Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Tuesday, 14 December 2010
A short life but a happy one
I had no money, no job and no wheels, and was suffering severe case of heartbreak.
Things were desperate.
What I did have, however, was a few top mates who got me drunk and, fortunately, the £300 payout for the CB250RS arrived through the post.
Most of it got quickly swallowed up paying off bank debts, but a quick scan of the classifieds revealed a 1972 Honda CD175 for sale.
It was the in gardening equipment section marked at £75ono.
The CD175 had once been red, but had faded to a sort of pink, and the ancient (i.e. over 40) owner had chugged around on it for most of its life in an undemanding fashion. I offered him fifty quid and he pretty much snapped my hand off shaking on the deal.
This machine was almost identical mechanically to the CB200 I had passed my test on, but while the CB had no soul whatsoever, the CD had it by the bucket load.
Honda had made huge quantities of them, and they worked. It was the sort of motorcycle that died out in the early eighties and has never really returned.
It had one carb rather than two, big deeply valanced mudguards, chrome panels on the tank, shrouds and nacelles everywhere and ancient Speedmaster tyres with cracked sidewalls.
I thought it looked fab.
I'd started to judge vehicles not by what they looked like parked next to other people bikes, but by what it made me feel like.
The little CD made me feel bullet proof. While noisier chums with loud exhausts, denim cut-offs and bad attitudes rapidly saw the points mount up on their licences, on the CD in my battered wax cotton Belstaffs I was invisible to the law.
In those halcyon days you could just sign on and pick a bit of work here and there cash in hand. I'll never forget going to the dole office one day to sign on and seeing a bloke pull up outside in a van, jump out in paint covered overalls, run in, sign on and run out again to get back to work.
With the odd days work and with nothing better to do with my time I chugged around in the glorious spring and early summer of 1984.
A chum introduced me to a friend of his girlfriend. Roberta was a 17 year old posh horsey girl with a double-barrelled name and a naughty glint in her eye who fell for my devil-may-care charm and rakish good looks (ahem), and I would hack out to Sidmouth of an afternoon and pick her up from sixth-form on it.
Her parents decided I was a bad influence on her, and they were dead right.
Though to be fair, she was a pretty bad influence on me as well.
Her father banned me from the house so I'd ride the CD out on warm June evenings, to a farm gate near the tumble down small mansion she lived in and she'd leave by the bedroom window and leg it down the drive.
Many a close call was had getting her back home from secret trysts and young farmers discos, her pissed on cider and black, me with a sore neck from the headbanging to the Quo and also from the copious love bites.
Ah, dear dead days, beyond recall.
I think all this excitement was bit much for the CD, and in the end after just three months the little beggars heart gave out.
The posh girl was doing her A levels, and so at the end of June I hammered up the A303 alone to spend a few days at what turned out to be the very last Stonehenge Free Festival.
Pictures from the very wonderful http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/
I had a great time, saw The Enid and Here and Now and some fabulous dub acts and was bored by Roy Harper.
But it was my third Stonehenge and I could see that sadly it had been getting out of hand. That year had seen heroin on sale openly for the first time and got the feeling that this particular game was up, a year before The Battle of the Beanfield.
All things must pass.
After three days I headed for home and was just outside Ilminster when there was a big BANG. Suddenly the air was filled with a cloud of white smoke from the left hand exhaust.
The engine kept running, but performance was halved, so I chugged home at 30mph, stopped at my local for a reviving ale, got back on it and rode it the quarter of a mile home, parking it up outside my flat. It never ran again I took the cylinder head off and found that the middle of the left hand piston had completely disintegrated, but despite the chunks of broken alloy rattling round in the engine, the CD still got me home.
Probably the second best fifty quid I've ever spent.
I still feel a bit guilty about treating it so badly.
Things were desperate.
What I did have, however, was a few top mates who got me drunk and, fortunately, the £300 payout for the CB250RS arrived through the post.
Most of it got quickly swallowed up paying off bank debts, but a quick scan of the classifieds revealed a 1972 Honda CD175 for sale.
It was the in gardening equipment section marked at £75ono.
The CD175 had once been red, but had faded to a sort of pink, and the ancient (i.e. over 40) owner had chugged around on it for most of its life in an undemanding fashion. I offered him fifty quid and he pretty much snapped my hand off shaking on the deal.
 |
| A CD175. Not mine, but you get the general idea... |
This machine was almost identical mechanically to the CB200 I had passed my test on, but while the CB had no soul whatsoever, the CD had it by the bucket load.
