Despatches: Odd rides and strange chaps

The weirdest bike I ever used for despatching was a Morini 350 Sport. It fell into my hands when a neighbour had to sell quickly and I thought, buy it, ride it and then sell at a very nice profit. The first day showed the way things were going to be. The home-made electrics worked to a rhythm of their own. I eventually found out that my relatively bulky form was crushing the seat pan on to a dodgy connector.

The little 72 degree vee-twin screamed into life at 6000 revs, making a godawful racket. Turned the choke off, caused the engine to die a death. More kick-starting, this time with one choke on and one off! That got the little bugger rumbling until I engaged first gear and the bastard stalled due to clutch drag. By the time I finally got on the road I would've been in work on the venerable GT550.

This nastiness carried on right through the day, the good mixed with the bad. The good side was its narrowness and snappy acceleration, much more svelte than the GT and most other DR hacks. The bad side was the unpredictable starting (as bad when it was too hot as when it was cold), total lack of comfort and a double-sided drum brake that was a vicious old stopper. When it wanted to work.

As any DR knows, the best kind of bikes are ones you don't have to think about, all attention should be focused on the stretch of road ahead. The Morini was far from ideal, then. However, two days later the GT550 died an electrical death, was off the road for a couple of weeks. I rewired the Morini so that the ignition was always on, added a couple of spark plugs and new oil; began to talk quietly rather than curse the little Italian gem. A set of flat bars rather than clip-ons transformed the comfort.

The bike then proved quite a useful little DR hack. After a month of autumn riding, most of the tank and frame paint had fallen off, all the alloy had turned nasty and I was sure that the big-ends were knocking, or something. The GT550 was put back into use and the Morini tidied up, sold at a small profit. Most of the guys who turned up were rightly annoyed at the state I'd let the classic vee-twin degenerate into!

I've owned too many GT550's and 750's. The oddest one was a bike that had only ever been used for the DR chores. Gone through twelve owners and 260,000 miles, a sort of living legend. All the owners I knew had sold the bike thinking that it was on its last legs. Only to be confounded by its continued running.

My main mount was a nearly new GT550 so I could contrast the effect of a quarter of a million miles of abuse. Many of the chassis and braking components had been upgraded, so there wasn't a major difference there. Just a slight tendency to pull to the left, a legacy of a crash into the side of a bus that had left the hefty steel frame slightly bent. GT550 forks collapse in heavy accidents absorbing most of the impact!

No, it was the engine where most of the difference was felt. Secondary vibes sang through the chassis and the transmission was pretty awful, wear in the gearbox combining with a loose shaft drive. I usually trawled around town in third gear, reassured that clutch abuse was okay as the previous owner had fitted a newish clutch assembly. GT's stretch back so far into motorcycling history and are so widely available that most parts can be sourced from breakers, little need to buy anything new.

The bike was kept for a couple of months winter riding, which it shrugged off, and then sold to a newbie in the office. Weird chap, rake thin and about 6'6" tall! His helmet perched precariously on his large potato shape head. He was from the Welsh heartland but didn't seem to mind the sheep jokes. He didn't fit the GT very well but it was a lot less laughable than the C90 he'd ridden down the M4!

Within an hour of leaving the office the controller received an irate phone call from some cager who wanted to know who was going to pay to put the side of his car back on. The large fluorescent bib had given the game away and his description of someone who looked like an alien on steroids fitted Taffy perfectly. Of course, the controller denied any knowledge of such a strange looking employee!

He soon sold the GT, at a loss, to a veteran DR, and then found happiness with a Dakar replica. Being relatively short of leg (but not of beer gut) I never really got on with those kind of bikes. The Aprilia Pegaso I bought as a non-runner was soon sorted with an electrical rewire (believe whatever myths you want about Italian bikes but they still haven't sussed out the electrics) but every time I gave it a bit of throttle it wanted to go airborne.

By the way, Taffy was finally sacked when he rode his bike over the tops of half a dozen cages and he was last heard of holding down a job at one of the radio stations.

The Pegaso was soon off-loaded, but the GT didn't half feel lethargic afterwards. The slowest bike I ever did the DR hustle on was a Honda C90. An ancient step-thru that had been fitted with a relatively modern engine that featured a lack of airfilter and degutted exhaust. The chassis was up to 30mph but the motor would wind the bouncing abortion up to 60mph, given a long enough straight.

The chaos of Central London traffic meant that I was doing jobs quicker on the step-thru than on the GT. It went through impossible gaps like a ferret up a trouser leg, which was just as well as the SLS drum brakes didn't seem to work. It could be twisted through right-angles, shoved up on to pavements and skidded around roundabouts, having more in common with a skateboard than a proper motorcycle.

The antics of the bike so enraged one cager that he ran along the pavement until he managed to nudge the back of the Honda. The step-thru reacted badly to this, landing on its side. I'd managed to step/stagger off before it hit the tarmac and sort of ran along the pavement to shrug off the momentum. I looked over my shoulder to see some mad-eyed cager continuing in pursuit, having run over the fallen Honda. I sidestepped into a narrow alleyway and the cage roared past. I didn't bother trying to claim the C90, one glance told me it was completely written off.

One black-cab driver used to loiter outside our office, waiting for someone to knock off! When we sussed what he was up to, one of our gang of reprobates sneaked around the cab and put a bag of sugar in his petrol tank! We led him on a merry dance until his motor started to clang away when we gave him a cheerful blast on the horn.

He staggered out of his cab, ran at the nearest biker with death in his heart, but a bit of throttle put him in his proper place. Shortly after that event a firebomb was thrown into the office. Luckily, it didn't explode! For some reason taxi drivers think they are masters of the universe, when everyone knows that it's really DR's who enjoy that status.

Another odd DR hack I had the pleasure of was a GN400 Suzuki. Like the Morini, this was a temperamental starter, but it was so slow to wind itself up I often thought I'd stepped into a parallel universe. After a winter's worth of despatch riding it was reduced to total rat status, the rust so deeply ingrained into the metal that not even fervent wire-brushing had any hope of cleaning it up.

Also, all the chassis bearings were shot, the chain was reduced to knicker elastic and the engine, being both worn and lacking any balancers, rumbled ferociously. When the silencer fell off, it spat out flames and sounded like a runaway Sherman tank. I couldn't even give it away for free; next door's skip finally sufficed.

That wasn't the only commuter I'd had a go at riding through Central London. A nice little CG125 looked promising, but again proved just that little bit too slow to escape from enraged cagers, giving me several frightening moments. Didn't stop me putting 30,000 miles on the clock, by which stage there were cracks in the rear subframe and engine crankcases! At least a breaker gave me fifty notes for the rolling wreck.

At the other extreme, the biggest, nastiest bike I ever did the DR blues on was a Kawasaki Z1300 six. At times it seemed almost as wide as a small car but it made up for this by popping incredible wheelies on the back of its excessive torque. Several near death experiences didn't stop me enjoying a summer's despatching but as soon as the heavy rains came it turned into a rolling deathtrap, the power and mass being too much to control on slippery roads. I barely dented the engine's capabilities and the finish was much better than most Kawasakis, no problem selling it at a good profit.

One bike I never got on with was a BMW R80RS. Should've been a brilliant bit of kit for winter riding but I never managed to master the gearbox (which had 60,000 miles worth of wear in it); even the plod have problems riding them smoothly. It was also too wide for Central London.

Then there was... oh, enough, get some tackle, sign up for despatching and see for yourself. You could even make pots of money out of it.

W.A.