has immortalized the name of Donald Crowhurst in a way he could never have intended but in a way he might possibly not have regretted.33 Over the years, Crowhurst’s story has been retold in six novels, many poems, many songs, an opera, several plays, several documentary films, and three major movies. Has any other failure succeeded so well?

Ref. 2C41-O

The different maintenance styles of the three sailors led directly to their different outcomes. Knox-Johnston’s style was: “Whatever comes, deal with it.” And he did. Crowhurst’s was: “Hope for the best.” It killed him. Moitessier’s was: “Prepare for the worst.” It freed him. Sir Robin Knox-Johnston won the Golden Globe Race. With a more maintainable boat, Bernard Moitessier went even farther, faster.

Ref. 7B84-P

Start with the motorcycle. A motorcycle is a two-wheeled, unstable, heavy, complex machine that you wrap your delicate body tightly around and ride at high speed. The combination of exceptional intimacy and exceptional danger invites exceptional bonding. Nobody proclaims “Live to ride! Ride to live!” about cars. Philosophers don’t write extremely popular books about repairing cars, but two have about repairing motorcycles. Examining what interests them about fixing a motorcycle might turn up some instructive ways to think about repair in general.

Ref. F7DB-Q

Both authors use the details of motorcycle maintenance—especially the trauma of repair—to ground-truth their philosophies, and their philosophies are deployed as a source of insight into the nuances of motorcycle maintenance. In both books, the motorcycle material serves as a framing device. Crawford uses it to celebrate the intelligence embodied in blue-collar work: “There was more thinking going on in the bike shop,” he notes, “than in my previous job at the think tank.”36 Pirsig uses motorcycle maintenance as a model for figuring out the structure of reality.

Ref. D592-R

The need for maintenance doesn’t stop when usage stops. The upkeep of any machine is largely about tending to the four sources of most problems: moving parts, flowing fluids, flowing electricity, and temperature stresses. Every bit of the moving, flowing, and stressing causes wear and tear, but damage also comes from not moving, flowing, or stressing. Nonmoving parts seize up. Nonflowing fluids leak or curdle into gunk. Rubber starts to rot. Corrosion gets into everything. Crawford told his customer with the half-dead Honda, “You might want to just get rid of

Ref. 2340-S

Crawford emphasizes that repair comes in two stages—that problem finding comes before problem solving: “You try to think logically about a sequence of investigations and fixes that will reveal the most serious problems sooner rather than later.”39 Diagnosis is often more convoluted than a simple decision tree. He gives the example of dealing with evidence of a serious oil leak: A thick three-dimensional layer of caked-on grime covers the bottom half of the engine and frame. It could be something easy to fix (a leaking oil tank, or an external oil line), or it could be something requiring a complete teardown of the motor (certain oil seals, for example)… But to make this determination, you have to first figure out where the oil is leaking from… Oil flings everywhere in the blast of wind that comes with speed, so it’s near impossible to say where the oil is leaking from unless you first get everything clean and dry, and cleaning the bike is a big deal. You poke halfheartedly at it with a screwdriver… and watch chunks of shit-colored bike cheese fall off onto the lift. Next come the rags, lots of them, and various caustic substances.

Ref. 14D1-T

Most of the time, when a machine stops working, it’s obvious to a skilled mechanic what is wrong and what to do about it. But what about when it’s not obvious? Both philosophers have the same advice as the sailors Knox-Johnston and Moitessier: Stop and think. Crawford writes: You have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. Any mechanic will tell you that it is invaluable to have other mechanics around to test your reasoning against, especially if they have a different intellectual disposition. Some diagnostic situations contain so many variables, and symptoms can be so under-determining of causes, that explicit analytical reasoning comes up short. What is required then is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules.42

Ref. CCDD-U

Maintainers learn to be causation experts when dealing with repair. They build two narratives: one for finding the problem and one for solving the problem. Working backward from the visible part of the problem to the issues hidden behind it is detective work into what caused what. Then, with a solution (or plausible hypothesis) in hand, they have to figure out the correct repair—how to re-ravel the skein of causation in a way that avoids collateral damage and ensures the problem will go away and stay away. That can be an elaborate caper story, carefully linking one crafty ploy after another in the most efficient sequence.

Ref. E84A-V

It’s a chancy situation. Repair is nearly always a disruptive intervention in an intricate system. Some of history’s worst disasters came from mismanaged maintenance. A bungled routine system test caused the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986. The catastrophic fire at Notre-Dame cathedral in 2019 came during a renovation of the badly rotted spire. In hospitals, when a medical examination or treatment causes illness, it’s called “iatrogenic.” Beware iatrogenic repair—when a sloppy attempt to fix a problem makes the problem worse or adds a new one.

Ref. 8912-W

Just stare at the machine… Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long… you’ll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you’re interested in it… After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine… Then you’re no longer strictly a motorcycle mechanic, you’re also a motorcycle scientist, and you’ve completely conquered the gumption trap of value rigidity.