Honda had made huge quantities of them, and they worked. It was the sort of motorcycle that died out in the early eighties and has never really returned.
It had one carb rather than two, big deeply valanced mudguards, chrome panels on the tank, shrouds and nacelles everywhere and ancient Speedmaster tyres with cracked sidewalls.
I thought it looked fab.
I'd started to judge vehicles not by what they looked like parked next to other people bikes, but by what it made me feel like.
The little CD made me feel bullet proof. While noisier chums with loud exhausts, denim cut-offs and bad attitudes rapidly saw the points mount up on their licences, on the CD in my battered wax cotton Belstaffs I was invisible to the law.
In those halcyon days you could just sign on and pick a bit of work here and there cash in hand. I'll never forget going to the dole office one day to sign on and seeing a bloke pull up outside in a van, jump out in paint covered overalls, run in, sign on and run out again to get back to work.
With the odd days work and with nothing better to do with my time I chugged around in the glorious spring and early summer of 1984.
A chum introduced me to a friend of his girlfriend. Roberta was a 17 year old posh horsey girl with a double-barrelled name and a naughty glint in her eye who fell for my devil-may-care charm and rakish good looks (ahem), and I would hack out to Sidmouth of an afternoon and pick her up from sixth-form on it.
Her parents decided I was a bad influence on her, and they were dead right.
Though to be fair, she was a pretty bad influence on me as well.
Her father banned me from the house so I'd ride the CD out on warm June evenings, to a farm gate near the tumble down small mansion she lived in and she'd leave by the bedroom window and leg it down the drive.
Many a close call was had getting her back home from secret trysts and young farmers discos, her pissed on cider and black, me with a sore neck from the headbanging to the Quo and also from the copious love bites.
Ah, dear dead days, beyond recall.
I think all this excitement was bit much for the CD, and in the end after just three months the little beggars heart gave out.
The posh girl was doing her A levels, and so at the end of June I hammered up the A303 alone to spend a few days at what turned out to be the very last Stonehenge Free Festival.
 | ||||||||||
| "I'm in the brown tent, next to the transit" |
 |
| This isn't me, and its not my CD175. But if the CD had been pinky-red, I expect I looked like this at some point. |
Pictures from the very wonderful http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/
I had a great time, saw The Enid and Here and Now and some fabulous dub acts and was bored by Roy Harper.
But it was my third Stonehenge and I could see that sadly it had been getting out of hand. That year had seen heroin on sale openly for the first time and got the feeling that this particular game was up, a year before The Battle of the Beanfield.
All things must pass.
After three days I headed for home and was just outside Ilminster when there was a big BANG. Suddenly the air was filled with a cloud of white smoke from the left hand exhaust.
The engine kept running, but performance was halved, so I chugged home at 30mph, stopped at my local for a reviving ale, got back on it and rode it the quarter of a mile home, parking it up outside my flat. It never ran again I took the cylinder head off and found that the middle of the left hand piston had completely disintegrated, but despite the chunks of broken alloy rattling round in the engine, the CD still got me home.
Probably the second best fifty quid I've ever spent.
I still feel a bit guilty about treating it so badly.
Saturday, 11 December 2010
Do you want to fly?
It's the early winter of 1983.
My Honda CB250RS is toast.
There's no courtesy vehicles for the victims of motor accidents. There's pretty much one motorcycle insurer, Norwich Union. Claims, even ordinary ones, take six months to a year to settle - theres no no-win/no-fee solicitors prepared to make a fat wedge fighting your corner. Compensation is almost unheard of.
There's no phones, certainly in the sort of bedsitters I was slobbed out in, so you can't hassle the insurance company for your money, and everything has to be done by post.
But it didn't stop me from needing wheels in a hurry.
I had the £700 I had scraped together to buy the GPZ550 with, but that was it, the other £400 the GPZ would have cost was in a pile of bent metal and broken plastic.
The dealer I had intended to buy from had nothing for that sort of money, and neither had anyone else.
So in those pre-ebay days, it was off to the classified section of the local paper.
I scanned the small ads and found a silver four-year-old XJ 650 Yamaha.
An XJ650. Mine wasn't as pretty as this.
The XJ was a UJM. A Universal Japanese Motorcycle. Four cylinders, two camshafts, electronic ignition, and a shaft drive. It was Yamahas third generation four-stroke - They had ironed out the drive train problems they had with the XS750, but, irritatingly for Yamaha, who had spent millions developing it, the XJ was always in the shadow of the much older XS650 twin - to the extent that it is rumoured the bosses stopped making the XS650 even though it was selling well, because it was getting embarrassing competing with themselves.
