Eleven days to the shortest day, and the same time to one year back on motorcycles after a 30-year gap. Why? There are two answers to that, as there are to most questions. Why the gap is best answered that life got in the way. I missed bikes every Spring, and every Spring, there was something else to do, or it rained, or some other feeble excuse. Why get back into it was more complicated.
If I thought that was complicated I should have thought about the difference 30 years made to bikes. It had been an unexceptional progression, through FS1-E, CD175, T25, 500cc Norton Dominator, 650 Triton, 1000cc BMW, 883 Sportster, which after it was stolen and recovered became a 1200 Sportster before it became a laptop and a laser printer. But all of them were pretty straightforward machines. And I thought I knew bikes.
I decided to get back into it with an F650. I wanted something simple and reliable, with enough power and speed not to be boring or dangerous. I bought it locally, in Woodbridge from a guy about my age who’d bought it to go green-laning and never did, but he kept the battery charged and cleaned it often enough.
The first ride in 30 years was a cold day. I had a new Bell full face with an ACU sticker, my old leather jacket and some leather gloves, but that was about it, apart from some steel-toe jodhpur boots. All of which would have been plenty, 30 years ago. I hadn’t realised how much things had changed.
It was a cold grey day, not actually raining, but total cloud cover, enough to make me think it would rain soon. I rode down the long drive and out onto a B-road along the side of the river.
Over the little bridge and right past the old quarry, past the riding school and left up the hill and right, onto the slightly bigger B road, where the gibbet used to be. Turn out and open it up a bit. I’d missed that acceleration. Down the greasy hill the other side, and I remembered how much this road twists so I thought I’d better turn around and go another way. Mirror, signal, manoeuvre, turn into the farm entrance, dab the brake and suddenly remember why you don’t use the front brake at all under 20 mph if you’ve got any sense.
I didn’t drop it. Nearly, but I didn’t. I got it turned round and went back up the hill, trickled it through the outskirts of the town, out past the mill, over the river, over the roundabout and out at last onto the dual-carriageway where I found out for the first time that it didn’t hang about if you wound it out. As there was a 40 limit coming up there wasn’t much time for that though. Past the Elizabethan manor and turn right before the garage onto the little road that winds past a farm. I wanted to stay away from any traffic. All in all I covered 20 miles on that try-out run and discovered a couple of things. First, under 3,000 rpm an F650 will happily shake your fillings out. Second, 3,000 rpm is not exactly what you need on a slippy lane in an English winter. Thirdly, despite having plenty of fuel in the tank the bike kept acting as if there wasn’t any. Then it was fine. Then it wasn’t. It took a couple of months, a new battery and a voltage display on the new phone charger I bolted on before I began to realise why it was cheap.
Some internet browsing and £12 later I had a new rectifier and it never acted up again. Quite why BMW put a rectifier which generates heat somewhere it could never get cold is almost as big a mystery as why the R1150 battery is under the petrol tank. What were they even thinking?
It beat me. Not the mechanics of it. I fixed that. But the thought process, the one that lead someone to build this thought-out machine, then one slack Friday lunch time thought ‘Forgot to draw the rectifier or the battery on the plan. Sod it. It’ll have to go under there. Nobody’s going to notice before they buy it.’
It had to go. And as things go, it went. I had the F650 for seven months, then got a real BMW. A boxer engine BMW. The only proper BMW bikes, for a reason. I’ve still got that.
