I am old enough to have known better. Much better. Reliving an old experience is never going to match up to the memory. Time filters out the bad bits, leaving a rosy glow of sentiment and nostalgia. Circumstances conspired against me, of course. As they all too often do. I also felt I was having things too easy. Riding around on a series of newish motorcycles. All I had to do was sit there, open the throttle and enjoy myself immensely. That was potentially ruinous of my street cred as editor of the UMG.
Initially, I thought I would go the whole hog. Buy some brutal, aged British twin. Something like a Norton Atlas would keep me so busy in mechanical repairs and visits to the dentist that I would have no time left for any other self indulgences. It would've been the perfect way to keep me on the straight and narrow. Or send me so insane with frustration that I would have smashed it to smithereens with the largest available lump hammer.
One look at the hideous price tags of these horrible old lumps quickly dissuaded me from such a dubious course. No sooner had I dismissed that action than a reader popped up on the doorstep. He claimed that in a past column I had expressed an interest in buying a Black Bomber. No, not some particularly lethal form of speed, but a 25 year old Honda CB450. What could have more street credibility than a vintage Honda?
Being naturally cynical I immediately suspected his motives. Classic Japanese motorcycles are notoriously difficult to sell. The main problem with CB450s being the paucity of used spares and the cost of new bits. As fine an engine as the DOHC twin possesses, the internal wear eventually reaches a point of no return. It’s cheaper to buy another bike than try to replace crankshaft, pistons and top end. We are talking 25 year old motorcycles, here.
This 1967 example sat in the gutter outside the Fowler residence with a rather forlorn air. The owner had foolishly agreed to let me test ride the bike for what was left of the day. The last time I rode a CB450 was 14 years ago. I hadn't even kick-started a four stroke twin into life for five years!
Took about ten kicks and much fiddling with the carb mounted choke to fire up the motor. The engine clattered alarmingly - my motor used to be almost silent at 600rpm. The non-standard silencers matched the carbs about as well a sixty year old oil-rigger suited a 15 year old Thai virgin. Low speed running was horrible, vibes appreciable and the chassis felt like the suspension was locked up solid. I had an errand on the other side of town, so the Honda was thrust into the heavy traffic grind. Here it brought back memories, but they were not pleasant ones. The 25 year old clutch dragged chronically. Every time we rolled to a stop at the lights, the bike kept crawling forward in first. Neutral was impossible to find and the gear change did a passable imitation of a cement mixer.
Don’t know how many times I stalled the motor because of that drag. Enough to have steam pouring out of my helmet by the time I finally reached my destination. It was so bad that I took a long circular detour out into the countryside to return home. Fond memories of running along at 90mph were quickly dispelled by the machine's penchant for violently weaving above 70mph. Where my machine had smoothed out above 6000rpm, this one became even more frenzied. A sure sign, to my mind, that the crank was on the way out.
I spent a couple of hours riding the old Honda but I can’t say I enjoyed them. Sure, if it was a brand new bike out of the crate, the experience would’ve been much more pleasant. The wrecked heaps that owners try to pass off as being classics have to be viewed with deep suspicion. They are just like the old British bikes, more trouble than they are worth unless you have a desperate need to relive your youth (in which case an Oriental nubile would probably work out cheaper and a lot more fun).
Depressed by having my memories soiled by the rather vile example of the breed, I found a certain consolation in the fact that my four year old Kawasaki twin felt transformed into an ultra fast, smooth and chuckable motorcycle. This state of grace faded after a couple of days. I was again disgruntled with the state of my motorcycling experience. There was nothing actually wrong with the Kawasaki, just that I knew the parameters of its riding experience so well that there was no way it was going to surprise me.
Such a state is always a little edgy. The temptation to ride like a juvenile delinquent just to dispel some of the angst always there. To summon up a high on a motorcycle is a mere, violent twist of the throttle away... as is a visit to the local hospital. On too many occasions I've been plunged from euphoria into painful hell when some unsuspected obstacle has sent the motorcycle sliding off down the road.
Well, it seems like that to me as I write this. In reality I can count the number of times I've fallen off and actually hurt myself, in the last twenty years, on the fingers of one hand. I’ve always managed to leap up and take myself to the hospital. Unfortunately, I'm very sensitive to pain and find that these moments often intrude into my mind as I’m hustling along. I'm particularly susceptible to the thought of having my knee-caps smashed to bits by oncoming cars!
