Britbike forum Forums General discussion The Rod and Tappet generation gap

well the mid 30s chap that bought my 71 Honda sl175 quasi-military restomod came to get it today....he corn-fessed to never having had a bike with kick start lever or carbs (has modern ducati and other crotch rockets) i started the Honda for him as he wanted to take a test ride....he stalled it 3 times in yard...finally got going ..and` going and going... after about 10 minutes my cell wrang he was on side road said it had stalled turning around and would not start......i got in car and went to place...walked over...bike started first kick....i followed him back to house.....he turned bike off and tried to start it by straddling seat and plunging up and down on lever in awkward fashion....bike would not go....i schooled him..i said stand on right side of bike and put right foot on lever and crack throttle and give sharp kick and quickly give a bit more throttle when it fires....he tried and of course it started every time.....no electronic fuel injection no electric starter boy was lost........he bought bike for hs wife how she gonna fare i wonder....

Well, at least he bought it and took it away, and didn't drive off in disgust because it didn't have a USB port on it.

If he's having trouble starting an SL175 on the kicker, imagine what he'd do faced with a CH Sportster or an 850 Norton ..... !

Lannis

I remember in '79 when I called about a '74 Trident for sale. The first thing the woman said was, "It's kick start only." I guess maybe some callers were turned off by this, but I still thought that all real motorcycles were kick start only.
Of course, with no chokes, it had its own starting procedure. But don't they all?

In 1969 I bought a slightly dismantled 250cc Jawa. It had no visible kickstarter and I had a terrible time trying to find the wiring for the electric start. Eventually I discovered that the (rather large) gear lever pushed in on the shaft and rotated to become the kickstarter. It was also like the Triumph Slickshift in that movement of the gearlever disengaged the clutch. A bit of foot control meant that I could move off from a standing start with my left hand in the air.

I assembled the bike and rode it 300 miles home. It was rather modest, but I once swapped it for a 250 Desmo Ducati for a day.

I once went to the annual Chicago bike show, where our club had an antique bike display.

A question often asked by the young guys was "What's that big chrome lever on the side of the engine do?"

Had a Honda 350 with both kick and electric start. Started easy on kick start , the electric start must of took all the power.

Got a lot of respect for those old Jawas
Rode one for 5 years while my riders lisense was cancelled in the hope that no cop would ever pull it over .
And I was right they looked the other way when I rode past which never ever happened when riding the A 10
swap that carb and do a bit of tuning and they were a lot quicker than most would believe and iron curtain reliable
Parked over night in Redfern on the street because I was too knackered to push it down the lane , some one actually stole the carburettor .
As a Jawa owner you could appreciate how difficult this was to do
Some time latter when around in waerloo some one went one better & stole the entire bike which would have bee a bitch because the alternator has siezed .

Obviously, your parting comment should have been "Fare thee well!"

I visited Czechoslovakia in 1973.

Jawas were built there, so they were all over the place.
Many of the big ones were pulling sidecars, and had no problem running about 50 MPH doing it.

That's why there are so many posts with questions about the electric start on T160s.

had to run errand yesterday and was near buyer's home area.......busy road lots of traffic/trucks i tossed and turned all night worrying about him and wife on that bike on that road...also how they gonna cope with having vintage bike for first time maybe i should have kept it for better suited buyer.

He probably already flipped it on facelessbook marketplace....LOL

I tried to be a nice guy once to a new rider. A friend had passed away and his estate being auctioned. He had a lovely Guzzi Ambassador that had been restored. The restorer and I went to the sale to make sure that it wouldn't be "given away" and agreed on a price that we'd go up to.

Bidding was slow. We bid it up for the sake of the widow, and noticed that the only other guy bidding was an enthusiastic looking guy in his early twenties (we guessed). It hadn't reached our agreed price yet, but we said to each other "Us old guys are always b!tching and moaning that there are no young people getting into this hobby. Maybe we're the problem, bidding this up and keeping this young Guzzisti-wannabe from buying a bike at a price he can afford." So we backed off, and let the bike go to this young guy for less than we had agreed to buy it for.

The little [email protected] flogged it off on eBay three days later for almost twice the money.

