No they don’t.
During the 1960’s Sochiro Honda stipulated that all Honda employee’s must be able to strip down and rebuild a C90 from memory. Honda invested approx £46 million in Viet Cong style village training camps worldwide (there used to be one in Totnes, Devon up the road from the Puffin Billy,) and created the worlds first “Psychic Mechanic” Training Course. Only after serving an extended training program (56 years) and completing a blindfold rebuild after first finding all the bike parts hidden in the forest, would the apprentices graduate and become Honda Master Craftsmen.
Honda went through a lean period in the 1980’s when they outsourced all their worldwide new vehicle contract servicing to Hugh “The Shoe” Murray, Ballygowan, N. Ireland. However, after a series of recalls caused by cow muck in the lower wishbone intake valve coupler, he lost the contract and Honda brought their “Sleeper” Psychic Mechanics in from the cold. (Besides, Hugh couldn’t get half of those bloody new fangled computer controlled motors up his drive anyway because of the big boulder halfway up. (“Give me something with a SU carb anyday.”)
Rumours have long abounded, about Sochiro himself being able to replace the valve-stem oil seals on an S800 without outside help, without tools, without the use of his hands and without the car actually being present, but I think that is all just an urban myth started after the war by his wife just to get him out of the house.
Since the Hugh Murray scandal, Honda have gone from strength to strength. Productivity is up, profits are up and the Psychic Mechanics have now started to pass their “Jedi like” muscle memory onto a new generation of spanner monkeys at Halford’s Bike Hut.
On the other hand, if you are asking if Honda mechanics have worked out how to use the Tinterweb and can download freely available PDF’s then the answer is YES!
Bring back Hugh Murray I say!
