How I got into motorbikes

There's another forum I visit because the world is not just about Superdukes. One one of them there is this guy who started posting stories, not just little comment but long accounts of why he rides bikes and anecdotes from the distant past. I was inspired to do the same so here's the first chapter on how I got into bikes.

CHAPTER ONE

I’ve always loved engines. I sometimes think it’s only Kawasaki triple engines but then I look back into the past and my mind is suddenly full of distant memories, lingering, indistinct but stretching back over the years, like two-stroke haze clouding the horizon in rear view mirrors.

Some of my earliest memories are of my dad running in his model aeroplane engines in the garage, the ear-shattering noise of those small two-strokes at maximum revs, the pale blue fumes filling the room with the intoxicating smell of Nitro-methanol and adrenaline. Watching him dismantle those miniature finned cylinders, easing out pistons the diameter of a half-pence pieces and show me how the they powered the crank and pushed the gasses through ports the size of a bullet hole. I was the first kid in school to get all those jokes about little ends.

Through a succession of Mammod steam engines and diesel powered control line planes my experience with internal combustion developed and blossomed into a passionate obsession. By the time I was thirteen, tiring of Biggles books and aeronautics, I inevitably begun to turn my thoughts towards the dream of propelling myself along the ground (in the fastest possible manner). My first experience of this had been with my dad’s Suffolk Colt lawnmower, on which I sullenly earned my pocket money each weekend. Even now, forty years later, I’m as intimately familiar with that little 75cc engine as I am with any other power-plant. It taught me about valves, ignition timing, carburettors and that poor old engine was stripped and taken apart so many times it’s testament to its design that it kept on running. I’d tried standing on the mower under power but the only way was to face backwards, legs apart with one foot on the drive chain housing and the other precariously balanced on the starter cord cover. Revs full, lever in and balance as the machine lurched forwards hoping that my Green Flash tennis shoes wouldn’t slip and sending my feet into the whirring cutter blades. My shocked parents soon put a stop to this sort of fun and perhaps were a bit relieved when I turned my attention towards motorising my younger brother’s childhood go-cart.

This was a tubular steel contraption with pedals and semi-perished rubber tyres that had been gradually rusting away in the back yard for years. It was a good design in many ways with a strong frame and well engineered steering. In my teenage imagination I immediately matched up this chassis to the familiar Colt engine and after several weeks of saving up and scouring the small ads in the back of Exchange and Mart I purchased my first engine from a local farmer. It was much older than the one I was used to but more or less the same design so I soon had it stripped it down and got it running fine. Next task was to get the thing connected to the back wheels of the go-cart which introduced the first big engineering challenge of my life. There was no place on the chassis for an engine, in fact even with the seat bolted on in the rear most position a gangly thirteen year old could barely squeeze in. There was only one thing for it. Using my newly acquired ‘O’ Level metalwork skills I welded together an engine mount behind the seat that just about managed to line up the drive shaft in a credible position to connect directly to the rear wheels. There was a minor problem in that, because the considerable weight of the engine was all behind the rear axle, the cart tipped back so it’s front wheels reached for the sky like some sort of wheelie crazed drag racer. It was only when the driver sat in that equilibrium was restored and the front wheels met with tarmac again but this, rather disturbing characteristic, didn’t bother me at all. I was imminently going to become a genuine, motorised human being and that’s all that mattered!



After much experimenting, broken chains, re-welding and judicious hammering my glorious missile, prepared to F1 standards, was wheeled out into the road one early Sunday morning, dad’s car relieved (by syphon) of a few pints of four-star. Unwitnessed except by our local milkman who stopped in amusement to watch the desperate efforts of this skinny lad crammed into a child’s go-cart frantically yanking the starter cord and praying it wouldn’t snap before lift off. Throttle lever set, and fine tuning the choke lever with the other hand, I kept one eye on the bedroom curtains for signs of the inevitable parental intervention. At last the engine caught and then roared into life, centrifugal forces engaged the clutch and I was away! That moment is etched in my mind, the pavements sliding by, my house left far behind, the road ahead rushing towards me, one hand gripping the miniature steering wheel and the other pushing the little chrome throttle lever to the limit. The engine noise clattering away behind my back, full revs, fuel igniting, pushrods dancing, valves bouncing, crank spinning. I was intoxicated in the moment, mechanically at one with my mechanistic genius, the wind in my face, master of the universe, as I hurtled to a terminal velocity of about fifteen miles an hour. At which point several things happened all at once. The chain snapped with an audible crack, the axle bent sending the cart into my very first tank-slapper, the engine over revved and my dad came running out the front door in his pyjamas screaming something about driving licences, insurance and not having had the sense to install any sort of braking system.

