What is it, I mused, as I sat amid the plywood splendour of Wimbledon magistrate's court waiting room, having had a slight difference of opinion with the Met over the finer points of the Construction and Use regulations and advisability of running two inch open drag pipes in snoring suburbia, that leads grown men into debt, despair and near dereliction but still provides more crack than a Kings Cross hooker on overdrive?
Well in my case it was a '72 T120 Bonneville. Candy and chrome with high bars, four inch over forks, peanut tank and a couple of feet of chromed drainpipe hanging out of the cylinders masquerading as an exhaust (dead quiet m'lud, honest, can't see what all the fuss is about....). All tacked on to a lump that when used enthusiastically, would have the front end airborne in the first three of its five gears. Oh, and it had a special two position throttle too - open and shut.
I won't bore you with the history lesson - enough fatuous folklore and wild eyed bullshit has been written about these bikes to fill a telephone book already. Suffice it to say that when you're eighteen and eager and you're standing in a back yard in Wembley having just seen 110mph on the clock on the North Circular and the bike still looks like it's doing a ton now that it's standing still, the Legend comes to life and the wedge leaves your back pocket about as fast as Hitler cycling through Golders Green on a sunny afternoon.
It does matter that the dead fork seals have allowed the forks to retch glutinous slime all over the front of the engine, that the chain's fucked and the MOT runs out in about half an hour. It's a Triumph and it's bad, and you know it'll get you into a deal of trouble one way or another, so you might as well get on with it, right?
Having done the deal, I found myself once again on the North Circular in the blistering bank holiday sunshine, £550 lighter (well it was 1983), heading home with a grin from ear to ear, if not 'ere to there. I had the world at my feet and only a fine oil mist clouding my vision.
This dreamlike state lasted only ten minutes before the swine died on the Chiswick roundabout with a chronic sense of overheating. Well, I wanted a fag break anyway and it seemed the beast was merely in sympathy with my habit, even at this early stage in our relationship.
A quick check revealed that the timing hadn't slipped, nor was the head gasket blowing, so I put it down to the unusually hot weather and resolved to change the oil (if oil was the right word for the black and boiling bitumen bubbling in the main spine tube below the seat) when I got home.
Half an hour later, large areas of West London were treated to the rasping staccato beat of a horny British twin as we roared off once again, only to be sidelined a little later by a mystery misfire - eventually traced to dodgy coil connections....ho hum.
Once back at my bijou hovel, the old nail was subjected to a rigorous and thorough service, leaving no nut or bolt unchecked in my quest for perfection before setting about discovering the true nature of the beast on numerous summer sojourns around the leafy lanes of the Home Countries. To put it another way, I changed the plugs and polished the tank badges and then thrashed the bugger everywhere. Mechanical sympathy, essential if harmony and oil levels are to be maintained, had not yet entered my vocabulary.
Needless to say, before the summer was out I had been introduced to the gentle art of pushing British bikes home and being jeered at by spotty Herberts on mopeds whilst doing it on a number of occasions. Call it justice, or cause and effect if you like, but I bet it's the way most of us learn.
To be fair, most problems tended to be electrical as the previous owner's idea of a rewire had been more macaroni than Marconi. The wires to the ignition barrel situated in the right-hand side panel were the usual culprits with the Lucas connectors slithering off their terminal posts with an eagerness matched only by a coach load of lemmings on a day trip to Beachy Head.
The push-in adaptor sleeves mating the oversize exhausts to the cylinder head also provided hours of enjoyment as they rattled back down the pipes, leaving flames shooting out of the ports in all directions. I never minded too much as the resultant glow supplemented the feeble five inch headlamp (off a Triumph Adventurer) and I was able, on night runs, to see the front mudguard, if not the road ahead, a little more clearly.
