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| Adam… washing my bike before a service…(!) I still can't get over it |
It isn't every day that a motorcycle shop offers to do you an engine service for free…! Looking for a place to do an oil change, we had already dismissed Yamaha in Riga, Latvia as ridiculously expensive. As you can read on our blog, our experiences with Yamaha haven't been all that good in the past and Yamaha Riga was another one… Not only unrealistically expensive but also unfriendly. When we politely declined they snapped at us that their prices are the same as in the rest of Europe… They weren't.
Just to give an idea on how expensive they were: engine oil alone was 3x more expensive than in the US and double to what we had paid in The Netherlands… Mind you this was in Latvia, which can't be described as a wealthy country where life is expensive and wages are high. But it apparently is if you ride a motorcycle. We didn't find any motorcycle oil in Lithuania and virtually the same seemed to be the case in Poland. Hmmm. Now what?
We were already on our way towards the Czech Republic when Jeanette was stung on her head by an angry wasp. Just a day later her face started to swell and she became pretty ill, time for a rest. I used the time to look for a place where I could get some engine oil and/or do a service. On Google maps I found K+K Motorcycles. The website didn't want to translate but it was only 6 km away from where we were.
K+K turned out to be a small family run motorcycle shop… which works on the most exotic brands! We hadn't seen that many motorcycles in Poland at all and yet these guy were working on Aprilia, Ducati, CR&S… Triumph, Yamaha etc. They also run a Dyno and re-programme ECUs. Not your average bike shop then and far away from anywhere. Strange!
The father and son team love motorcycles. So much so that they work 7 days a week and 12 hour days…! On Sunday they don't serve customers but do maintenance on equipment, software updates and clean the workshop. Talking of which; these guys have the cleanest workshop in history. The floor tiles are white… and spotless.
They didn't allow us to work on our own bikes but offered to do the service and only charge us for the oil… Wow. Needless to say our bikes were deemed too dirty for their workshop and they thus received a proper clean first. The cheapest engine oil I had been able to find until then was U$ 12,25 a litre, they sold me Millers Semi synthetic for 7 US dollars a litre and didn't want anything for their labour. Part for the reason was that dad had pretty much been around the world himself on a motorcycle, some pretty exotic places too.
Talking to them it became clear that they live and breath motorcycles. Their workmanship is nothing short of outstanding and attention to detail, even in a free service, is very high. The equipment available for a motorcycle shop is staggering. They even have frame straightening tools, the afore mentioned dyno and just about any electronic diagnostic tool you can think of. Their customers come from all over Europe and between the two of them they service and repair 700 motorcycles a year.