After that the scene was set and my next foray into the world of power was a seminal one because it was on two wheels. I was still at the age where I met up with mates after tea and we’d hang about getting up to minor mischief and go places you weren’t meant to be. A favourite activity was to climb over the tall perimeter wall of the local industrial estate where haulage contractors parked their rigs at night and agricultural tyre businesses dumped tractor tyres and inner tubes in huge, monolithic piles. It was a dark, dirty place that smelled of engine oil and coal dust with a compacted, cinder surface pock-marked with black puddles that glinted with the rainbow colours of spilled diesel. We loved it. And one night we found a treasure leaning against the back wall in the shadow of some ancient rusty machinery. It was black, like the yard and It had a presence that instilled a sort of awe in me at the time because it was just so big and heavy and seemed to compel us to push it into the middle of the yard and sit on it and try it for size. Its seat was broad, it’s handlebars wide and I remember the thrill of sitting there with my hands on the controls and feet on the pegs. I didn’t know it at the time but it was a Honda CB450 Black Bomber… and the keys were in the ignition.

To be continued...

That is a most excellent tale.
Brakes? Who needs em? You'll stop when you run out of gas.

Great write up Bic, a talent I sorely lack.
Red wine sometimes agrees with you.

Thanks for the comments. More wine later...

CHAPTER TWO

I’ll never know whos bike that was or why it ended up in that yard. My mates said it was stolen and dumped and certainly no one ever seemed to notice that we went there every night over that long summer to take turns riding that bike round the cinders. One day it just wasn’t there anymore and I felt a great loss. But in those few, precious weeks something happened inside of me and I developed an affinity with the way a motorbike felt and how it was built and how it sounded. I loved kicking that bike into life and embrace the smell of hot engine, petrol and black rubber. I loved the connection between a twist grip and the rise in revs and the bark of exhaust. I loved mastering a clutch and learning to change gears and blip the throttle on the way down. I loved the slow, irregular tick, tick of cooling metal when we stopped for a break to share illicit drags on pilfered Players No. 6. My mates trashed that bike, jumping it over builder’s planks balanced on green and white Castrol oil drums, crashing it into nettle filled ditches, skidding it sideways, speedway style, through the filthy puddles but I mourned every injury it sustained and secretly despised them for their uncaring ways. It was me that kept it going and tended to it’s wounds at the end of every session. My sisters and her friends were all into the clichéd love affairs with Donny Osmond and ponies, Black Beauty, and the soundtrack to White Horses but me: I was smitten with that Honda twin and had, and always will have, a secret place for them in my heart.

At school my books were always covered with drawings of WW1 aeroplanes, Sopwith Camels, Fokker Triplanes and Spandau machine guns but as I approached the final years of this hideous sentence these had transformed into detailed technical drawings of motorcycle engines, racing fairings, and leather clad riders, crouched down behind Perspex screens into streamlined forms. I still really had very little knowledge of bikes and the different makes but I loved the proportions of motorcycle engines, the polished alloy casings, the shape of the air-cooled cylinders, the swoop of exhaust pipes and jewellery-like accents of copper and brass. One day, during one exceptionally boring lesson I was sketching out a new picture on the back of my exercise book. It had, for some reason, a mad black and red striped tank design and a crazy, spiky look. “What’s that then?” whispered a conspiratorial, but cynical, voice in my ear and I turned to see this lad studying my latest two-wheeled creation. In a sort of shocked reaction I spontaneously blurted out, “It’s a Beezer-bike”, (making reference to the red and black Dennis the Menace character from the Beezer comic I’d only recently out-grown reading).

Little known to me the term ‘Beeser” was a slang term in use at the time for BSA and my mention of this acted like some sort of magic code and his tone immediately changed, “Meet me after school”, he said, ”I’ve got someplace to take you.”

And so I entered another world. The world of bikers. Steve, for that was his name, took me back to his place and then onto a neighbouring house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. There, outside the open garage doors stood a collection of ancient, old men (or so they seemed to me) dressed in greasy denim, leather and tattoos, the smell of fags and beer heavy in the air as they laughed and joked about stuff I didn’t understand. But, despite being intimidated by their general demeanour, they hardly registered because there in the garage, hidden in the shadows but catching the last rays of a setting sun was a machine that captured my heart the instant I saw it. A DB34 BSA Gold Star in full clubmans trim. Jeez that bike was everything I’d ever dreamed of. Chrome tank, gleaming alloy, BSA badges projecting deep, red passion, clip-on bars and prominent instruments. I stumbled towards it mesmerised by the size of the engine, that massive lump of fine-finned brutality. In all the years since I don’t think there has ever been an engine that impacted on me like that one did and when they kicked it into life (which I remember was not simple or easy) I knew I'd be wed to motorcycles for the rest of my days.


