All for...what?

I've spent about three separate weekend days working on the Triumphs' front end now. This troubles me. Here's where it all started - minor fork seal leak. Everything was working fine, brakes decent, but a little bit of fork oil coming out of one seal. So I take the wheel off, take the forks apart, put new seals on, put it all together again...And it still leaked. Then I realize I had too small a diameter seal as a replacement, as my fork legs are a tad larger than stock for some reason. Next weekend, take it all apart again, put in new fork seals that fit (turns out these won't work either - they suck), and decide to redo the brakes while in there. Later I find I have the wrong brake shoes...I try to put the old ones back on and takes forever to figure out how to put the drum brakes together according to the manual diagram. Turns out I misinterpreted what the clown in the book was trying to show, so I spent about a few hours hurting myself to no avail. I was ready to bring the whole bike into a shop and just hand over a few hundred dollars. This still doesn't seem like it would have been a bad idea.

This past Sunday, I figure out that it's actually not that hard to get drum brake shoes on. Coming back to it, it was like an epiphany. You just line everything up but pull OUTWARDS on the springs (see where I am pointing) to get them back on and lined up correctly. It's hard to explain though - hence the manual issue. The fork seals made more sense too. So...I get it all back together, third weekend working on a bike that I am just trying to finish so I can MOVE ON, and it STILL DOES NOT WORK. And, in trying to get the seals to seat, I banged the fork leg, the inner part, with a metal punch. Stupid. Standing with me at the time was a friend who is also a Ducati mechanic, and he said 'ohh, that's not good.'

So after several days, the bike is worse off, I still need to buy new seals (the newest ones don't seat correctly), and the forks have a nice ding in them that may allow oil to trickle out permanently, no matter what seal I get in there, eventually. But the drum brakes work better now.

Very frustrating, this. Like Ted Simon realizes in Jupiter's Travels when going around the world, the mishaps and frustrations ARE the trip. It can't just go as planned; that shouldn't even be the goal or expectation. But, it's hard to put that thinking into practice.