Have you ever noticed that most times you lend a bike it gets stacked? l lent my Kawasaki GPz305 to a mate and in due course he returned covered from head to toe in mud... yep, Kawa severely bent. This put me in rather a dodgy position as I was a despatch rider.
I managed to scrape together £350 for another bike, started the hunt through the MCN ads, fancying an XT500 but there were none around for the money I had available. Then I saw it, an SR500 flat tracker, £400.
So, l caught various buses and ended up in Stoke Newington. It was a bike shop, but the guy made it quite clear that it wasn't the shop selling it. One look at the bike told me why. It had started off as a Yamaha SR500 but had been stripped of everything not absolutely necessary.
A huge chromed headlamp out front, wide dirt bike bars, a custom GRP seat that incorporated a tail light and tiny number plate, no back guard, home-made rear-sets, a bodged, bent, short gear lever turned around and newish tyres which, with a long MOT, stopped me walking off in disgust. £350 and it was mine.
My wife was not impressed with the seat, her thoughts are not printable in a family magazine. It was a painful and tight fit, best suited to the sexually perverted. The riding position and thin seat meant that even short rides were painful and it was not long before a Honda 100 seat and some Meccano were employed — it looked terrible but was much more comfortable.
The bike was ready for some serious abuse, but on the way to work I was stopped by a bike cop and given a free MOT check. It just about passed but he wasn't impressed by the number plate. Later, the same day, l was stopped again. In one week I was stopped five times — one plod told me why, the bike was too unusual.
l dealt with this problem by losing the tax disc. They wouldn't stop searching until they found a fault with the bike, so it was much quicker to let them find no tax disc and give me a lecture than wait for them to completely check the bike out. Which sometimes was just as well.
The rear-sets were positioned to give plenty of ground clearance, the light mass meant it was easy to chuck through the traffic, the only disappointment, the gutless motor. There was plenty of torque and it went okay up to 60mph, but after that it just couldn't cope with motorways — it was more boring than watching cricket.
Fortunately, the speedo never worked the whole time I owned the bike, so I never found out how slow it really was. The brakes were well able to cope with the lack of mass and snail-like performance. Vibration was not a problem except that things used to come unscrewed. While travelling up the M40, the chrome silencer jumped ship. I did an emergency stop and was just in time to see it flying through the air after hitting a car, landing in front of a lorry, becoming history as a silencer — it was squashed flatter than a pancake.
I had to carry on to deliver an urgent package, but I was soon suffering from serious earache. As I approached Oxford I saw a jam sandwich ahead, so I stuck my boot over the end of the downpipe and was able to sneak past without attracting undue attention. I stopped outside a house with a garden full of British bikes, hoping to buy a silencer off the owner. He came out and said it reminded him of his Thruxton. He told me they used to silence the Velos by using a very long silencer, where the noise pulses cancelled each other out.
He pulled out five foot of copper tube, wire, hoseclip and hammer. The tube went over the downpipe like it was meant for the job and he firmly attached it with the wire and hoseclip. It was just as loud but had a sort of mellow bark with echoes of racing days and Castrol R. The tube jutted out about two feet beyond the end of the bike, which meant I couldn't hear much of the noise any more. It did wonders the ability of the engine to spin higher up the rev band.
When I got back to London I went straight to Maitland Racing, who specialize in tuning bits for big Jap singles. I gave them £40 and they gave me a silencer. It helped the engine produce more power, almost as good as the long copper pipe, but much quieter, although it looked big and ugly.
A few months went by and the winter struck. I almost went on strike as it became very cold and icy, at times my hands were frozen numb and my nose dripping like a tap. On one occasion I ended up down a country track delivering an envelope to a house with skulls in the front garden. I was just turning around to get the hell out of there when the front door opened, and a small man relieved me of the envelope — he didn't look completely mad so I summoned up the courage to ask about the skulls. They were papier mache, left over from the panto. Talk about feeling like a dickhead.
I think it was the same week the new silencer fell off. This time I was quicker and grabbed it after it had only been run over once. I borrowed a hacksaw and hammer off some BT guys, sawed off the squashed end and bashed the silencer back onto the downpipe, then adjusted the bracket to fit.
When I kicked it into life — with an audience of workmen anxious l didn't make off with their tools, there was a horrible clicking noise because the kickstart jammed against the silencer. l bent down to free it and the bike jumped into gear, leaping off the sidestand and throwing and trapping me on the pavement.
I was pissing myself with laughter. When I looked up I saw a policeman peering down at me, and I had a really bad attack of the giggles, which was made worse by trying to explain what had happened. Eventually, he said ”I see, sir,” gave me a very doubtful look and departed.
Not long after that it caught fire. A slight electrical problem that looked worse than it actually was. Some chafed wires under the petrol tank, smoke coming out from the tank which had me worried for a while.
I started to have lots of electrical problems when it became damp. Sometimes it would just cut out, no amount of kicking or bump starting would make the damn thing go. On one occasion I just abandoned it... the next day it started first kick. No amount of WD40, new plugs or suppressor caps had any effect.
When it cut out in Wandsworth, I pushed it into a back street garage where the chap handed me a screwdriver and told me to undo the right-hand switch cluster. The bike started up first kick — the kill switch wire had been shorting out on the bars, all it needed was a piece of insulating tape.
I had owned the SR for ten months, a period that usually reduced most bikes to worthless scrap under my despatching regime. The SR was still functioning despite having a head start, as it was already a bit of a heap when I bought it. Of course, it was often bodged, but the worst it encountered was having a bit of chicken rammed in the oil tank when I left it outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken shop.
I took it home and did a good oil change, but maybe something was left in the engine as shortly afterwards I heard a distinct clonk from the motor. I took the sump filter out and a large chunk of mesh fell out. Since it was still working, I resolved to keep running the bike until it died on me.
I did have to throw some money at it, though, on account of rather a large amount of play in the swinging arm. I bought some brand new bearings — £40! They don't last long because of a lack of grease nipples. I took it to a bike shop to have them fitted and also asked them to fit a good used set of shocks to replace the originals that were a sagging, leaking mess.
A few days later, the wife and l collected it on a pitch black winter's night. Going down a steep hill I failed to see a sign warning of a hump. We hit the ramp, which felt more like a small wall, at about 60mph. Nicely airborne, when we landed the shocks bottomed out in style, and the rear brake strut hooked itself over the exhaust bracket, thus applying full brake power.
We stayed upright and came to a stop alongside the pavement, where I pretended to the wife that l was doing a planned emergency stop to carry out an adjustment to the exhaust bracket. 1 don't think she was fooled for a minute. The next day I went back to the shop and demanded another set of shocks as the ones he’d sold me were a sagging, leaking mess...
Shortly after that, the insurance coughed up some money for the crashed GPz305 and I sold the Yam for £140 to a despatcher at work. Two days later the new owner was leaving messages for me to phone him - the Yam had passed peacefully away following a terminal gearbox blow up, and would I like to come to collect the wreck and give him his money back. I declined this offer and we eventually compromised, I gave him £40 towards another engine obtained from a breakers.
The SR was a strange bike. The light mass and simplicity would have been a good combination, had the engine been able to produce a bit more power. But then you can’t have everything, can you? If it had been any good it would have been more expensive and I would not have bought it!
Max Liberson