Motorcycle Forum / Country Specific / UK Group / August 2008

OK. Puch Maxi aged 18 (so this is 1976). Blew it up. Yam YB100 a couple
of months later. Utterly indestructible bike. It never, ever went wrong,
though I always carried a spare plug because it ate them.

Crashed it, oh God, loads of times. Into ditches. Into a milk tanker.
Threw it up the road on diesel. Rode it from Brighton to Oxford every
other weekend, to get my oats[1]. Fitted ace bars to it, because I
thought it made it look like a Jota (I can't believe I'm confessing
this).

Refitted the stock bars and added windscreen and panniers because I
thought it made it look like a Harley (the C50 tartan-pattern panniers
didn't help here).

[1] This has got to be told. Then girlfriend was a schoolgirl at
Headington School For Girls, outside Oxford. Posh place.

She had to get parental permission for a weekend pass out. Her parents,
unsurprisingly, being Baptist and she their only child, regarded me with
suspicion.

Her housemistress[2], who'd never married (the love of her life didn't
make it back from Dunkirk, apparently), knew exactly what was going on,
and marched her to the school doctor and had her put on the pill.

She then told me that if her parents vetoed the weekend pass out, so she
could join me in carnal bliss at Sussex University, then as
housemistress, she had an annex - a sort of granny flat - on the
premises, and I could come up to Headington and we could spend a weekend
of carnal bliss there. In the event, her parents (fools) granted the
weekend passes.

To this day, I'm still incredulous that some bluestocking stiff-neck old
lady, who was in charge of the educational and moral upbringing of a
hundred or so young girls, could actually collude at the deflowering of
one of her charges. I'm immensely proud that I managed to sway her
judgment in that direction[3].

[2] Miss Chiesman, you will never be forgotten. I am assuming you're
dead, by the way.

[3] One weekend when I went up to Headington, she was abed with the flu.
Knowing which side my bread was buttered, I took her a bottle of Bell's.
It did the trick, obviously.

We're talking about getting the piston out, cleaning up the scores on
the barrel and fitting a new piston/rings because the f.cking thing had
nipped up again. We used to chip in a couple of quid each to hold a
spare piston/rings/circlips ready for the next seizure.

Hmm. I can remember as a teenager dropping my DT125 and breaking the
gear-selection return spring stop. For some reason I felt (probably
erroneously, in retrospect) that the cases needed splitting in order
to drill it out and tap it.

Not having the requisite puller for the flywheel, My dad took it to a
backstreet garage to have the flywheel taken off. Unfortunately due to
a language problem (this was Hong Kong) the mechanic stripped the
entire engine and I was presented with a box of bits.

I made up a new gearshift stop on my Dat's hand-cranked lathe, fitted
it, then reassembled the engine as best I could given that it was my
first ever rebuild and I hadn't stripped it in the first place. There
were only a few bits left over and it ran! I did have the flywheel
spin on the crank later (the Woodruff key had sheared), which turned
out to be caiused by me fitting an insufficiently thick washer under
the retaining nut, but that was the only problem.