12/06/2025
Alright y’all… I’ve got a confession. A haunting, actually. Bikers talk about ghosts on the highway, strange lights, spirits of the road… but nobody warns you about the worst kind of haunting of all:
The haunting of a missing motorcycle part.
For some people it’s a tool that vanished. For some it’s that one bolt that Houdini’d into the fourth dimension. For me?
It’s my air cleaner.
Not just any air cleaner — the air cleaner off my 1998 Harley-Davidson Road King, Homegrown.
The first Harley I ever had. The bike I bought in literal pieces and put back together with my father-in-law. We spent long nights and longer weekends turning wrenches, bleeding knuckles, cursing in two languages, and stuffing more horsepower into her than we probably should’ve.
Sure, she had the dreaded Magnetti Marelli fuel injection system — the one Harley riders talk about like it’s Voldemort.
But ours was the unicorn. It actually ran.
So naturally… I never touched it.
Fast forward 15 years. I’m riding down the interstate one day, minding my business, when I hear a sucking noise. And not the fun kind either — you bikers know what I mean.
I look down just in time to see my chrome air cleaner cover and filter launch into orbit like it was trying to escape the tax bracket. Apparently during my last inspection, I forgot the most sacred Harley ritual of all:
Applying 1 full gallon of Loctite to every bolt on the motorcycle.
Two bolts.
I missed TWO bolts.
And Homegrown yeeted my air cleaner into the afterlife.
But I saw where it fell, so no big deal, right?
Well… three afternoons later… after walking miles of interstate shoulder with my wife and kids like we were searching for a lost family member… NOTHING. Vanished. That thing slipped through a portal to another universe.
And it STILL haunts me.
I know it’s “just an air cleaner.” I know I should’ve ripped that Magnetti Marelli off years ago and gone to an S&S carb like God intended.
But sentimental value hits different. If you ride, you get it. We bond to these machines like they’re alive — because sometimes, they are.
So now I ask the rest of the motorcycle world:
What’s the one part YOU lost that still keeps you up at night?
Which missing piece of your bike still whispers to you from the highway ditch you never found it in?
Let’s hear your ghost stories.
Yogi
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