Honda Would Not Touch a Trike This Old. The Shop That Built It Is Seven Hours North. And the Whole Job Came Down to Four Lock Nuts I Could Touch and Could Not Turn.

By Merle · Retired bridge inspector, Sedalia, Missouri
September 2026 · 9 min read

Arlene took this from the doorway on the second Saturday. She says she wanted me to see what I looked like. I have been down there long enough to know.

Thirty-four years looking under bridges. I am not scared of a bolt.

My name is Merle. I am seventy-two. I spent thirty-four years as a bridge inspector for the state of Missouri, which means I spent a good part of my working life hanging under concrete with a flashlight in my teeth looking at fasteners other men could not be bothered to look at. I mention that so you understand I am not a man who calls somebody the first time a nut is hard to get at.

Arlene and I rode two wheels for thirty-one years. A GL1500 and then a 2010 GL1800 that I bought new in Columbia the year I retired. In 2018 my left knee started going out at stoplights, twice in one summer with her on the back, and the second time a kid at the gas station had to help me hold nine hundred pounds off the ground while she got off. She did not say anything on the way home. She did not have to.

We had the Wing triked that winter. Roadsmith kit, independent rear, done by a shop up outside Minneapolis, seven hours north, because they were the ones who would do a 2010 with the ABS the way I wanted it. Sixteen thousand five hundred dollars. Best money I ever spent on a motorcycle. Arlene rode more in 2019 than she had in the ten years before it, and she rode to Shreveport for the last Wing Ding in 2023 with me, the one where they stood up on the first morning and told us the association was closing after forty-six years. I remember thinking, standing in that hall, that there were a lot of grey heads in that room and not a lot of places left for us to go.

I have done every service on that bike since the day I bought it. Oil, filters, brakes, the rear end fluid on the kit, the air lines. The Wing has a clutch fluid flush every two years or twelve thousand miles and a coolant change on the same schedule, and both of those live behind the lower front cowl. On two wheels the cowl comes off in fifteen minutes. On my trike, the front edge of each running board sits right over the two lock nuts that hold the cowl and the lower shields together.

I could touch them. I could put two fingers flat on them. I could not get a wrench on them.

Every tool in the garage. Here is what each one did.

• Three-eighths ratchet with a short socket. The head would not go into the gap between the board bracket and the cowl edge.
• Ten millimeter combination wrench. Got the open end on the nut and had about one flat of swing before it hit the bracket. One flat, then back it off blind, then one flat.
• Stubby ratchet. Got in there and gave me enough movement to make myself mad and nothing more.
• Flex-head ratchet. Seated, folded at the joint the moment I loaded it, and put my knuckle into the running board bracket. That is where the bandage came from.
• Universal joint on an extension. Kicked sideways, loaded the socket crooked and started rounding the corners of a nut I could not afford to round, because if that one rounds off the cowl does not come off at all.

Three phone calls. Three different ways of saying no.

So I did what a sensible man does and picked up the phone. The Honda dealer in town first, the one that sold me the bike. The service writer was polite. They do not work on trikes, and they do not take anything more than ten years old anyway. Two rules, and my bike broke both of them.

Then the shop that built it, seven hours north. Happy to help. Bring it up. I asked him if he heard himself.

Then the trike dealer in Kansas City, the closest one on the list, a hundred miles each way. They would look at a Roadsmith, and they were honest about the number. One hundred and forty dollars an hour, and on a trike with boards on it they book the lower cowl at two and a half hours, because of what is behind the boards. Three hundred and fifty dollars in labor to reach a bleeder screw and a drain plug, plus the fluid, plus a day of Arlene's time following me over there in the car, for a service I have done myself on every motorcycle I ever owned.

He said one more thing before he hung up, and it stuck. "Half the trikes that come through here have never had the clutch fluid touched. Nobody can get to it, so nobody does." I thought about the fluid in my bike, four years old and the color of iced tea, and about what a clutch slave cylinder costs when the fluid eats it from the inside.

The view from the floor with a flashlight. That is the nut. Those are my fingers on it. That is the wrench that would not go.

