Off-road and dual-sport motorcycles are meant to ridden over rough terrain with full loads at medium speeds - when they fall down nothing snaps off; they ride better fully loaded; and they maintain handling capability on all types of traction.

One thing they are not good at is being run at high RPMs for a long period of time - eating oil and gasket warping is all too common.

I of course have ignored all this since getting the bike.

Rather, in a hurry to get wherever I’m going with the bike totally overloaded, I have pushed my RPMs up to about 6600 doing 140K/hour for hours at a time.

Consequently the barely noticeable oil weeping on the right cylinder head got a bit worse:

Being the expert mechanic that I am, I decided my first stop was to tighten the cylinder head bolts a bit as maybe they had rattled a bit loose.

Oops.

Before I knew it, I had snapped a bolt and left the tip deeply embedded in the cylinder head bolt-hole, and of course I had crushed some of the threads - look closely at the bolt-hole that is uncovered by the rag.

Now if you’re in the US in your home workshop you cuss like a sailor, kick a wall, and then break out the power drill and easy-out bit to carefully drill a hole in the bit, thread a reverse-threaded easy-bit in, slowly work the old bit head, and then re-tap the threads.  Not terribly fun, but not difficult.

…But when you’re in Africa, you catch a collective taxi to the only tool rental place in town, and hope to hell that you run into an incredibly kind South African named Dirk who not only has all the tools that the tool rental place doesn’t have, but offers to drive you around and do the job himself for free.

South African hospitality, especially among those of Afrikaans descent of a certain stripe, is legendary and incomparable, and without it there’s no way I’d be sitting here today with a re-tapped cylinder head cover and engine that is running like new without a strong dose of it.

Moral of the story:  Don’t overtighten engine bolts unless you happen to have a Dirk down the road.

Don’t be like me.