To be honest there was something dubious about the bike I had found. It was far too cheap, for a start. The seat had been been given a new cover, which seemed odd for such a new bike. The tank looked very tatty, with a poor quality spray can paint job.
There was a big rust bubble appearing on one exhaust.
But I liked the look and feel of it, and the big engine and the shaft drive, so I bought it.
This is the sort of thing I was listening to when I bought my Silver Yamaha XJ 650.
Bet you can't guess what I called the bike.
The one other 'proper' biker I knew who wasn't prepared to go into hock for a new bike each time he wanted a change, or hadn't been seduced by BMW, was the mechanic at the petrol station I worked at.
He took a look at the XJ 650 and pronounced it a bag of nails.
I reckoned he was jealous I'd got such a bargain, and besides, as he was on the second bottom-end rebuild on his CB900FA he could hardly talk.
I cut a deal with the garage's paint shop - If I prepped the tank, they'd give it a good paint job for me.
I spent hours rubbing it down ready for a new coat of silver. And that’s how I found out why it had been so cheap.
The petrol tank was full of holes. Other evidence showed the bike had been in a fire and been left for a while covered in water and fire extinguisher foam. This had rusted through the bottom of the tank and the exhaust system.
The bloke I‘d bought it off had just slapped paint over the holes it the tank until it had been resealed.
I'd been riding round on a 120mph firebomb.
But with the help of the now very smug mechanic a proper repair job and spray was effected.
He brazed me a plate over the hole in the exhaust and the bike, now christened the Silver Bullet, was starting to come right.
It wasn't perfect by any means - for a start, it now took me 15 minutes to get to work, instead of 11, which was odd.
The mechanic swapped his CB900FA for a Yamaha RD350LC and we swapped bikes for a few days, and I realised that fast and light was what I liked, not big and powerful - I didn't want to give the LC back, but he didn't want to keep the XJ.
Still, Spring was coming, and then Summer, and I had pockets full of cash, and a great big motorcycle. Things were looking good.
And then I had the worst day of my life.
And of course, it involved a girl.
I'd been offered a job as a trainee manager at a city filling station, there was more money, and I wouldn't have a long journey to work. It had "prospects".
I took the job.
And there was the girl. The girl who I was hopelessly besotted with. Real unrequited heartache, the kind you only get when you are young and impetuous. I'd known her for two years, and got absolutely nowhere.
And then one day I invited her to dinner and she said yes. I had a bath, bought a bottle of Muscadet and a couple of steaks, Went to my new job and, as I didn't have a fridge in those days, took the bottle to the filling station and chilled it at the back of the fizzy drinks fridge. I did my shift, went home, picked her up on the bike, cooked her dinner, we drank the wine and had the single most disastrous romantic evening either of us ever had.
And when we got up the following morning, trying to avoid looking at each other, I went to the window, and saw that someone had nicked my XJ650, which I hadn't locked up as I had been too busy trying to be cool.
So the girl and I parted company, I reported the theft to the police, I walked to work, and on arrival was fired for having alcohol on the premises the previous day.
I saw the XJ650 again 3 weeks later. It had been sprayed black, had the plate changed, and that was it. It was also in the possesion of a well known local sociopath. I wrote it off as a dead loss.
I was unemployed, heartbroken, single, skint and had no wheels.
Could be worse, right?
My Honda CB250RS is toast.
There's no courtesy vehicles for the victims of motor accidents. There's pretty much one motorcycle insurer, Norwich Union. Claims, even ordinary ones, take six months to a year to settle - theres no no-win/no-fee solicitors prepared to make a fat wedge fighting your corner. Compensation is almost unheard of.
There's no phones, certainly in the sort of bedsitters I was slobbed out in, so you can't hassle the insurance company for your money, and everything has to be done by post.
But it didn't stop me from needing wheels in a hurry.
I had the £700 I had scraped together to buy the GPZ550 with, but that was it, the other £400 the GPZ would have cost was in a pile of bent metal and broken plastic.
The dealer I had intended to buy from had nothing for that sort of money, and neither had anyone else.
So in those pre-ebay days, it was off to the classified section of the local paper.
I scanned the small ads and found a silver four-year-old XJ 650 Yamaha.
An XJ650. Mine wasn't as pretty as this.