To be continued...

CHAPTER THREE

Steve became a good mate. We shared a passion for bikes and his parents were far more lenient with their views about riding bikes and getting onto the road legally. He was a few months older than me and as his sixteenth birthday approached I could only observe in envy as he masterminded the plot to become the next Barry Sheene. It was 1979, the FS1E had been superceded by the RD50 and Steve had the one we all wanted; resplendent in red and white speed-blocks, cast wheels and micron expansion chamber. There was a period when the older lads had turned 16 but still hadn’t left school and they’d all turn up on their Fizzies and AP Suzukis and a few rare and exotic Italian Mallaguttis and Cimattis. Thee rest of us would pedal our push bikes up the long hill away from school and congregate at the top waiting for the ‘Ped-boys” to come by. As the approaching buzz of tiny engines laboured up the hill we’d sit on our bikes craning our necks backwards searching the cloud of blue and white smoke to see who was in the lead. Invariable it would be Steve, flat on the tank, his black gloves gripping clip-on bars, AGV hidden behind his cockpit fairing and denim flares flapping madly in the slipstream.

We’d start pedalling furiously down the hill leading into the village, judging our timing so that we’d match the speed of the fast approaching swarm of bikes. And for a few glorious minutes you became one of them, surrounded by screaming two stroke engines, wildly weaving to gain position, narrow back tyres, under damped suspension, the smell of Castrol R. In those moments I knew my true destiny, this is what I wanted to do, as much as I could, forever. And it was only a matter of time.

Although I spent every minute dreaming about speed and my daredevil future exploits when I finally got onto public roads I hadn’t factored in my dad and his puritanical views about motorcycling and the appropriate way to behave. He was an engineer and had owned many bikes in his youth but at a time when motorcycling was an affordable form of transport and his many Truimphs, and Panthers had all been drab utility vehicles adorned with luggage racks and leg shields. Maybe it was just the black and white photos but it seemed to me that biking in the 50’s had been a bit of a grim affair. In contrast my bedroom walls were covered in posters of metallic green Z900s, leather race numbers and rider names, Sheen and Roberts clashing in a blaze of yellow, blacks and reds and Mick Grant’s lime green H2R so when I finally brought up the subject of buying a motorcycle our views on this weren’t exactly aligned.

For various reasons, mainly financial, my sixteenth year had slipped by without me getting a moped so I wanted to get straight onto a 250 which of course my dad objected to on the grounds that it would be too hard for me to deal with the size and power. He had no idea about that Black Bomber, my years of riding field bikes round farm land and hours of illegal road riding on borrowed bikes – and I could hardly tell him. So began the battle of bike selection that became something of a breakfast routine over the weeks preceding my birthday. I’d show up with Exchange and Mart and Bike magazine with felt tip pen circles round RD and GT250s and he’d come prepared with cards from local shops advertising MZ 125s and Honda 200 Benlys: old man’s bikes! Christ, if I turned up on one of those I’d be the laughing stock of my mates. In the end I realised that without his blessing and support I just wasn’t going to ever get a bike so we managed to find a compromise and one evening he drove me over to Blackburn to collect a little Honda 125J from a friend of his who owned a bike shop.

Although a modest little bike the J was the sportiest of all the 125 Hondas at that time and came with quite a few features that overcame some of the negative aspect of their reputation. It had a front disc instead of a drum and proper clocks with a rev counter and idiot lights. But the best bit was the engine because it was good solid overhead cam single that in many ways reminded me of a modern, miniature Gold Star lump. At least that’s what I told myself during that first year as a legal road rider. I learned so much on that bike and ultimately grew to begrudgingly respect it for dealing with so many crashes and being constantly thrashed trying to keep up with all my mates on faster machines. Having passed my test I finally convinced my dad I’d earned the right to trade up to an RD250 and the little Honda was cannibalised by my younger brother and the engine went into an off road frame to became another field bike for the next generation of wannabe bikers. I’d like to say I was sorry to see it go but the truth is that once Keith got his oily mitts on the keys I never once gave it another thought. Id got better things to think about; I’d discovered two-stroke triples!