I’d owned an MZ from new with no problems until I put the bike under a 36 ton artic (those famous wooden tyres again) and decided that was enough of motorcycling for me, thank you very much. Well, Christmas came and went, I recovered from the accident and then realised I needed some transport to get me ten miles to work and back. The purchase of a £20 Honda C90 provided some commuting power for a few weeks until it gave up in a terminal manner.
I had to look for something better. The breakthrough came at a mates house. I saw a CZ175 hiding in a corner, rather dilapidated, rusting away. It was his fathers, who had exchanged some scaffolding for it but had left it standing for five years because he couldn’t be bothered to fit some new oil seals, that had gone with only 1100 miles on the clock.
Six five pound notes exchanged hands and I was the owner of a CZ175, for my sins. At home, a real horror story was revealed with too much rust and too many missing parts. Even at CZ prices, the missing parts added up to a frightening amount. I went back to my mates house to search for them. We found most of them, I only had to buy a rear chain and the oil seals.
The rusty wheels were cleaned up and painted. Everything else was attacked with a wire brush, polished or painted, until the thing began to look presentable. After picking up a manual from the library, the seals went in OK and the rebuild was surprisingly easy, despite the fact that the engine bits had been stored in margarine tubs half full of water. Only the joke kickstart/gear lever gave any cause for concern, with a spring that could probably do good service in Big Ben and took over an hour to fit.
I suddenly realised that I didn’t have a log-book and rushed off to the PO to fill in the appropriate form. The engine slotted into the frame, I connected up the electrics and fitted in a new battery. Surprise, surprise, it started 3rd kick. True, the engine rapidly transformed a pleasing chugging note into a screaming wail, that was only stopped by turning off the ignition key.
This was soon fixed by evicting the spiders from the carbs, but then the engine refused to run for more than five minutes. By this time the pubs had opened so I trotted off to give the problem some serious consideration. Inspiration did not come until the next day when on inspection it was found that the petrol tap had not been cleaned for 11 years. That more or less cleared up the problem.
As the bike wasn’t taxed I kept going to work by train and ran the bike around the village to keep it going and sort out any teething problems. The most embarrassing was the awful kickstart. I was showing off to some local lads how I could kickstart the bike whilst sat on it, only to receive a kickback which took most of my ankle with it. I rapidly decided to only start the bike from the side.
The trains started costing too much money and became unreliable, so I rode the CZ with no tax; it was that or have no job. The first day was a disaster. I’d noticed that the battery was going a bit flat, but put it down to excessive riding at night. Being late for work, I left the machine running outside the local shop only to find that it had stalled and the neutral light (which was usually more like a 100W bulb) was not lit.
I pushed the bike home and used jump leads on an old Bantam battery I had handy, but as soon as I replaced the cover the engine stalled again. After ten valuable minutes wasted shouting all known obscenities at the heap, it eventually dawned that the positive terminal was shorting out on the cover. The wiring was starting to smoulder because I’d removed the fuse (it had kept blowing), but the problem cleared up once I’d relocated the terminal.
As I was extremely late and angry, I thrashed the bike all the way to work. The rumour spread that I had a bike and quite a crowd gathered around it at break time. The comments were not too kind and I determined to prove them all wrong by thrashing the bike every day. Every day, I treated my ride to work as a continual drag race, as hard as I tried I could not blow up the engine. Even a mate, who was famed for wrecking Honda 100s and 125s, failed to destroy the CZ when he borrowed it every Saturday - he became quite fond of it.
There was one slight problem, the engine would suddenly stop due to the old petrol tap. I eventually handed over £4 for a new one and this solved the problem. The suspension is quite bad - every ripple in the tarmac is transmitted to the handlebars. On bumpy roads it’s just a case of holding onto the handlebars with a grip of iron and hope for the best. The back end is only slightly better with a tendency to pogo at the least provocation. The tyres are slightly better than the awful things they wrap around the alloy wheels of MZs. They do last a very long time - the cost of a decent set of tyres is more than the value of the bike...
Mine being the earlier type of engine, it had oil injection which worked a treat and was a lot less hassle than mixing oil into the petrol. Overall, they're not such bad bikes. If you ever have the chance to buy one cheaply I’d recommend that you go for it.
C Allcock