TALES FROMTHE SHED
Happy days are here again… well, winter is. This may or may not be the same thing…
Happy days are here again… well, winter is. This may or may not be the same thing. Frank is singing a happy song. Possibly…
Once upon a time, in a magazine far, far away, every year at around this time we would run a story. Magazines do this. Although the words and pics were always different, the title was always the same: Winter Drawers On. It was a feeble joke when it was a new joke – and it’s a joke older than any of us, I reckon – but it became a sort-of magazine tradition. Traditions in magazines can be fun, and break up the work of actually putting it all together – RC has a few scattered here and there, and occasionally readers spot them, and more occasionally comment. That old magazine was the long-deceased Used Bike Guide, which like RealClassic did its best to feature the views, opinions and entertaining tales of writing riders who were also readers. It was a whole lot of fun, too.
The basic thrust of the annual story was to take a survey of winter riding kit and report back. Simple stuff; go take a tour of local bike and bike accessory emporia and see what was on offer, take a guess at how wind and waterproof it might be, and make suggestions, preferably humorously, too. It is a depressing measure of how much more I rode in those days than I do now that I would typically wear out a pair of gloves and a jacket every year. Maybe I should pretend that my kit lasts longer nowadays because kit has improved – which of course it has! And I can now afford better kit in the first place…
The other big theme was the growing appearance of the ‘winter hack’. Back when I was youthful, notably more hairy and only rarely dreamed of writing about motorcycles, I had one bike. Just one. It lived outside, sometimes under a cover, sometimes in a garden shed, and I rode it to whatever passed for work every day and out and about at weekends. Several of my friends, however, had a Number One bike, a posh machine used for tasks less mundane than going to work every day, and a second bike, a machine which did the daily grindy stuff. I aspired to such wealth, of course, and eventually got there. Hurrah for me, let’s move on…
Every winter I decide that the only intelligent thing to do – if I intend to continue riding through the dark and wet and icy, which I always intend to do – is to sort out a winter bike, and then I always remember The Bullet. Not any old Bullet – this is The Bullet, the very machine Rowena rode for a hundred million miles around the UK back in 2005, when RC was very young, and she and a friend visited every Royal Enfield dealer in the country in a single long ride. It was very wet, as I recall. I stayed at home, polished the cat and sent email encouragement while the summery rain lashed the windows. A chap could do no less, I thought.
So every winter – around this time – I drag out the Bullet and get it ready for winter’s worst. This inevitably involves a new battery. This is entirely my fault, because once winter’s panic has passed I put the Bullet away beneath its handsome silver cover
and forget about it. Neglect is of course its own reward, and that reward is that tyres go flat and batteries go flatter. Hard to inflate a battery. You may have seen in a recent Shed that this year was exactly the same as previous years: I dragged out the Bullet, did a tiny amount of remedial stuff and … and … quite unexpectedly found myself refitting the ancient and entirely scabrous Craven top box I’d taken off when we decided a while ago to sell the bike. It was lashing with autumnal rain outside, my posh bikes were all tucked up under allegedly and hopefully waterproof covers and I was singing a merry song as I did a simple job I’d intended to do since about 1984. That’s correct – 1984.
The top box came into my possession in 1984. It came attached to an ancient Matchless which was bought by my late friend Jim. He declared the box to be the most hideous thing he’d ever seen and refused to buy the bike until it was removed. I whispered, quiet-like, that I’d have the box, so a deal was done. The box went straight onto my 1966 AJS, survived the crash which destroyed that grand old bike, and has desecrated several bikes since with its unique ugliness.
The simple job? This may sound familiar. If so, seek therapy. Or strong drink, which I prefer, personally, but cannot of course recommend in these mysterious days. The box has been fitted (in a loose sense) to several old bikes down the decades, and somehow I’ve always used the fittings and fasteners it came with. Three brackets and six nut’n’bolt sets to hold it all together. They never were the correct nuts and bolts, just a bizarre and typical old, pre-‘classic’ bike assortment of mismatched rusty kit requiring several different spanners to operate. Since maybe 1985 I’ve intended to replace them with decent fasteners, preferably stainless and of the correct length, so I can remove it easily.
So I replaced them this year, after a mild delay of only three decades, using a really nice set of Allen-head bolts and half-height locking nuts left over from the BSA A65T project. Stainless, too. Possibly UNF, though I don’t really care. This job took approximately a half-hour, which made me wonder why I’d not done it years ago, instead of using more and more penetrating oil and worse and worse language…
Why a top box? Because a winter hack (terrible expression, but you know what I mean) needs to be able to carry waterproofs in case it’s not already pouring down when you set out, and to bring back that takeaway Chinese or pizza which is the reason for venturing away from home and hearth in bad weather anyway. And I think they look
… characterful. I am genuinely delighted that these Craven items are still available new from our good pals at Draganfly Motorcycles, too.
