All the Nuts Ain't On Your Bike

As I've written about before, I just love cruising motorcycle message boards and forums to learn what other guys and girls are doing with their motorcycles.
Sometime, I can learn things that I didn't know.
A lot of times, I see that others are doing what I've been doing since day one.
And then, there are those that want to show everybody how smart they are. :)

Currently, there's a guy on one of these forums that ain't too happy with how the front sprocket of his bike is held on.
For some reason, this rider thinks he needs to change his front sprocket twice in the same day so that he can gear his bike well enough to satisfy himself, and this is just for a recreational ride, not a guy riding for points or money.

His bike uses what's called a locking nut to hold on his front sprocket.
This nut has a raised rib going around it.
The shaft that the nut treads onto has two depressions in it, 180 degrees apart.
Once you torque the nut to proper specification, you take a hammer and punch and hit the raised rib, pushing part of it down into the depressions in the shaft.
This is known as "staking" the nut in place.

Now, lets's take a step back and think about why the guys who designed this motorcycle did it this way.
Can anybody out there in Blogland tell me why the guy putting this nut onto the shaft has to stake the nut down?

Anyway, this rider I'm talking about doesn't like the fact that he's got to stake and unstake his nuts.
Hmmmm, that sounds painful, don't it? :)

Yes, folks, because you're deforming that raised rib on the nut by staking and unstaking the nut, you're supposed to use a brand new nut when you want to change front sprockets.
Why?
Because, if you try to be a wise guy and use the old nut over again, the part you bent from unstaking will probably line up with the shaft depressions when you tighten the nut back up.
Geeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Imagine that.

Well, this guy doesn't like the idea of having to use a brand new nut every time he needs to change his front sprocket to go on his recreational leisure ride.
When he was told that using the same ol' nut ain't a good idea for the above reason, he told the community that he was going to engineer his own solution to the problem.

Think about that one for a minute, folks.
Keep in mind that a brandy-new, original equipment nut that belongs on there to begin with would cost this rider about $2.

What you all think of that?
I'd really, really like to know. :)

And, as part of today's GRRMX acronym decoding, here's another idea:

Gonna Really Retaliate against My X-wife.

How's that? :)
This would be coming from a guy who says, "My ex? Yeah, I still miss her...but my marksmanship is getting better all the time..." :)

Off to jerk,
-John