The XJ was a UJM. A Universal Japanese Motorcycle. Four cylinders, two camshafts, electronic ignition, and a shaft drive. It was Yamahas third generation four-stroke - They had ironed out the drive train problems they had with the XS750, but, irritatingly for Yamaha, who had spent millions developing it, the XJ was always in the shadow of the much older XS650 twin - to the extent that it is rumoured the bosses stopped making the XS650 even though it was selling well, because it was getting embarrassing competing with themselves.
To be honest there was something dubious about the bike I had found. It was far too cheap, for a start. The seat had been been given a new cover, which seemed odd for such a new bike. The tank looked very tatty, with a poor quality spray can paint job.
There was a big rust bubble appearing on one exhaust.
But I liked the look and feel of it, and the big engine and the shaft drive, so I bought it.
This is the sort of thing I was listening to when I bought my Silver Yamaha XJ 650.
Bet you can't guess what I called the bike.
The one other 'proper' biker I knew who wasn't prepared to go into hock for a new bike each time he wanted a change, or hadn't been seduced by BMW, was the mechanic at the petrol station I worked at.
He took a look at the XJ 650 and pronounced it a bag of nails.
I reckoned he was jealous I'd got such a bargain, and besides, as he was on the second bottom-end rebuild on his CB900FA he could hardly talk.
I cut a deal with the garage's paint shop - If I prepped the tank, they'd give it a good paint job for me.
I spent hours rubbing it down ready for a new coat of silver. And that’s how I found out why it had been so cheap.
The petrol tank was full of holes. Other evidence showed the bike had been in a fire and been left for a while covered in water and fire extinguisher foam. This had rusted through the bottom of the tank and the exhaust system.
The bloke I‘d bought it off had just slapped paint over the holes it the tank until it had been resealed.
I'd been riding round on a 120mph firebomb.
But with the help of the now very smug mechanic a proper repair job and spray was effected.
He brazed me a plate over the hole in the exhaust and the bike, now christened the Silver Bullet, was starting to come right.
It wasn't perfect by any means - for a start, it now took me 15 minutes to get to work, instead of 11, which was odd.
The mechanic swapped his CB900FA for a Yamaha RD350LC and we swapped bikes for a few days, and I realised that fast and light was what I liked, not big and powerful - I didn't want to give the LC back, but he didn't want to keep the XJ.
Still, Spring was coming, and then Summer, and I had pockets full of cash, and a great big motorcycle. Things were looking good.
And then I had the worst day of my life.
And of course, it involved a girl.
I'd been offered a job as a trainee manager at a city filling station, there was more money, and I wouldn't have a long journey to work. It had "prospects".
I took the job.
And there was the girl. The girl who I was hopelessly besotted with. Real unrequited heartache, the kind you only get when you are young and impetuous. I'd known her for two years, and got absolutely nowhere.
And then one day I invited her to dinner and she said yes. I had a bath, bought a bottle of Muscadet and a couple of steaks, Went to my new job and, as I didn't have a fridge in those days, took the bottle to the filling station and chilled it at the back of the fizzy drinks fridge. I did my shift, went home, picked her up on the bike, cooked her dinner, we drank the wine and had the single most disastrous romantic evening either of us ever had.
And when we got up the following morning, trying to avoid looking at each other, I went to the window, and saw that someone had nicked my XJ650, which I hadn't locked up as I had been too busy trying to be cool.
So the girl and I parted company, I reported the theft to the police, I walked to work, and on arrival was fired for having alcohol on the premises the previous day.
I saw the XJ650 again 3 weeks later. It had been sprayed black, had the plate changed, and that was it. It was also in the possesion of a well known local sociopath. I wrote it off as a dead loss.
I was unemployed, heartbroken, single, skint and had no wheels.
Could be worse, right?
Thursday, 9 December 2010
The Little Flyer
After five months on the dole, and an abortive attempt to train as a fighter controller for the RAF I got a job pumping gas at a local filling station. 60 hours a week, covered in diesel and smelling of petrol, in all weathers on a forecourt that was open to the elements and hand cranking the old diesel pump when the power went off in winter - we had the contract for the council as we were the only filling station with a pump that could be hand cranked to fill the snow ploughs. I loved it. It paid twice what i'd earned in insurance, and I could wear jeans and didn't have to wear a tie.
I cycled the five miles into work most days through glorious Devon countryside, until I'd scraped a few quid together and it was time for another vehicle. The barely-used CB500T was gathering dust.
