The CD200 Benly is a twin cylinder four stroke commuter with vague sixties styling. I was actually attracted to the bike by the peculiar chromed mock air intakes on the sidepanels and the metal fork shrouds, but I still don't know why. Mine was one of the deep maroon red ones. I liked the colour a lot, perhaps because it was the same as my Rudge.
Friends who rode 400s and 750s all seemed to think I should have got something larger but I was easily pleased. I had wanted a bike for commuting and a solid, reliable little commuter I had got.
After a while I began to use it for longer journeys. It happily buzzed along at 60 to 65mph with a top speed of about 75mph. This required a week's diet and a following wind to achieve. In retrospect, I might have been more successful with the kind of diet that produced a following wind. However, since it also required an ungainly position and snot on the speedo, my licence was always fairly safe.
Soon, I started to take advantage of my new found freedom and I started to explore away from the boundaries of London. It comfortably took me to Oxford, Bristol, Norwich and Birmingham. The only problem with long journeys was numb fingers due to handlebar vibration and the sickening way it would wallow around motorway bends when travelling with a pillion. It always seemed to give me about 70 or 80mpg, regardless of the load it was carrying.
Performance is not the most dynamic in the world but the seat is broad and comfortably padded. I always consider this an important feature of a bike since nature has not endowed me with much natural padding of my own.
On one trip to Birmingham in early March, in snow, with a new girlfriend (I believe in throwing my pillions in at the deep end; she made me join the RAC), I suffered the one major problem with the bike. I think there must be some law which says that the act of checking a bike the night before a long journey is bound to either reveal some major fault or cause one. This time it was the petrol tank which had rusted internally just above the seam and chose that moment to split.
I had to jury-rig a Bantam tank in its place. A nice old pensioner in Brum told me how he used to own one of these and wasn't it so much better than the Japanese stuff. I hadn't the heart to tell him that, in this case, it was only the tank that was better.
I subsequently had another tank go in the same place and suspect it is caused by water in the tank - whether this comes from condensation or from dodgy petrol I don't know. The third tank got one of those epoxy coatings and a fuel filter. I was working as a carpenter at that time and the bike was my daily transport all over London. The engine is surprisingly good at coping with a load and never complained at the amount it regularly had to pull. I've seen one used to pull a sidecar full of ladders by a window cleaner from Kent whose round covered South London.
I occasionally used my Honda to collect pieces of wood for work. Six feet was the longest I could manage and the only other limit was whether I could straddle the wood to reach the back brake and gear levers.
I regularly used it to transport my tools to wherever I was working by strapping them on the pillion perch. The engine never complained but the chain tended to stretch at an alarming rate. The full enclosure meant this wasn't very obvious and I am indebted to Hamrax Motors for rescuing me without too many rude comments when the chain jumped off one very heavily loaded night on a West London roundabout.
The full chain casing became a conventional chainguard after this, the rate of deterioration of the chain increased. If you want a practical commuter, keep the chain fully enclosed. Chain demise was doubtless hastened by the ease with which the bike did wheelies - it's really simple, all you do is strap to the pillion seat two toolboxes of carpentry tools, an electric drill, jig-saw, a four foot level, a bag of saws, plus a top box full of various screws, nails, extension leads, a radio and various butties; and then you strap on one of those marvellous folding workbenches. Top speed isn't much, though.
The demise of this splendid little bike occurred on New Year's Ever, 1985, when I tried to board a bus through the exit doors whilst still riding the bike and without waiting for the bus to stop. Yes, one of those big red things with two floors and an annoying habit of never turning up when you need one and, no, I didn't see it.
This, perhaps not surprisingly, slightly shook my confidence since I was sober, not in a hurry, on a clear, dry road and still don't remember a thing. My only consolation was that the person who drove me back several weeks later, so that I could complete my insurance form, nearly did exactly the same thing in daylight. I was very lucky and celebrated New Year on my back on a hospital trolley with some whisky from a medical hip flask.
The bike was rescued by a South London bike dealer who shall remain nameless. Should anybody else suffer such a fate, and I very much hope that if you do, you are as lucky as I, then get your bike back as soon as possible. I waited until I was less dejected before bothering about it. I also believed the dealer when he said the bike was repairable and the frame was okay. I should have guessed by the way I had to pay for storage and recovery charges before I was allowed to see the bike.
The front end was just a bent and mangled mess. The most substantial part of the headstock was bent and there was ominous crazing of the frame paint everywhere else I looked. More dejection followed. This is just another way of saying that I was really pissed off with it and slung the remains in a distant corner of the garage.
Several months later I was offered a non running CD200 with 13000 miles on the clock. This victim of a divorce had stood in a back garden for several years and was offered cheap because the engine had seized during that time. I bunged in my original engine and, after replacing a few rusted pieces from my pile of scrap, I was owner of another CD200. This then acted as back up transport to a rather tired BMW combo which had progressed from carpenter's van to family transport.
I didn't feel the same way about this CD as I had about my first. Perhaps because I wasn't so proud about it, I didn't service it as regularly as I should have. I was on my way to college on it one day when it crossed my mind that I hadn't serviced it for some time. I was thinking about how marvellous the engine was, how it always started regardless of the weather and how it had never been any trouble in the 30,000 miles I had done. I was just getting to the point where you promise yourself that you will actually get round to changing the oil this weekend when....a loud clattering noise from the engine signified that the engine had decided that this weekend was too far away and too late.
The camshaft runs in the head unless you don't change the oil regularly. Then it escapes and runs around the head. I have taken this as a lesson for all subsequent bikes and keep their moving bits all neatly enslaved with regular doses of slippery stuff.
In conclusion, the CD200 Benly is a good, solid, reliable little bike, which if regularly serviced should last a good few miles. My engine lasted 33000 miles and, whilst the head was irredeemable, the pistons and bores were still within tolerances and the rest of the engine has been saved for spares. They commute well, require little attention and are comfortable enough for long journeys.
Richard Glynn