The man at the trike ride who had already been through it

We ride the second Sunday of the month with a group of trikes out of Warsaw, down by the lake. Mostly Wings, a couple of Harleys, all of us on the wrong side of sixty-five. I told the story at the gas stop, mostly to complain, and a fellow named Emmett came over from a blue 2012 with a CSC kit on it.

Emmett is seventy-four. He spent thirty-one years as a line tech at the Honda dealer in Springfield, and when he retired he put a lift in a pole barn behind his house in Bolivar and now he works on nothing but Wings, most of them trikes, for people who have run out of other places to take them. He did not laugh at me. He had heard it before.

"Those cowl nuts," he said. "When I was still at the dealer, the trikes came in and the young guys would fight those boards for an hour. I cut an old ten millimeter wrench in half and kept it in my top drawer for twenty years, and I still needed somebody's wife to hold the outside bolt. Dealing with those boards is why half the Wings I see in my barn have never had the clutch fluid changed. Not because the owners are lazy. Because Honda designed the cowl with a clear shot from the front, and the kit put a board over the shot."

Then he went to his trunk and came back with a flat black steel bar, about the length of my forearm, a square drive at each end and a bend set into the body of it. He put my thumb on the drive and told me to press. Something rolled inside the steel.

"Roller chain, sealed the length of the bar. The chain takes the bend for you. The bar goes flat into the gap where there is room, the socket stays square on the nut at the far end, and your ratchet works out here past the board where your hand fits. You are not fighting for swing anymore. You moved the swing."

He had used it on his own bike for the cowl nuts, the airbox bracket, the bolts on the CSC floorboard mounts, and the one bolt at the back of the alternator that every GL1800 owner knows about and pretends is not there. He said he keeps two now, one in the barn and one in the trunk, and he made me promise not to buy the ones with a knuckle inside.

Emmett in the barn in Bolivar the following week, when I went back to thank him. The bar he pulled out of his trunk at the gas stop.

"The chain takes the bend for you."

A flat steel bar about the length of your forearm, a square drive at each end, and a roller chain sealed inside the body of it. The bar lies flat in the gap behind the running board. The chain carries the turn around the fixed bend. The socket stays square on the nut at one end and your ratchet swings in the clear at the other. That is all it does, and after three phone calls that is exactly what I needed it to do.

Where it comes from

You will not find it on the parts counter at the Honda dealer, and the trike dealer did not know what I was talking about. The maker sells it direct from their own site. Eighty-nine dollars and change, free shipping to the house. Against a hundred and forty an hour, a day of driving, and a clutch that was going to keep running on four year old fluid until something inside it gave, I ordered it from the gas station parking lot before we rode home.

What happened next

Other trike owners who stopped calling shops

Delmar K. ✓ Verified Buyer

2008 GL1800, Motor Trike Adventure kit · Perry, Georgia

★★★★★

"The two bolts at the front of the Motor Trike floorboards had me beat for a year. I could touch them and that was all. This went in behind the board and they were out in a couple of minutes. My wife asked me why I was smiling in the garage."

Howard S. ✓ Verified Buyer

2012 GL1800, CSC Viper · Kerrville, Texas

★★★★★

"Honda shop here will not take a trike. Nearest CSC dealer is in San Antonio and books six weeks out. Did my cowl screws and the airbox bracket on a Saturday. Seventy-six years old and I am still the one who works on my bike."

Loyd B. ✓ Verified Buyer

2006 GL1800, Hannigan · Elizabethtown, Kentucky

★★★★★

"Bought the cheap flexible one first. Folded on the first pull, same as my flex-head. Bought the one with the chain. Not the same tool. Got the rear alternator bolt out without pulling the tank."

The Thursday it came. Four nuts, six minutes, ratchet out in the open where my hand fits. Arlene in the doorway again, for a different reason.

If your Wing has three wheels, check this before winter

Pull up the service record on your bike and find the last clutch fluid flush and the last coolant change. If you cannot find them, you already know why. Then get down at the front of the trike with a flashlight and look at what the kit put between you and that lower cowl. On a Roadsmith or a Motor Trike it is the front edge of the boards. On a CSC it is the Viper boards. On a Hannigan it is the shields. It is a different piece of plastic on every kit and the same problem underneath it.

Know now which fasteners your normal tools cannot get at, before the fluid goes another year and before the only shop that will take your trike tells you to bring it back to the state it was built in.