Within the first five minutes I'd fallen off. All I'd done was a U-turn in a narrow street when I'd taken a wrong turn. The bike felt well balanced, encouraging me to do it feet up. One moment I was a hero the next I was an arsehole, with a hole in my jeans at the knee and a grazed helmet. The bike had landed on its engine bars, only breaking off a brake lever end and smashing an indicator.
It took a while to find this out because I found I couldn't lift the 550lbs of Kawasaki off the tarmac. I was more than embarrassed hammering on people’s door to summon help. Eventually an ancient ex-army type came to the rescue and then spent the next hour showing off his collection of guns and telling me tall stories about his motorcycle days. The 70 year old had more gung-ho than most 17 year olds. I left feeling diminished and not a little awed. Bring back National Service!
I was way behind schedule by then, so gave the Zephyr some heavy throttle, making good time once I'd reached the nearby motorway. With 90 horses on hand, mostly concentrated in the mid-range, it was just a matter of settling into top gear and selecting the required speed by operating the throttle. Five minutes at 120mph soon changed my mind, my head was threatening to dislocate itself under the wind blast and when I tried to get down on the tank sharp pains shot along my thighs after a few moments. Back off, 85 to 95mph being tolerable. After an hour of that abuse it was time to hit the services for some fuel, about 30mpg! The seat was good for a lot more mileage than that and I found that fuel varied between 25 and 35mpg, which has to be pathetic for a bike that was rarely ridden in lunatic mode. It’s what happens when old style air-cooled two valve technology meets modern noise and emission regulations.
About five miles from home it poured down with rain and I fell off again, this time on the other side. The Zephyr doesn’t look it but it’s a very top heavy beast that can slide away in low speed corners before you know what's happened. It may not have helped that my previous bike was a rather dodgy Honda CB400 Superdream. These bikes were in completely different worlds. i.e. falling off into a half dozen irate peds probably wasn't a good idea but at least someone gave me a hand levering the behemoth upright. No damage this time, except to some youth who reckoned his ankle was broken. I ignored him and roared off up the road, nearly scaring myself silly as the back wheel was snaking a foot or so to each side under the mad throttle hand in first gear.
Back home I was fuming at myself and the bike. What the hell was going down here, falling off two times on the first day of ownership. Was I a man or wimp? Was the Zephyr a motorcycle or a rolling deathtrap? Had I bought a completely inappropriate bike for my nine stones and 5’9”? A sleepless night followed, then a dawn raid on my favourite country roads that I knew like the back of my hand.
The Zephyr was a bitch to start, cutting out, revving to five thou and then going on to three cylinders. It needed five minutes of frantic juggling until the engine warmed up when there was an orderly tickover and it'll pull like a tractor until it went into Apollo rocket mode for a few thousand revs. It accelerated fast enough to catch me out going into bends.
The triple discs didn’t bite as hard as I'd expected under extreme abuse, although they were fine for most of the time. Going into a bend on the brakes, with locked up suspension, was no fun. I fought the bike’s inclination to go straight on, using every ounce of muscle I possessed to force us to bounce around the corner. We ended up on the wrong side of the road but luckily there were no cagers about. I quickly concluded that the Superdream was more fun in tight curves, purely a function of its lower mass and better weight distribution.
It was a bit of a downer to find myself becoming ever more conservative on the throttle as it became obvious that any spirited riding was likely to end up with a broken bike, if not rider. I couldn't even enjoy posing in town as the bike became rather heavy steering at low speeds and quite likely to flop over on to unsuspecting peds - I didn’t figure that the average young lady would go for the kind of introduction that had 550Ibs of Kwack falling on top of her. Give the bike some time was the only incantation I could think of, other than going for the thing with the nearest lump hammer.
Some heavy rain storms turned up the first major hassle. Sticking calipers. They only needed cleaning up but there was only 4300 miles done! The rain also brought out rust on some fasteners. A couple of weeks of bad weather left the Kawasaki looking like an old wreck. Solvol and toothbrush time. I could've done without wasting time like that, but I suppose it’s all part of the bonding process. The chain needed an adjustment every 200 miles but at least the engine hadn't needed any attention, save that the oil leak from the top end was spreading fast. I tried tightening down the head bolts but it made no difference.
“Blowing head gasket, better get it fixed fast else you won't have any valves left,” reckoned the local Kawasaki dealer, with logic worthy of a Hong Kong politician. He was still smarting from the fact that I'd ignored his overpriced offerings... two of which had similar leaks to mine. I stayed around long enough to enquire as to the cost of a new head gasket, laughed loudly and then roared off down the local bypass.
For a moment I thought I was on the wrong machine, backed off the throttle in haste. The road had more holes than an Angolan runway. The council had started repairs, found out they didn’t have the money to finish it, leaving a ruined stretch of road. I'd wondered what the barrage of signs were. The Zephyr didn't like the series of deep, unevenly spaced holes one tiny bit. For most of the time the suspension gave off a feeling of competence but when pushed the damping faded and both ends became all crossed up. Considering that all this was happening in a straight line, and I'd got speed down to 30mph, the wobbles and spine dislocating lurches were not impressive. Once the ruined section was left, more intoxicating speeds were achieved, but I was left with the feeling that here was a bike that could get seriously out of line.
I kept up my muscle building course by continuing to bully the Zephyr through the traffic during the daily trudge to work. A stout pair of boots allowed me to put a foot down during the more intimate manoeuvres, which sometimes strained my leg muscles. And, I would often scare the shit out of peds (and myself) by doing a wheelspin start when they were still crossing the road. I daresay that there’s some way of getting the front wheel up in the air but the prospect of having 550lbs of out of control metal falling on top of me kept such ideas in the realms of fantasy.
With 7300 miles coming up the engine was flooded in oil from the head gasket leak. By then I was not too enamoured so the obvious solution presented itself. Out with the engine (two bolts broke due to the nuts being corroded on solid), off with the head (one stripped thread), clean up the metal surfaces and gasket, and then smear with the latest in hi-tech gasket goo.
It worked for two weeks then I saw a smear of oil on the cylinder. Right, that’s enough for me. Ride down to Bristol on a pristine looking Zephyr, have a word with one of the big discount dealers and get a large trade-in allowance on a one year old CBR600. I reckoned by the time I sorted out a private sale the engine would be awash with oil again.
The CBR, nowadays, is what’s known as a proper motorcycle, much as the Z1 claimed the laurels back in the seventies. The Honda made me feel like a hero again and I cursed the year I wasted on the Zephyr: I would probably have had the same problems with a Harley Davidson, which just goes to show that looks ain't everything.
Adrian Caldwell