All the advice I had been given by some older bikers was that there were two good dealers in Exeter – they had started trading back in the 1920s and were run by horny-handed, oil-spattered, sons of toil.
There was also one brash newcomer which had carpets on the floor, computers instead of parts books and salesmen who wore suits. The general opinion was that this garage was to be avoided.
I looked at their stock which mostly contained a collection of three- and four-year-old 550cc fours and 1,000cc behemoths, and there, lurking unnoticed in the corner was a Honda CB250RS.
This was unlike any of Honda’s usual offerings, and was a lightweight 250cc single cylinder machine with the engine from the XL250 trail bike, fitted with balance shafts to smooth the vibes, spoked wheels, lovely little shorty megaphones and nothing unnecessary that might make it heavier, like starter motors.
I sat on it and it just seemed right. It fitted me perfectly. There was brief haggle, they gave me twice what I had expected for the 500, sorted out the finance, and bunged me a free crash helmet into the bargain.
Riding the little Honda back home I loved it instantly. The little beast flew along – 92 mph top speed, the slickest gearchange I had ever come across, handled like it ran on rails and did about 75mpg.
It was comfortable and felt beautifully put together and was more than capable of keeping up with bikes twice its size.
I had moved from the countryside to the fleshpots of Exeter, and found I could cover the 13-mile journey to work in 11 minutes.
I had plenty of time to spare at the garage, an inexhaustible supply of paraffin to keep her squeaky clean and free Duckhams hypergrade from the garage tanks meant she had oil changes every 1,000 miles so she stayed in mint condition.
God, I loved that little flyer and went everywhere on her,, chased girls, hurtled through the night on gallant missions and insane adventures, found the great biking roads that were the Sidmouth Loop and the A39 Coast Road. One of which has been ruined by speed cameras and the other by a dual carriageway.
View Larger Map
the Sidmouth Loop
After a year-and-a-half of ownership I was on a trip to London when, outside the UK headquarters of Honda in Chiswick, there was a loud spang.
The gearbox had fallen apart. This was a disaster – second-hand engines were pretty thin on the ground, but I found a scrap engine with a good gearbox in Sarf Lunnon and made an awful attempt to repair it using a socket set from Argos in a my mothers garden shed in Twickenham.
I didn't set the balance shafts properly and it vibrated like a jack hammer - so I rode to Woking and stuck it on the train.
I managed to fix her properly back at the filling station, but she was, sadly, never really the same again, which was down to my cack-handedness.
So one Saturday I reluctantly decided to replace her, with something a bit larger and went down to another dealer where I put a deposit down on a Kawasaki GPz550 which I intended to pick up the following weekend.
But as ever things didn’t quite turn out according to plan.
Four days to the weekend, when I was due to go and pick up my new GPz550 I was making my way out of Exeter to work on a wet Tuesday morning when I saw a large grey Mercedes leaving the car park of the main police station. He saw me, stopped at the entrance with his bonnet sticking out into the road, I pulled out towards the middle of the road to avoid the Merc.
Then, with just 10 yards to go, the driver decided that he could clear the car park before I reached him. He was wrong. I hit the Merc fair and square a foot behind the front wheel, flew over the handlebars, bounced off his bonnet and slid 50 feet on my back across the main road, coming to a rest with a bump against the kerb.
I lay there for a minute – but didn’t seem to be in any pain. That meant either I was the luckiest man in the world or I was dead. Eventually the traffic stopped and I got up. Entirely unscathed, I walked shakily back across the road where my bike was embedded firmly in the side of the Merc. The driver of the Merc got out and looked at me. I looked at him. He looked sheepish. “Sorry, Ollie mate,” he said – we drank in the same pub.
She was no more – and so, sadly was my deal for the GPz550 – I had nothing to part exchange and there was a long wait in the pipeline before the insurance company paid out.
I cycled the five miles into work most days through glorious Devon countryside, until I'd scraped a few quid together and it was time for another vehicle. The barely-used CB500T was gathering dust.
All the advice I had been given by some older bikers was that there were two good dealers in Exeter – they had started trading back in the 1920s and were run by horny-handed, oil-spattered, sons of toil.
There was also one brash newcomer which had carpets on the floor, computers instead of parts books and salesmen who wore suits. The general opinion was that this garage was to be avoided.
I looked at their stock which mostly contained a collection of three- and four-year-old 550cc fours and 1,000cc behemoths, and there, lurking unnoticed in the corner was a Honda CB250RS.
