Puch Maxi

I was really pleased with my 17th birthday present - a knackered old Puch Maxi from a shady looking farm-hand whose tried and tested method of stopping the motor was to put his foot on it and waggle it about until it died. It was P reg and this was 1986, so it was quite old. The odometer said it had done 4301 miles but it had long since broken, so there was no way of telling how many miles it had really got under its belt. The speedo didn’t work either but I wasn’t too bothered about that as it would only have depressed me to know how fast I wasn’t going.
 
The bike was stripped right down, cleaned up and some new main bearings and piston fitted. The original piston had been fine but my dad broke it, not realising at first that this puny alloy job was nowhere near as strong as the cast iron piston in his old flat tank Norton.
 
After several weekends of work the bike was ready for its MOT. My trip to the MOT centre, where my mate worked as an apprentice, was the first time I’d ever ridden anything with a motor. If I were to get back on the slowped now I would find it miserably slow, but as I'd only previously ridden a pushbike it seemed phenomenally fast and effortless. What could be easier than to just sit there and twist the grip whilst the engine did all the work? This was what I'd always wanted as I'd struggled into headwinds on the very old pushbike.
 
The MOT passed, on the way home the bike died. I tried to start it but nothing happened. I looked at the plug - nothing wrong with that. Then it dawned on me that I hadn’t put any petrol in - I was going to have to push it or use the pedals. As soon as I started pedalling a car appeared every 15 seconds on a normally deserted foes. Every car seemed to be full of piss taking idiots who found it hilarious that I should be pedalling this thing with its ridiculously low geared pedals - you have to pedal like mad just to crawl along.
 
Needless to say, I never allowed myself to run out of petrol after that. The only other time I was stranded was at night and not the engine's fault. It was absolutely chucking it down and I was longing to get home and out of the torrential rain. Suddenly, the back end started to slide about all over the place. I had a puncture and I was in the very middle of nowhere. The engine was still buzzing away so I decided to risk ruining the tyre by riding home at about 15mph. I was sure the tyre would be ruined and maybe even the rim would be buckled, but I was in a desperate mood and took little heed of the slipping, sliding wheel. Next day, I checked the back end over and all it needed was a repair to the puncture. Talk about lucky.
 
The Puch was a neat enough introduction to biking, far from fast it was a logical step up from a pushbike and not really dangerous in inexperienced hands.
 
Martin Holding