Similarly, the longer forks whilst great for cornering due to the increased ground clearance, were no fun on wet roads as all the rain, salt and other crud was directed straight into my face, cleverly bypassing the skimpy US spec mudguard on the way. But what about the consumables, I hear you cry. Obviously, it depends how you ride but mine went like this - front tyre bloody ages, rear 7-8000 miles. I ran Roadrunners front and rear, finding that the handling did not deteriorate so dramatically, as with the TT100s, as they wore down.
A gallon of four star could get you from London to Brighton with restraint or only somewhere very much closer without.....but I always ran mine on the sooty side and with a main jet you could stick your head through. Oil was changed every 1000 miles and rarely needed topping up.
This Trumpet, like most others at some time or another, shed bits, fractured brackets, cracked its seat pan and blew bulbs if I dared go over 70mph, had a pair of carbs that wouldn't stay in sync for more than a weekend and a huge appetite for wheel bearings, but I could live with such minor irritations (or character if that's your definition) due to all the fun provided by its simple but poky power plant.
Someone, somewhere, had known what they were doing when they put this lump together. I could never work out why, when we went to rallies or on Sunday runs, all the other Triumphs held back, until I was told that they'd all been going flat out trying to keep up. And I thought they all went like mine! Even after I sold it and the new owner gleefully told me that it possessed a fancy close ratio gearbox, we found no other clues as to why it went so well.
The 650cc pushrod twin probably knocked out around 50hp and with its fairly low gearing and light weight could rip your arms out of their sockets as it pulled like a train through the gears. None of this keeping it in the powerband stuff, just wind it open and hang on. It started to run out of steam just after the ton, of course, but by then you would be more concerned with whether it was about to self destruct or if the comical hub brakes would do the business when the next torpid Volvo driver decided to take a detour across your line of flight. More often than not they did and it was only on a few particularly heart stopping occasions that I was forced to take up religion very quickly - and God being a Harley rider himself and therefore well used to iffy anchors, usually answered my rapid prayers.
The frame, so often criticised for being too tall, not holding enough oil (about four pints as opposed to Triumph's original intention of six) and cracking a lot was never as bad, in my experience, as some people like to make out. Sure, things could occasionally get a bit hairy on bumpy bends but that was usually down to the ancient Girlings that had long since blown their seals or swinging arm bushes that ran drier than a rally beer tent on a Sunday morning because you could never quite get the grease gun to reach the nipples under the pivot with everything else in the way.
In those days, however, such matters were of more interest to the local Old Bill than myself and I often took advantage of their generous offers of a free roadside MOT and maybe a nice trip down to the court to explain to a wrinkly old beak exactly why, when observed doing a tad over thirty down Fulham Palace Road, I had taken so long to reach a halt and why there was six inches of play noticeable on the high US bars. And, why, if I wasn't a housebreaker, I was carrying so many bloody tools, a number of which had freed themselves from my toolroll and bounced down the road, bruising a random selection of the good residents of SW6 in the process.
Still, we live and learn and I would always mitigate such harmless antics in the name of pursuing the passage of a misspent youth, pleading poverty and rampant insanity in the family for good measure. Bonnevilles, although excellent workhorses, have that extra sparkle about them, inspiring throttle opening and a bit more nonchalance in their owners than might occur whilst riding more mundane machinery. Even limping home on one pot with half a con-rod hanging out of the crankcase has a degree of tragic style to it.
You can usually drink free for at least a week on the sympathy, anyway! So, if like me, you've wanted one since you were knee high to a chaincase, you've got a reasonable chance now that prices have stabilised a bit, of picking up a runner at least, without too much strain on the overdraft. I've just brought home a T120/140 bitsa, in lots of bits, for £400, so it can be done.
You'll swear at it, kick it, plead with it to start some days, and as I was told when I bought mine, you'll probably get into a lot of trouble with it but you'll have a lot of fun doing it all - even if it doesn't always seem so at the time. And that's the crack. Sure beats a trip to Kings Cross, any day.
Jon Williams