Motorcycle Maintenance

From what I've read and from my previous experience, Zen-like motorcycle maintenance is achieved with proper tools, parts, and manuals. Last week when parking the bike at school I had a brain fart and forgot to extend the parking stand. So when I went to lean the bike to left like normal, it just kept going right down to the asphalt. STOOPID! Well, I tried to hold it up to lessen the impact, but it was destined to go down. Once it leans past a certain angle, there's no way to hold it up. For me anyway. It hit on three points: transmission cover (scratched!), left tail light (scratched!) and clutch lever (busted!). Somehow the clutch still worked, but the metal (metal? that brittle crap) lever and its housing cracked. It was off to the Harley dealer to get replacement parts. Looking through the shop guide, I noticed that there was a little ring clamp that in the manual a special ring clamp tool was prying off. Sure enough I found the ring clamp. I took one stab at trying to scrape it off its pin, but this is one of those tasks that is sure to fail without the proper tool. I would have either scraped the old housing (wasn't worried about that) or broken or lost the ring clamp. That would have caused my blood pressure to spike for suuuure, so I just decided to stop right there and go get me one them ring clamp tools. $20 later, the ring clamp came off without any trouble (well, there was one slight moment of angst when the thing uncoiled itself and sprung free to fly across the garage; luckily Friday's gig still hadn't disrupted my binaural stereo location hearing ability, so I heard where the little ring clamp was bouncing before I noticed it, still spinning on the floor). After that though, through the application of various other wrenches (some used for plumbing than bike repair), the repair took only a few minutes. I even adjusted the clutch lever to be a bit higher up on the handlebar—something that's been bugging me for a while now. So $75 and a couple of scratches later, the bike should once again be operational.