Thinking more deeply about this, in my case the justification for a winter bike is a simple one. I really, truly, profoundly dislike cleaning bikes. Once they’re clean – really clean – I tend to find reasons not to ride them outside those rare sunshiny days. Sad but honest. This wasn’t always the case. Back in the distant past, although I rarely had only one motorcycle cluttering up the place I’ve usually only had one on the road at a time. Usually. The advent of Seventies bling actually put me off buying nearly-new machines, and the 1975 Co-Op T140 Bonnie I ran through the winter of that year convinced me that it was the least suitable bike for daily commutes I’d ever owned! Never has a finish vanished so fast – even though I tried to clean it once every week or two.
Sprinting forward to the present day finds me with a slightly glorious selection of bikes to ride whenever I have both time and an excuse. Supper in Shropshire? Trip to a caff in North Wales? Count me in. But… but… washing off road muck is OK if tedious nine months out of twelve, but come the salty winter I actually don’t want to ride the shiny bikes. Again, be impressed by the honesty here – if not the sentiment! Which brings me neatly back to the Bullet.
So far as I can tell, the Bullet is virtually indestructible. Since the RBR it’s been ridden almost exclusively for short trips in bad weather – the fact that its odo shows only 11,000 miles confirms this. And I have to confess that it usually gets stuck away under a cover in The Shed after the plainly selfless and considerably heroic Better Third has given it a bath and spayed it with ACF50. This, you will agree, is not cossetting in any way. But… its finish is still impressively good. It was sunny today, so we pulled the bike from The Shed, kicked its tyres (literally; applied
laziness in all things) and rode it about a little to first warm it through and then take the pics you can see nearby, hopefully.
Fuel on, apply choke, turn key, press button. That’s it.
As many, many riders have discovered down the years, these really are excellent machines. They’re remarkably solid. Unpretentious. And decently well-finished. Most of the chrome is good, despite a decade and a half of no polishing and neglect. The only bad bits are the rear rim, which is a little mysterious on a chain drive machine, and the two toolboxy things below the side panels, which have gone a little scabby.
The more I mess around with this bike, the more I like it. It sailed through its MoT again this year – the only discussion point was that the front tyre rubs ever-so-gently against the front mudguard. How can that be, not least because it’s a near-new (as in less than a decade old) Avon and is the correct size specified for the bike? It’s not a case of the guard being bent, either, because there’s no clearance either side. Puzzling.
And possibly the strangest thing about this machine, this unassuming machine, is that prepping it for winter’s worst does in fact fill me with renewed enthusiasm for getting out and about and heading off into the wintry weather. Which sounds insane, but it’s not. I always get bored with driving the car around – if I’m on my own, that is. A car is a good place for two chatty folk to head out for pie or cake or…
I’ve enjoyed some of my most memorable rides in winter, too. For no sane reason I took bikes to Stonehenge to celebrate the winter solstice – twice! Both of those were rotary Nortons, and both suffered a lot from the salt and the weather – in fact the air-cooler broke down in the snow! But it fixed itself, in a faintly cosmic way. The Plan was to ride the Bullet there the following year to make a hat trick of insane gestures … but I didn’t do it, somehow. Can’t remember the excuse. Maybe it wasn’t snowing enough?
Whatever. Royal Enfield’s finest will provide more fun over the winter than my modern machines, I bet. And more than the recently resurrected A65T, too, for exactly the reasons I’ve outlined. The BSA is spotless. It feels like an act of sacrilegious madness to take it out for its maiden flight in the UK – it’s a refugee from the USA, remember – in late October when the local farmers have been enthusiastically spreading slurry on their fields. And on the roads of course, which is all part of the great countryside tradition we all know and love. Don’t we?
Two final thoughts. Firstly, we receive endless queries from riders who want a recommendation for a good all-year classic. These are difficult to answer, because… well, how can anyone else know what another person wants to ride? The truth is that the sheer value offered by the trad RE singles is hard to beat. How much is a bike like this worth? Or… how much would it cost to buy one?
In a(nother) moment of insanity a while ago, we decided that the Bullet should go to a good home where it would be loved,
cherished, polished and ridden forever by a doting new owner. This is a familiar excuse. So we mentioned it around in the RC riding community. Cries of ‘You can’t sell it! It’s historic!’ and the like echoed through the ethers … but no one actually wanted to pay £1000 for it. So it’s worth no more than that, obviously. And £1000 is not a lot to pay for a sound and solid traditional single, is it? A single with all the classic attributes, including a great sound, grand handling and one seriously plonky engine? And are they good to ride? Yes. And does the electric hoof work? Yes.
Which brings me tottering to a final thought. The astounding value offered by the Royal Enfield 650 twins. Blimey. If they’re built as well as our old Bullet, they truly are remarkable value. And if you have one, and you ride it through the winter, could you drop us a line and let us know how well it fares? I’m asking for an anonymous friend, of course!
Right then. Grubbing through pics of my old bikes in winter reminded me that high on the top shelf in The Shed there are two – two! – of those slightly glorious Avon ‘snoot’ handlebar fairings which we used to know and loathe in our earlier days. I am a great fan of screens and fairings in bad weather, and although handsome modernist screens are readily available for the gruff Bullet, none of them provide any hand protection, whereas the snoot does. Hmmm. Wonder whether Kenny at Ace Mosickles could knock up a set of brackets for one. Hmmm…