Ref. 779C-X

Impatience is another form of agitation that can lead to rushing into big mistakes. Pirsig has two recommendations here. One is to allow what at first seems like an excess of time for your tasks, because things almost always take longer than expected. The other is to take time to put away your tools periodically. It’s a calming thing to do, and when your tools are where they belong, you won’t get frantic trying to find them. (My further suspicion is that tidiness, like cleanliness, is a social signal, as much to oneself as to others. It’s visible evidence that something is respected.)

Ref. E232-Y

Then there’s the drain of gumption that comes with boredom. In that case, Pirsig’s advice is to do something else for a while. Sleep is ideal. If you can’t stop, dose yourself with coffee. Another solution is to treat the boring task as a ritual, alive with aesthetic nuance and a welcome respite from the clamor of thinking. Find your own contemplative practice in motorcycle maintenance.

Ref. 9402-Z

Pirsig proposes that to become expert at keeping anything in good repair, you need to understand it in two ways: how it works and how it’s made. How it works will be relatively straightforward and universal to similar machines. There are operator-controlled functions such as steering, throttle, and brakes, and standard running functions such as the actions of a four-cycle engine: intake, compression, power, and exhaust. Repairing your specific machine requires knowledge about how it was made—the nested component assemblies of the particular make and model you have. Pirsig writes: The engine consists of a housing containing a power train, a fuel-air system, an ignition system, a feedback system and a lubrication system. The power train consists of cylinders, pistons, connecting rods, a crankshaft and a flywheel. The fuel-air system components…

Ref. 6016-A

A large part of maintenance is routine inspection. Pirsig’s habit on the trip was to take advantage of any pause to “check the oil level and tires, and bolts, and chain tension.”58

Ref. 25A7-B

A fundamental question that will keep coming up is this: What are the best ways to design for maintenance?

Ref. 5CA1-C

At that time, nearly everyone lived and worked on farms or ranches and in small towns. Most of them were proudly self-reliant, skilled at repairing anything they owned. Ford knew that and designed for it. In his 1922 book My Life and Work, he wrote, “I believed… that it ought to be possible to have parts so simple and so inexpensive that the menace of expensive hand repair work would be entirely eliminated. The parts could be made so cheaply that it would be less expensive to buy new ones than to have the old ones repaired.”72 The car had only 100 different parts, and they remained standard from the first Model T to the last, from 1908 to 1927. Every junked car was a trove of reusable parts.

Ref. ECF3-D

For precision to be a phenomenon that would entirely alter human society, as it undeniably has done and will do for the foreseeable future, it has to be expressed in a form that is duplicable; it has to be possible for the same precise artifact to be made again and again with comparative ease and at a reasonable frequency and cost.

Ref. A34D-E

The Lada had a continuity advantage similar to Ford’s Model T, remaining in production virtually unchanged for 32 years. Consequently, as one article points out, “While the car was notoriously unreliable, it was also ridiculously easy to fix. You could pluck a part from virtually any Lada ever made, jam it into yours, and get it going again.”

Ref. 5541-F

We hippies were so set on escaping dependency that we wouldn’t listen to our elders, professionals, or even knowledgeable neighbors. Instead, we relied on books to teach us how to garden, raise goats, build geodesic domes, and do all the other “basics” we were determined to “go back to.” Most of the generational techniques and tools hippies sought could be found in one place: the Whole Earth Catalog, a do-everything-yourself compendium I cofounded and edited from 1968 to the early ’80s. Of course, one whole page was devoted to taking care of your VW. The star of the page was one of the best repair manuals ever created: How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, written by John Muir and illustrated with pizzazz by Peter Aschwanden.

Ref. 631C-G

Muir teaches how to listen for problems. If there’s a funny noise and pushing the clutch down silences it, it’s a transmission problem, but if it changes to a different funny noise, it’s a clutch problem. “Loose valves tweedle,” Muir writes. “Very loose valves clatter.”119 He gives his reader the confidence to undertake even heroic tasks like diving into the engine’s guts to adjust the valves every three months. He writes in capital letters: “DOING THE VALVES, TIMING, AND MINOR MAINTENANCE ON YOUR OWN CAR WILL NOT ONLY CHANGE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR TRANSPORTATION BUT WILL ALSO CHANGE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOURSELF!”

Ref. A75C-H

While Muir teaches his readers every kind of repair their VW might ever need, he especially teaches them how to avoid having to do it. “Warm up the engine before moving—ninety percent of engine wear happens in the first fifteen minutes of operation,” he advises. “Warming up the engine is a sacred rite… Do this warm-up thing and it will make your VW last a third longer, minimum.”121 He recommends that you idle for at least half a minute (up to three minutes in cold weather), then drive gently for the first mile. The point, he explains, is to give the engine cylinders time to get fully coated with oil. “Now when I put a load on the engine, it is the oil that carries the load, not the metal.”122 Modern engines are no longer so delicate about needing a warm-up, but their requirement for consistently renewed oil hasn’t changed a bit.

Ref. 0DDA-I

Hippies were so dedicated to living in the moment that preventive maintenance was a difficult lesson for us. Something breaking is a big event. Repairing the broken thing is a big event. But preventing the thing from breaking is a non-event. Doing a responsible task like changing the oil doesn’t come naturally. It’s a messy chore, tedious and thankless. There’s no reward when you do it and no reward later—just the unnoticeable absence of pain.

Ref. BDF2-J