Lannis

When SkyLink International Couriers went belly up I had the 5 company Z 250b's at home trying to make one or two reliable bikes out of them.
They were fitted with combination top box / panniers designed tofit neatly on the Honda Hawk after cutting the seat in 1/2 so the box sat directly on the frame.
The owner of Skylink was cheap so he had the same conbination box fitted to the Kawasakis which were just not robust enough and regularly broke the frames in 1/2 at the top box mounts ( the 200kg of satchels we squeezed into them did not help this at all ).
SO as I was owed $ 10,000 , back in the days when CEO's were on $ 100,000 , I just kept quiet about the bikes till the liquidator had finished robbing every one blind
He recovered 95% of the money owing yet after his fees we got 5¢ in the dollar .
Any way the cruxt of this is I managed to salvage 3 bikes converted back into normal road trim.
The last one sold was going to be picked up when I was working afternoon shift so SWMBO was there to take the cash & hand over the bike .
A nice young lad of Arabian desent came to the door , helmet in hand , paid for the bike & was going to ride it to his job in the city ( Sydney , state capital ) then ride home.
True to Mulga Bills bicycle when watching him push the bike outside Cheryl asked "scuse me sir but do you know how to ride ?"
She got the answer that he had a push bike so how hard could a motorcycle be to ride .
Being a biit risk adverse and the fact that we were on a major city road she suggested he go up & down the lane a few time to get the feel of the bike before venturing onto the very busy streets .
Well she said he red lined the throttle, dropped the clutch, did a nmassive mono then slamed into the post office chain wire fence, bounced off that hard enough to displace a few bricks in the doctors surgury opposit then got dragged another 100 meters up the lane till the bike stalled .
He said he was fine & now running late for work so could he get a lift
She took him to the local hospital and he was still in theatre when I got home 6 hours latter

boy came and got bill o sale and told me he has figgered out how to start bike and it ran great and he took it on highway and wrung its neck to over 60mph
he's happy, my conscience is clear end of story

For years, I was the youngest member of our local club (I bought my bike when I was 22 and am now approaching 50). I knew of a few guys my age into 60's and 70's bikes, but not a whole lot. More recently, I have seen renewed interest in these bikes from younger individuals.

The trend I've seen (more so with the older BMW's than the Brit bikes), is a move towards restmodding; modern brakes, suspension, LED's, and electronic dash boards. I know of one attempting a fuel injection conversion. Not for me, but it is interesting to see what people come up with.

What throws me off, is how interpretations and style have changed a bit. One of the "cafe racer" sites I am on is full of bikes with chopped fenders, knobby tires, mx handlebars, and flat tracker/washboard seats. I have always thought of those as bobber and scrambler machines, but apparently they are cafe racers to the younger crowd.

At least I am seeing a renewed interest in the machines. They are an adjustment if you are only used to modern efi machines, but much easier to work on yourself if you want.

YMMV,
Eric

a jikov? who would do that?

Tony Hillbilly was disgusted after trying to sell his Triumph s. he advertised kickstart only on both- had more than one prospect come over and ask where the start button was- younger guys. The last Triumph he owned was for sale for months- beautiful, well running bike. A local guy that ships to the UK bought it finally. Tony saw it up for sale in the UK and contacted them to tell the owners about the many upgrades done to the bike.

that was a really nice motorcycle.

If it was the 750 with the Honda front end then I watched it on UK ebay for several days as the classified advert price (set by the UK importer) dropped and dropped again. I made feeble excuses to myself and didn't buy it, and then it was gone. A fine example of non-buyer's remorse.

tony was a spectacular tuner. he worked that T140 with the nasty AMAL mk2 carbs forever until he decided to go with TM mikunis and fix it once and for all.

i still ride his 97 buell that he tuned until the stock issues went away. 132 mph at the races.

and i rode his ducati monster after he got rid of the standard ducati monster performance issues. a beautiful machine.

he would take something and tune it until it was right, then lose interest, sell it on, and build up something else.

i imagine his 57 A10 is as good as anything else he built.

My thoughts exactly
even worse I was on night shift at the time I noticed it so had to ride the pushbike 8 miles to work

I worked on jetting my A65 with VMs forever. Put Mk2s on my Bonneville and forgot about them, only changed the idle jets and forgot about problems.

BTW I found a use for the electric start button on my Trident, I wired it to the horns. Now I have button for horns on either hand.

Good idea. I have a couple of cars with the horn buttons conveniently situated just where your thumbs would be. Normally.
However, when you're taking evasive action and want to blow the horn you have to chase the damn things round and round and the they're only the size of your thumb when you find them.
Using the big central pad in the middle of the steering wheel as the horn button makes so much more sense.

Your extra horn button gives you an extra option.

I had one Ford product in the '70s where the horn button consisted of squeezing the steering wheel.
One button or two, I'll probably end up flashing the bright lights at them anyway.