KAWASAKI TENGAI
Bertie Simmonds finds himself a Kawasaki hit-single to ride and comes away feeling rather good!
Bertie rides the trailie single.
There are many forgotten bikes out there… machines which just seem to dip under the radar of brilliance but are, in their own way, very special machines. Today has been my day to try one of those bikes – Kawasaki’s Tengai. You may recall our ride of the Honda Dominator a few issues back, well, we really got the bug for some other ‘hit singles’: the sorts of bikes that just seem to do the job they’re built for but – whether it be because of capacity, number of cylinders or style – seem to not get the recognition they deserve. Often, single-cylinder bikes (or cruisers, more of which in future issues) seem to not create that spark (ahem) that multis or twins seem to and we feel it’s time to look at these decidedly different bikes that are often much-loved.
Looking at bikes like the Tengai, we can see that there are so many good single-cylinder, quirky machines out there that can fulfill a number of roles. The Tengai was one of those big singles that was more than just a dirt bike – if it ever was one. For the Tengai of the late 1980s, you took a well-proven motor and then surrounded the top half of the bike in plastic and made a curious, half-dirt bike, half adventure bike. You may not have taken your Tengai off-road on the Serengeti, but for some, the rush hour on the North Circular was much more important and that was a job the thumping single could tackle with ease, day in, day out. So what is a Tengai? Well, it’s a more road-biased version of Kawasaki’s enduring KLR650 and was in the Kawasaki line-up from the late 1980s into the early 1990s. So, rather than a pure mud-mover, this machine is more set up to be something else. You’ve got a big, 23-litre fuel tank, a wraparound fairing that starts from the top of the bash-plate at the bottom of the engine up to a useful ‘more-than bikini-fairing’ and a tad less suspension travel, which really shouldn’t bother us much if you know where we’re going… As I approach the Tengai pre-ride I have to say this one is a beauty. Roger Jones (CMM friend) has looked after her very well. You can see this by the chain oiler, the sheer whiteness of the body panels (very late 1980s, but many white panels have since faded on older bikes) and his addition of ‘him’