When we finally reached the vendor’s semi it was getting dark. In the torchlight the little blue 500 looked so balanced. As elegant as a Maja by Goya or a nude by Modigliani. It didn’t actually have a MOT but we were assured it had one until recently since when it’d been standing at the side of the house after an initial holiday tour of Europe the previous summer.
What had happened on that holiday is anyone’s guess, but if it was as unreliable as the bike became under my ownership then it would have put someone off biking for life. It certainly seemed to have had that effect on his wife - a dark, pretty, heavily pregnant young lady who sat watching TV in the lounge, desperately trying to ignore the existence of the lowlifes slapping hands outside.
The starter motor banged and crunched the bike into life and we took it in-turns to ride around, its owner hanging on as pillion. I gave it a few handfuls of throttle - a perfectly normal method of riding to my way of thinking but according to the vendor, thrashing the thing. I ask you. On the short run I couldn't detect any faults. It was far too dark to notice the broken shaft drive housings, snapped back brake caliper (resulting in a fully floating caliper which like the front one was seized), broken horn and flasher unit and a headlamp that only had the parking light left operative.
Its ignition switch was an old style un-shrouded item which the rain had dissolved. The exhaust had been repaired with welded on plates, the seat was ripped and held as much water as a leaking Wellington boot. Its wiring too had been cut about and stuck back together with bits of insulation tape (one thing I could do well after owning this bike was solder). On finding all those problems in one machine, I was convinced a real monster had once owned this frail machine and that it had been thrashed, abused and neglected during its short 18000 mile life.
Needless to say, I really took to the thing and bought it, with cash, with all the above and several other faults undetected until I got it home. They would have been surmountable problems had the bike been well designed and constructed from proper materials. When I took the brake plate into Kent Aerospace for welding they thought it must be made out of magnesium because it was so white, but their tests revealed it was made out of the lowest quality alloy.
With a V50 any kind of neglect results in tons of trouble. Going over the machine later revealed the aforementioned problems plus the airbox split in two and shot front wheel bearings. The latter were a real laugh, the Guzzi dealer demanding £26 for a pair, but I tracked down a set for just £10 from a bearing shop SKF6303-2881, if you’re desperate enough to want to keep one of these machines on the road.
Everything on the bike was made in an incredibly shoddy way - switches were nasty ill fitting bits of plastic. Why they worked at all was a constant mystery to me. Side panels were so thin and frail they snapped when I tried to remove them. I managed to buy by post a Brembo caliper from a breaker - it arrived covered in mud and grass but when cleaned up did actually work.
I spent about three months and £200 on that bike. All winter it lurked around in my dining room while I waited for new bits to arrive or discovered something else wrong with it. I was really lucky to have the advice and help of a brilliant marine engineer who lived nearby. He quite happily showed me how to take the shaft drive apart, drift out bearings and set up the front forks. In my previous four years of biking, all using nearly new Jap machinery and being heavily cosseted by five star dealer servicing, I realised I’d been denied all this involvement.
There were hours of fun to be had, cleaning, repairing and losing bits of V50 which seemed to be all over the house. I re-wired most things, replaced countless broken bits, recovered the seat and resprayed large areas of paintwork. I had to drill out and re-tap quite a few snapped off bolts where previous owners had got pissed off and over-tightened parts just to exact some kind of revenge - there were stumps of bolts holding on things like engine casings.
When it was back on the road, I found that every time I attempted to go even a short distance something would go wrong. The ignition switch kept shorting out almost every journey I made, the machine just stopping with no warning. This could be quite frightening in heavy traffic. Once, in a wild mood of optimism I decided to ride to London, about 40 miles away, and treat the bike to a brand new ignition switch (about £25). On the way the speedo drive broke, it was a tacky, flimsy sealed unit which had to be replaced (another £25). While I was running along the busy A2 the oil light came on. I stopped, checked the oil, revved the bike up to 80mph for the rest of the journey on the assumption that if the oil wasn’t circulating because the oil pump was broken then it’d blow bits of hot metal shrapnel all over the fast lane. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t have been at all upset.
Next, the ignition switch ceased functioning fixed by tearing out the wires and taping them together. The V50 was going quite well, it could be thrown through traffic with great ease. Happiness rapidly evaporated when I stopped at a crossing and there was a loud bang - the V50 was dead and smelling horrible, smoke was everywhere. The shoppers on the crossing looked on quite unmoved, as if Guzzis expired there every other day. Dejected, I wheeled the smouldering wreck into a side Street. I felt a bit annoyed but it was my own fault - the ignition wires had worn through, touched a rusty patch on the tacho drive cable which had burst into flames, burning off the outer skin. A bit more rewiring had it running, gingerly I rode to Moto Mecca, buying tons of new bits, including a tacho cable (£7).
The next few weeks were full of such incidents, I go dewy eyed with nostalgia as I remember the exhaust balance pipe blowing in half going uphill past a bus stop full of deafened observers. The bike nearly always went dead in the rain. Quite simply, I found it a disaster as a method of transport. I can’t remember one journey when something on the bike didn’t break. It just never ceased to amaze me how often something went wrong. I rode it with fascination, always waiting for the next thing to break and it never let me down in this respect.
In a way I’m really grateful to the Guzzi, as I learnt a great deal about repairing and maintaining motorcycles, but I also liked riding them rather a lot and the balance between the two was sadly lacking in the V50. After a few months of riding I managed to sell the bike through MCN, even making a few pounds profit on the deal. Its purchaser was a furniture design student from London, which figured somehow. I could just imagine the sleek design standing in the corner of some trendy burger bar or penthouse covered in light bulbs. This fellow actually owned several V50s so he knew the problems and rode happily down my road towards the smoke. I tried to pull a sad face as I waved him goodbye and pocketed the cash, somehow I don’t think it was very convincing.
My next bike was an old, red, drum braked SF750 Laverda, circa 1971. This has proved a much better machine in every way. Had it not been for the Great Guzzi Experience I’d never have been brave enough to embrace happily the ownership of such a user-involving sort of motorcycle.
Nick Shires