Just before Christmas, on the shortest day, I did something I hadn’t done for thirty years and bought myself a motorcycle. The last one was a late 1980s 883cc purple metal flake Harley Sportster (Baby….!), which was low, sounded good and was nice to ride, but as every month went on and another £200 had to be spent to get it the way it should have been, I came to realise that there was more to the H-D experience than I’d imagined. It cost more, too, buying the parts to cure the faults that building down to a cost to sucker the buyers inevitably meant.
Some of the issues were weird, like how it was geared for 55mph in top, which was the US speed limit, but the speedometer was in miles per hour. Maybe the bike was some grey import as I’d bought it second-hand but with only about 1500 miles. Whether or not the inlet manifold shouldn’t have split. Being told, ‘Yeah, they all do that, mate,’ didn’t help. Why did they?
‘Metal fatigue, innit’ didn’t reassure.
Any metal failing on a fifteen-hundred-mile motorcycle ought never to have been on there in the first place. The dealership got arsey when I said that and came back with, ‘Yeah, we just take your money, don’t we?’ Which, so far as I could see, was true. Telling the guy he’d got a lot of attitude for someone who’d just had £3,500 off me didn’t seem to help, somehow.
Getting back into it.
“““““““““““““““““““““““They fixed it, but that didn’t happen again, and I chugged off over the blue horizon. But first, I had to find some decent brakes, and a four-piston Brembo sorted that out. The vibration was something else, cured by a Bar Snake, not to be confused with a lounge lizard. Essentially, it is a solid, bendy rubber hose. The idea was and probably still is to stuff it inside the handlebars where it’ll vibrate at a different frequency than the bars and cancel the vibes out. Then, you might see what’s in the mirrors at speeds over 25 mph.
The tyres lasted 3,000 miles. The spark plugs didn’t seem to. The battery box didn’t either, because there wasn’t one on there until I found a three-sided chrome box at some non-main dealer place, the rip-off artists near Greenwich, or the surprisingly pleasant Hells Angel shop down in Kent somewhere. I knew which I preferred dealing with, and it wasn’t Fred Warr’s in World’s End, one of the most unfriendly dealers I’ve ever come across. Maybe it was because I didn’t buy it there, maybe … I don’t know what it was. Maybe they were just arses. They acted like it.
It got stolen and dumped in a field. The bike, not Fred Warr’s entire shop, you understand. We found and recovered it, then I used the insurance money to bore it out to 1200, put a Mikuni injector on it to replace the carburettor, got rid of that biscuit-tin air filter and stuck Kuryakin footpads on it, despite wondering all the while why one of the Men From Uncle was messing around with motorcycle parts. I suppose a lot of people have a side hustle. New coil, new plugs, new leads, and paint the tank jet black, and it was good to go. It did, and I used the money to buy a laptop and a mono laser printer. There wasn’t much change, or not from the money I got for it, anyway.
A strange thing happened a couple of months later, though. A friend’s sister knew the person who’d bought it. She told me it had broken down and wouldn’t start. I talked to the guy on the phone because despite everything else that had happened with the little Sportster, not starting wasn’t one of the things that had happened. He’d tried everything and had no luck.
At about the same time, someone I knew went to see a medium, a descendant of Admiral Dampier, no less, although the two events were unrelated. Out of nowhere, the medium claimed she had a message about the motorcycle her client’s friend had just sold, purportedly from the father of the client. He’d been an army despatch rider in Burma, back in 1945. Tell him it’s the coil.
My friend dutifully relayed the message, and I told her she was talking out of her rear end. When was the last time you heard of a brand new, out-of-the-box coil failing these days?
Except that was what it was.
Nothing even vaguely supernatural has happened with the F650 I bought to get back into bikes, nor the R1150R that replaced that. Nothing remotely spooky has gone on with the Ducati Scrambler I bought a couple of weeks ago, either. Not unless you count the Ducati’s unearthly ability to need its cam belts replacing every five years whether you ride it or leave it in the garage, or the 1150’s habit of growing heavier the longer you don’t ride it.
I don’t know what to make of spirit messages from beyond the grave diagnosing Harley-Davidson replacement parts. I gave up on H-D a long time ago, anyway. The past is a different country, and besides, the wench’s father is dead.