This was unlike any of Honda’s usual offerings, and was a lightweight 250cc single cylinder machine with the engine from the XL250 trail bike, fitted with balance shafts to smooth the vibes, spoked wheels, lovely little shorty megaphones and nothing unnecessary that might make it heavier, like starter motors.
I sat on it and it just seemed right. It fitted me perfectly. There was brief haggle, they gave me twice what I had expected for the 500, sorted out the finance, and bunged me a free crash helmet into the bargain.
Riding the little Honda back home I loved it instantly. The little beast flew along – 92 mph top speed, the slickest gearchange I had ever come across, handled like it ran on rails and did about 75mpg.
It was comfortable and felt beautifully put together and was more than capable of keeping up with bikes twice its size.
I had moved from the countryside to the fleshpots of Exeter, and found I could cover the 13-mile journey to work in 11 minutes.
I had plenty of time to spare at the garage, an inexhaustible supply of paraffin to keep her squeaky clean and free Duckhams hypergrade from the garage tanks meant she had oil changes every 1,000 miles so she stayed in mint condition.
God, I loved that little flyer and went everywhere on her,, chased girls, hurtled through the night on gallant missions and insane adventures, found the great biking roads that were the Sidmouth Loop and the A39 Coast Road. One of which has been ruined by speed cameras and the other by a dual carriageway.
View Larger Map
the Sidmouth Loop
After a year-and-a-half of ownership I was on a trip to London when, outside the UK headquarters of Honda in Chiswick, there was a loud spang.
The gearbox had fallen apart. This was a disaster – second-hand engines were pretty thin on the ground, but I found a scrap engine with a good gearbox in Sarf Lunnon and made an awful attempt to repair it using a socket set from Argos in a my mothers garden shed in Twickenham.
I didn't set the balance shafts properly and it vibrated like a jack hammer - so I rode to Woking and stuck it on the train.
I managed to fix her properly back at the filling station, but she was, sadly, never really the same again, which was down to my cack-handedness.
So one Saturday I reluctantly decided to replace her, with something a bit larger and went down to another dealer where I put a deposit down on a Kawasaki GPz550 which I intended to pick up the following weekend.
But as ever things didn’t quite turn out according to plan.
Four days to the weekend, when I was due to go and pick up my new GPz550 I was making my way out of Exeter to work on a wet Tuesday morning when I saw a large grey Mercedes leaving the car park of the main police station. He saw me, stopped at the entrance with his bonnet sticking out into the road, I pulled out towards the middle of the road to avoid the Merc.
Then, with just 10 yards to go, the driver decided that he could clear the car park before I reached him. He was wrong. I hit the Merc fair and square a foot behind the front wheel, flew over the handlebars, bounced off his bonnet and slid 50 feet on my back across the main road, coming to a rest with a bump against the kerb.
I lay there for a minute – but didn’t seem to be in any pain. That meant either I was the luckiest man in the world or I was dead. Eventually the traffic stopped and I got up. Entirely unscathed, I walked shakily back across the road where my bike was embedded firmly in the side of the Merc. The driver of the Merc got out and looked at me. I looked at him. He looked sheepish. “Sorry, Ollie mate,” he said – we drank in the same pub.
She was no more – and so, sadly was my deal for the GPz550 – I had nothing to part exchange and there was a long wait in the pipeline before the insurance company paid out.
Monday, 6 December 2010
Three wheels on my wagon....
Ahh the Reliant three wheeler – what a piece of.....engineering it was.
It is not Robin Reliant. It is Reliant Robin.
Reliant actually produced some surprisingly good motor cars – not least the Scimitar, a sports estate much loved by the horsey set after Princess Anne bought one.
And for a few years in the 1990s – when BMW owned Rover – Reliant was in fact the largest British-owned motor manufacturer.
My Reliant Regal 21E (so called because it had 21 extras - carpets were just one of the many luxuries) was not really a classy piece of motoring heritage.
One of the curious vagaries of the British motor vehicle licensing system is that you can drive a three-wheeled vehicle on a full motorcycle licence, or a full car licence.
In the days when a motorcycle test was easy to pass many a biker turned unexpected family man would resort to the Reliant as transport for his surprise offspring.
I got the Reliant not because I had an urgent familial need, but because the boss of the insurance company I was working for insisted that I had a motor car for my rounds.