Imagine my feelings then when an acquaintance insisted that I borrow his race tuned Kawasaki 500 H1. He had previously lectured me at some length that the irreverent comments in the UMG on the fearsome triple were entirely unjust. I managed to refrain from asking him for a gas mask to counteract the heavy dose of pollutants coming out of the exhaust. He explained that the tuned state of the engine necessitated the oil pump being turned up to its highest setting.
I thanked God for the padding in my crash helmet. Don’t get me wrong, I love the sounds a lot of motorcycles put out but the terrible triple was something else. This was not helped by the fact that the motor had to be blipped to around 5000 revs to keep it running. Nor by the three expansion chambers being devoid of anything as silly as baffles.
I suppose that the dense fog created by the engine was useful in concealing the number plate from the plod and the identity of the rider from irate neighbours!
Not wanting to appear a complete idiot in front of someone who's good enough to cough up some hard earned cash every other month for the UMG, I grabbed some throttle before gently dropping the clutch. I needn’t have bothered, the clutch was one of those vicious on or off jobs. The result was that my need to avoid stalling had sent the tacho into its power band just as the clutch bit home. Hell have no fury like a tuned H1 well into its power band.
Suddenly finding myself grappling with a mono-wheel device screaming up the road at a ferocious pace was a quick way to wake up the senses. But it had little else going for it! Even on two wheels, H1’s have a dubious handling reputation, on just one wheel they are bloody diabolical. Or perhaps it was just me. I have always avoided joining the wheelie brigade and my lack of experience might explain why the handlebars were waggling viciously in my hands. Though not why the back wheel was squirming all over the place like there was no air in the tyre.
I backed off the throttle. After a moment the engine went dead. Then the front wheel came crashing down. I strained a leg muscle stopping the machine from falling over. Gassing the engine again the whole vicious cycle was repeated. It wasn’t until the motor was in third gear that the thing became anywhere near controllable... and then it was going so fast I nearly ran across a couple of junctions and could quite easily have launched the damn thing right off the road into the local river.
Which was probably the best place for it. The owner had thoughtfully tightened up the suspension so much that each and every bump was passed straight through to my spine. It shared with an NSU Quickly I used to own, a disconcerting tendency to run wider through bends the more you leaned it over. The tyres seemed to turn to iron once the bike was a few degrees off the vertical and the beast hopped and skipped all over the road. The power punch was so violent that it was ridiculously easy to aviate the front wheel when leaned over even in fifth gear.
About thirty minutes of this self abuse was all I could take. The triple also vibrated ferociously, backfired alarmingly if you tried to use less than 5000 revs and had drum brakes that would have just been adequate on a tired Honda CB250. Later that day, the owner challenged me to a race, myself mounted on a GPz500 twin. He refused to believe my prognosis that the triple was all but unusable on the road rather than track and that it was only fit as a rather obscure if particularly violent means of suicide.
Having decided | had no intention of choking on his fumes I immediately took the lead with no thought of relinquishing it. Being in a nasty mood, I headed for a favourite series of B roads down by the coast. There are fast straights and wild curves that turn back on themselves. Mostly deserted, the only drawback of this road is that the road surface often changes from passably smooth to violently rough.
The GPz’s suspension is hardly state of the art stuff, but it is adequate to most needs. The machine's basic stability means it would take a bloody idiot to run the bike off the road. Unfortunately, that’s a barely adequate description of the H1 owner. Anyone who tunes an already vile power band to be even more vicious and then leaves the rest of the chassis stock, has to be well on the road to incarceration in a mental institution.
I should not have been shocked to find said machine’s front wheel waggling around my earlobe as we exited the first bend. I smiled quietly to myself in the knowledge that the sudden change in road surface up ahead would have the triple owner dropping a load in total panic. There were enough bumps ahead to tear the stroker’s chassis apart, even the nifty and nimble GPz would squirm a little when the going got that rough.
Dropping a gear and winding on the throttle into red ensured I could keep well ahead of the triple. Although the power delivery is violent enough on the H1 to put the rider in mind of space rockets taking off, the actual acceleration that gets through to the road is down on even a middle of the road sportster like the GPz500. I was therefore a bit miffed to find that as I hastily braked for the next set of bends the H1 sailed blithely past, hopping all over the road, the rider giving me superior leer.
