Motor bikes, not something I’ve ever really been interested in. I had a brief flirtation with liking them at the time when Street Hawk was being shown (ooof…. that shows my age) but other than that they have held no interest what so ever for me. This week, however, has been a bit of a bike week and whilst I respect them a little more now, I still can’t get enthusiastic about motorised two wheeled transport.
So, how comes I have been playing with them? For once, it’s a work thing. Without going in to too many boring details, I have a customer who lives in South Africa. Being semi retired he is able to spend most of his time, when he hasn’t travelled back to the UK, bumming around on bikes. Nice life, if you are in to that sort of thing. Unfortunately the equipment he wants isn’t readily available out there, so he goes on a spending spree on his return, which means I get the responsibility of picking the equipment up and getting it ready for shipping.
This time, he wanted two complete Honda XR650’s, or as I am lead to believe, also called Super Moto’s. Last time I collected a bike for him I ended up in Wales, so this time I kept my fingers crossed that he could find something a little more local. Bike number one was found and thankfully was only ten miles away. Later the same day, the e-mail with bike number two landed on my computer and this time I was not quite so lucky.
Now the Isle of Man is somewhere I have always wanted to visit but I figured it would be more of a holiday or leisure destination rather than somewhere I would have to go for work! On contacting the seller, it turned out I still wouldn’t be able to take my first visit to the motoring heaven Isle as the bike was to be shipped to Lancaster Docks, from where I could collected it. Still a bit of a slog from my Essex location, but not as time consuming as it once appeared to be. So, next week I am heading north.
For now though, I was still stuck with bike number one. As it arrived after my customer’s departure from the UK, I get the inevitable questions….. “What’s it like?” I’ve known him for quite a few years now, and he knows cars are my thing but he still asks. “Yeah, it looks okay.”…….. I don’t bloody well know!! It’s a bike. Looks clean enough to me, but I am buggered if I know what’s going on underneath or even have a clue to a tell tale sign of what a bad one looks like.
To get it ready for shipping, the bike needs to be drained of all fluids, and in this case stripped back to leave just the chassis and engine (previous problems with whole bikes ending up in SA in a considerably worse condition than it left the UK, but that’s another story I which involved me and an American Chopper which came from the states…… for another time may be), and the rest of the equipment packed safely in bubble wrap. Now I’ve taken a fair few things apart in my life – cars, karts, lawn mowers, even a part of train once, but never a bike, so this was going to be a new experience.
After five hours, there I was surrounded by a bubble wrap mountain full of parts and a surprisingly small engine and chassis assembly. What struck me was how easy it all was to take apart. If it had been a modern car, there would have been various specialist tools and unique procedures to dismantling, but with the bike just a socket set, a screwdriver and a couple of standard metric spanners and it was all done. There wasn’t even a Torx key in sight. As the Meerkat says….. Simples.
So tell me, what can’t cars be like that? Why do they have to be fitted with manufacturer specific fasteners, sealed units and customer proof fittings? What happened to the good old fashioned car that could be worked on by the Sunday mechanic? This bike at least had been created with simple elegant design, ease of use, ease of maintenance, and for that reason I can imagine seeing it still running in fifty years time. A lot more than can be said about the majority of the bikes four wheeled modern brethren.