Personally as my rounds included one of the South West’s more notorious council estates – naming it Burnthouse Lane was not exactly a good omen – I felt that a big noisy motorcycle and a helmet was more likely to scare off muggers after the cash bag full of £2 pound a week premiums I had to carry around every day.
So without a car licence, but able to drive a three wheeler on a motorbike licence, a Reliant it had to be.
All I could afford was a 20-year-old example, which had doors that shut when they felt like it as they were coming away from the fibreglass body work, and in which the driver’s seat had collapsed so a fruit crate had been jammed under it so I could see over the steering wheel.
This amazing piece of kit cost me £300.
Nobody would travel in it with me, apart from my girlfriend, who had to, and I bounced off pedestrian barriers and grass verges in country lanes in it, leaving piles of glass fibre dust all over Devon for four months.
Then, travelling home from a Hawkwind/23 Skidoo/Gong festival in North Devon, the thing blew its head gasket.
It took a week to find a garage that was prepared to do the job, as to work on the engine you had to do one half of the job from under the bonnet, and the other half through plastic panels inside the cabin. it took them another three weeks for them to do it. It cost me £300 - as much as the car had cost - to get it fixed and three weeks after that I was fired from the insurance job for general incompetence.
With the Honda 500 still pretty unhealthy it was my only set of wheels and sufficed as I searched for alternative employment, without success.
Then one day there was a dreadful metal-on-metal graunching sound and it stopped again.
A “mate” offered to take a look at it and pronounced it knackered, and offered me £20 for it "for spares".
Skint and unemployed I took his £20 and spent it on Clan Dew fortified wine and food. The girlfriend and I got drunk for two days.
The “mate” promptly bought a second-hand distributor from a Mini from a scrapyard for a tenner, bunged it in the Reliant and flogged the thing for £300.
a Reliant Regal 21e
First of all let me correct an oft-used expression which, for former and current owners, raises hackles everytime it is heard.It is not Robin Reliant. It is Reliant Robin.
A Reliant Robin- Completely Different
And Del Boy did not drive a Reliant Robin – he drove a Reliant Supervan III. A Supervan III - different again, see...
Reliant actually produced some surprisingly good motor cars – not least the Scimitar, a sports estate much loved by the horsey set after Princess Anne bought one.
And for a few years in the 1990s – when BMW owned Rover – Reliant was in fact the largest British-owned motor manufacturer.
My Reliant Regal 21E (so called because it had 21 extras - carpets were just one of the many luxuries) was not really a classy piece of motoring heritage.
One of the curious vagaries of the British motor vehicle licensing system is that you can drive a three-wheeled vehicle on a full motorcycle licence, or a full car licence.
In the days when a motorcycle test was easy to pass many a biker turned unexpected family man would resort to the Reliant as transport for his surprise offspring.
I got the Reliant not because I had an urgent familial need, but because the boss of the insurance company I was working for insisted that I had a motor car for my rounds.
Personally as my rounds included one of the South West’s more notorious council estates – naming it Burnthouse Lane was not exactly a good omen – I felt that a big noisy motorcycle and a helmet was more likely to scare off muggers after the cash bag full of £2 pound a week premiums I had to carry around every day.
So without a car licence, but able to drive a three wheeler on a motorbike licence, a Reliant it had to be.
All I could afford was a 20-year-old example, which had doors that shut when they felt like it as they were coming away from the fibreglass body work, and in which the driver’s seat had collapsed so a fruit crate had been jammed under it so I could see over the steering wheel.
This amazing piece of kit cost me £300.
Nobody would travel in it with me, apart from my girlfriend, who had to, and I bounced off pedestrian barriers and grass verges in country lanes in it, leaving piles of glass fibre dust all over Devon for four months.
Then, travelling home from a Hawkwind/23 Skidoo/Gong festival in North Devon, the thing blew its head gasket.
It took a week to find a garage that was prepared to do the job, as to work on the engine you had to do one half of the job from under the bonnet, and the other half through plastic panels inside the cabin. it took them another three weeks for them to do it. It cost me £300 - as much as the car had cost - to get it fixed and three weeks after that I was fired from the insurance job for general incompetence.
With the Honda 500 still pretty unhealthy it was my only set of wheels and sufficed as I searched for alternative employment, without success.
Then one day there was a dreadful metal-on-metal graunching sound and it stopped again.
A “mate” offered to take a look at it and pronounced it knackered, and offered me £20 for it "for spares".
Skint and unemployed I took his £20 and spent it on Clan Dew fortified wine and food. The girlfriend and I got drunk for two days.
