Some people still insist that motorcycling has to be expensive. I know guys who spend more money on a pair of boots than I spend on a whole motorcycle. The most effective footwear also happens to be the cheapest - a pair of mangey old Wellingtons bought secondhand for a quid. Combine them with four pairs of socks and you're set for the coldest, wettest winter the UK can summon. Why spend fifty, a hundred, quid on a pair of leather boots? That's as stupid as buying a new motorcycle.
The main element in cheap motorcycling is to buy a small bike that no-one else wants and ride it as slowly as the traffic flow allows. I'm talking about motorcycles as basic transport not ego trips or adrenalin travels. The first bike I acquired in this way was a dead C50, a 1974 model. The guy was happy for me to take it away for free. The 17 year old engine was seized solid but a replacement was found for a tenner, condition unknown but it turned over.
After some fettling, that included modifying the engine mounts, the motor was installed and kicked over about a 100 times until it rattled into life. There were a lot of disturbing noises but it leapt into first and lurched up the road in typical step-thru manner.
Now, if I had wanted to ride fast, the thing would've been a deathtrap but in town I was happy enough at 25 to 30mph, slinking along in the gutter, scaring the shit out of sleepy pedestrians. Despite the Honda lacking anything like decent brakes or stability, it passed the cursory MOT and was never stopped by the police. The latter helped by the fluorescent orange jacket I'd found in a skip. The nylon was torn in one arm but I was a able to patch this. With an original and probably priceless pudding basin helmet and Mk.1 goggles I looked a picture of innocence.
With all this nylon gear the one thing I didn't want to do was break down. Massive condensation formed inside my clothes if I had to exert any effort, such as pushing the bike. For this reason I rarely keep a motorcycle for long, having perfected the sense of when an engine is about to expire. The C50 lasted five months and was sold for £80, which more than covered my running costs.
The next in line was a Brazilian manufactured Honda CG125. A fifty quid touch because the engine mounts had cracked in the crankcases. The motor would still start but bounced in the frame like an 850 Commando at tickover. Only two years old, except for some rot, the whole chassis was in fine fettle.
This is where friends and contacts come in handy. Walking into an engineering works and demanding alloy welding would turn out expensive but a few phone calls had tracked down someone who knew someone who knew someone else who worked in such a place and would do the job on the quiet for a tenner. Oh, it's a nice old world if you know what you're doing.
Nothing's quite as easy as it seems. Even with the engine back snug in the frame, there was a lot of vibration and not much more go than the C50. I suppose I could live with that but I had visions of making a killing by selling the CG off for £500 to £600. Reluctantly I pulled the valve cover off. Ho, hum, wrecked rockers led to the revelation that the valves had disappeared halfway into the head. One breaker wanted £75 for a newish head and got a mouthful of abuse for his pains (over the phone). £35 seemed expensive to me, but I appeared to have little choice. Why Honda chose a pushrod design I wouldn't like to say, but it ran reasonably after it was rebuilt. After a month I sold it for £525 before anything else could go wrong.
I went wild on a running C90 for a £100. The owner wasn't a real motorcyclist, had assumed that 60,000 miles and ten years had wrecked the Honda's engine. In fact, all it needed was a little work on the centrifugal clutch. I like these step-thrus, they just keep running and running, cost next to nothing to keep in consumables and fuel, and grind through the traffic like nothing else. This one lasted nearly a year until I sold it for what I'd originally paid.
Meanwhile, I'd acquired no less than four rat Honda 250 Superdreams with the intention of making one running bike. If I tell you that the most I paid for one was twenty quid you'll get an idea of what they were like. It was a sledge-hammer and chisel job to dissect them but I had plenty of time during the long winter evenings to do the job.
I'd read (in the UMG, naturally) that the whole balancer mechanism can be junked without any great loss, which was just as well as all four had knackered chains and tensioners. One engine had a reasonable crankshaft, another a full complement of teeth on the gears, yet another a reasonable pair of pistons and barrels......all four, strangely, had serviceable sets of cylinder heads, so the three valve design can't be completely naff.
The engine wasn't a big problem, then, just a lot of work. The chassis was a different matter. Not one set of calipers was safe to fit. I had to buy a full set of chassis bearings and the best petrol tank had to have a patch of rusty underside knocked out and a bit of steel welded over the gaping hole. There was a usable 2-1, the airfilters were junked and the wiring radically simplified. Anyway, it all went together eventually, finished off in trendy matt black and camouflage netting.
After a few minor hassles the motor growled into life, my cats tearing off down the garden as if a pack of Dobberman dogs were after them. I quickly adjusted the tickover before every window in the house shattered. Once sorted, the Superdream was thrown into the commuting but turned out not to be very impressive. It wobbled above 40mph and turned in only 40mpg despite the gentlest of throttle hands. It leaked oil from every engine joint (I'd used the old gaskets) and wrecked chains at a remarkable rate (I'd eliminated the cush-drive). After two weeks I was happy to see it go for £275. If I'd charged for all the hours I'd put in I would've made a massive loss, but I didn't worry about that as I had nothing else to do.
A change was obviously needed. That came in the form of a non-running BSA Beaver, a quite smart moped with most bits made in Italy but assembled over here. The reason it wasn't running was traced to cracked piston rings. I took the piston along to the local motorcycle dealer who after an argument finally turned up a couple of Fantic rings that would fit with a bit of filing. A fiver the pair because they were old stock.
I felt pretty pleased with myself as I was tightening down the head studs, but it turned to anger when each stud started turning in the alloy. Another mate did the helicoil trick for a tenner, which I thought rather excessive, and I soon had the little stroker in one piece. It then occurred to me that the engine had popped out without having to pull any wires apart. Apart from a few coils of ancient wire, there weren't any electrics on the bike. I hate electrics.
A comedy of errors followed, in which I spent about a hundred nights of passion trying to achieve a working ignition system. No hope. I gave up in disgust, sold the heap off to a kid across the street for sixty quid. The cheeky little sod had the thing running the next day, took delight in doing massive wheelies up the street every time I poked my nose out. He had a friend who was an electronics genius and had sorted the mess in five minutes. You can't win them all!
The latest bike is a Yam RXS100. These are worthy little machines that run on the minimum of fuel and are more than adequate for town riding. Mine was very cheap because it was badly crashed, even the frame was as bent as a ten bob note. The frame was straightened by another mate and most of the other bits came from my collection of parts acquired over the past few years.
It goes without saying that consumables are never bought new. Tyres, chains and even brake shoes can be found from dealers who've just replaced them with new stuff, from breakers who have great piles of bits (if you butter them up or exasperate them by hanging around all the time, they are dirt cheap), or through the great cosmic exchange system. Got to go now, I've just been told about a seized CD175 someone wants cleared out of their garden. All this parsimony's really great fun.
George Taylor