He would have been much better off looking where he was going! The surface started to turn really rough, where I received a mild pounding the H1 looked like it was about to fall apart with the rider bouncing about in the saddle. This sudden manifestation of council neglect evidently cooked the H1 rider’s brain. Rather than trying to lean over into the bend, he instead rode straight off the road. A soft landing was ensured by the slime infested ditch that ran alongside the road. I was all for doing the proper thing, leaving the tripie there to rot. The owner, despite being covered in enough effluent to start his own sewage farm, insisted I lend a hand in pulling the bike out. I managed to cadge a long length of rope from a nearby gypsy encampment, tied this to the H1’s handlebars and the rear subframe of the GPz.
The twin proved adequate to the task of pulling the H1 and rider through the swamp for about fifty yards. He careered up the ditch at its lowest point, only just avoiding rolling back down and landing on his head with the machine on top of him. The triple was almost miraculously free of damage from its off road excursion and started on the third kick. The rider was all for carrying on the race, despite the fact that he was covered in enough slime to do a passable imitation of the monster from the swamp. I demured, I'd had enough of this macho madness.
These things tend to go in cycies of three, so I was nervously awaiting the next unmasking of my memories, although it has to be said I was always of the opinion that the H1 was one dangerously weird motorcycle. The thing that really makes me distraught about these old Jap horrors is that there is enough myth gathering around them to cause their prices to rise to absurd levels. No-one can doubt they are worth experiencing if the entry cost is a mere couple of hundred quid, but when owners start demanding four figure sums for bikes that lack usability and are often downright suicidal it seems to me the game is going the same pathetic way as the British classic scene. Ugh!
I was pondering this when an old CD175 Honda appeared in the local newspaper. By old I mean 1969, one of the examples with a pressed steel frame, cylinders inclined forward and an engine capable of pushing the plot to 80mph. My first real motorcycle? The first thing I noticed was that it looked a lot less stylish than I recalled (it came with dumpy guards and full chain enclosure, but they were easily swapped for something more sporting) and that the machine felt really diminutive.
There was never anything much wrong with the pressed steel frame, a large enough structure to take whatever stresses 17hp could put on it. It was the suspension that really spoiled the bike... this example still had the original forks and shocks... my mere ten stones were enough to use up all that was left of the available suspension travel. My short test ride was enough to dissuade me from testing the limits of engine.
Sure, the motor seemed OK, whirring away without too much vibration, although the gearbox was a typical period piece of worn out Honda design... it would take a couple of weeks to become sensitive to the need to slice ever so gently through the box. With 79345 miles on the clock I rather fancied it must surely be near the end of its useful life. If I had been desperate for some cheap wheels, its fifty quid price tag would have been enough to sway me in its favour. In a rare moment of beneficence I decided to leave it for some enthusiastic youth; there were a lot worse ways of moving on from a rat GP100, and the like.
A few days later it came to me in a blinding flash that the machine I really needed to buy was an XS650. Its quirky handling would ensure that I stayed awake and never grew bored with its predictability. They were old but not so old that it would prove impossible to find one with a few years life left... it was even possible to hop them out to 840cc if I really grew desperate for something to do on cold winter evenings.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I’ve yet to locate one of these devices in good working order. I was rather pissed off to have spent hours travelling to view one, only to find that its owner had chopped the bike in the worst possible taste. A brief ride up the road was enough to convince me that I would be better off buying a H1 triple. I wanted to keep myself awake not scare myself silly. The other one I saw was more or less stock but had been around the clock at least once. The owner kept insisting that the engine rattles were perfectly normal for an XS twin. Maybe the rattles were, they were always noisy buggers, but the knocking noise coming from the four bearing crankshaft certainly wasn't.
All I can say is that nostalgia ain't all it’s made out to be. It’s too easy to become infected with all this retro crap. Today’s motorcycles are appreciably better than what’s gone before. Tomorrow's will be even better. There are loads of brilliant used machines around from the last five years that often cost less than many of the inflated value older Japs. Going backwards never really works but then neither does standing still!
Bill Fowler
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