The “mate” promptly bought a second-hand distributor from a Mini from a scrapyard for a tenner, bunged it in the Reliant and flogged the thing for £300.
Sunday, 5 December 2010
Saturday, 4 December 2010
What's brown and sticky?*
 |
| look at the styling on the CB450. who'd want a t120 Bonneville after seeing that? |
The CB450 was a twin, like its rivals. But that was as close as the similarities went.
It had two overhead camshafts, rather than none in the case of BSA, Triumph et al. It had an electric starter. It didn't vibrate your fillings out. It was fast. It didn't leak oil in vast quantities.
The Brits were using designs that dated back to the Second World War.
Honda were looking forward, with an engine featuring about six yards of cam chain, a wet sump, horizontally split crankcase and something exotic called "torsion bar" valve operation.
It was the CB450T, with its high spec switches, deep chrome and reliability that started the killing off of an industry that had once bestraddled the world.
The fact that it didn't handle worth a damn meant nothing to the open minded.
The CB450 went through various guises until Honda finally killed it off in 1978 in favour of the equally ground breaking CX500.
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| the cb500t. very 70's and not in a good way |
Unfortunately for me, I bought a 1975 model in 1981. And by then the CB500t (as it had become) was pretty much dead meat.
I liked the slabby, chunky look of the thing, bedecked as it was in chocolate brown paint and a top-box the size of a starter home. But I soon found it handled like a greased pig and was impossibly gutless compared to chums GS550s and XS500s.
I‘d had the 500T three weeks when disaster struck.
The starter motor clutch, essentially three metal slugs in a metal ring which were held in with biro springs, fell apart under all the vibration and the various bits whirled around inside the generator housing, destroying the whole thing.
I took it back to Hutchings, who looked at me blankly when I said that I'd paid £700 for it three weeks ago and I really felt they had some responsibility to fix it.
They suggested it had been ridden hard. I pointed out I had started it 40 times since I'd bought it and felt starter motor clutches should last a bit longer than that.
They said things about how expensive Honda parts were and how hard they were to get.
I said things about trading standards and the Sale of Goods Act and goods of merchantable quality.
They reluctantly gave me a Honda trail bike of dubious legality with next to no no teeth on the back sprocket to use while they tried to source the parts.
After a fortnight the trail bike was unrideable, and they gave me a Garelli moped instead as it was "the only thing we've got to spare" for my 30 mile a day round trip to work.
It blew up in four weeks.
Hutchings said they had still not been able to get a new generator from Japan and they had run out of bikes for me to destroy.
The mechanic at Hutchings managed to mend the old generator so worked a little bit - just enough to keep the ignition circuit running, but not enough to charge the battery
They gave me a spare battery and a charger told me to run it as a total loss system
One autumn evening I had been out for a ride on the Honda, when I was pulled by a motorcycle policeman on a Norton Commando, as I'd been doing 65 mph in a 30mph zone.
The conversation with the copper went as follows:
Officer: “Do you know how fast you were going, sonny?”
Me: “Yes, about 60.”
Officer: “Well, why were you going so fast? In a hurry to get somewhere were we?”
Me: “Well, the thing is, my lights don’t work properly, so I was trying to get home before it got dark.”
There was a pause. The copper looked as his notebook and I could see him weighing up the paperwork that was approaching.
He sighed: “Well,” he said: “You‘d better piss off home before it does, then...”
Try doing that with a speed camera.
It took Hutchings four months to get a new generator. A starter clutch was apparently unobtainable.
I told them to fit the generator and I'd wait for one to be hand carved in Hammamasutu. As I picked up the bike the old school mechanic, who was fed up with his boss lying admitted that the genny was a second hand one, and there was no point in waiting for a starter clutch because the crank had been so damaged a new one couldn't be made to fit.
It was an inauspicious start to two years of ownership. I lived with a kickstarter and hauled the ill-handling pig around for a while - I fitted a screen, got stuck in blizzards on Dartmoor, patched the holes in the silencers with gun-gum, went on weekend rallies, learned to look after it so I was merely inept rather than cack-handed, commuted on it every day in all weathers, met gurls, and all that stuff.
Moved in with a girl, split up, moved out, came to be a victim of unemployment in Thatchers Britain (though to be fair it was because I was rubbish at my job, which was not Thatchers fault), and went back to mum and dad, a bit sheepishly.
It was parked up next to the shed, where it stayed for six months, rusting quietly.
*a stick
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