Here’s what I started out with.........
By way of background, I’ve been riding year-round since the late seventies and have accumulated a small collection of bikes (I currently have four on the road plus others in various states) and am a bit of a fan of singles. I have always done all my own servicing and repairs except where the need to preserve warranty has meant using dealers, but even then I don’t really trust anyone else to work on my bikes.
MTs first came to my attention sometime in the mid-nineties when I got talking to a guy with an MT500 at the start of the National Rally. I liked the apparent ruggedness of the MT, but having owned an XT550 previously, was not over-enamoured with the idea of going back to kick-start only and a single leading shoe front brake. I later looked at a 350 when I took the kids to a local ‘Army day’, but it was a few more years before I really started to search seriously for one and even went so far as paying Force a visit to look at their offerings which were a bit too expensive for what I had in mind. I carried on looking for one to come up locally in the right condition and at the kind of price I had in mind and had just about given up when this one more or less fell into my lap.
I’d been helping out a mate with a bike repairs business and a customer brought in an MT fresh from Withams with a broken cam belt. Having experience with these engines, I got the job of replacing the belt. Overall the bike was in better condition than a lot of other MTs I’d seen in the previous few years and after fitting the new belt and firing it up for the first time in gawd knows how long, it didn’t run too badly either. The owner took the bike away together with a new battery he’d bought and came back a week or so later for an MOT. It then went away again and was next seen a few weeks later outside his house with a ‘For Sale’ sign on it. Discreet third party enquiries revealed an asking price circa 1200 quid – more than I wanted to pay – but there were no takers.
A few more weeks went by without the bike being sold and after some more discreet enquiries to establish a likely acceptable price, I went to look at it. As well as replacing the cam belt and battery, the owner had also fitted new side panels and had the tank re-sprayed. However, since getting the bike MOT’d and registered he’d only ridden it two miles and said he couldn’t get on with it and it was too tall and too fast for him. I gave the machine another once-over that revealed an in-service date of March 1997 which I guess makes it quite a late one. After I had fired it up, we agreed on a three figure sum.
I then rode the bike round to my mate’s workshop intending to check it over properly. The journey proved to be a bit of an experience. The bike ticked over ok, but on pulling away the engine would pretty much die and then lurch away rather abruptly – maybe the previous owner thought this was just the way the bike was meant to be? A morning in the workshop spent carefully cleaning the carb and setting it up properly together with a few other minor adjustments and I rode the twelve miles home on an altogether better behaved machine. The fork action was poor and the engine a bit noisy but it steered straight, handled ok and at one point I rattled it up to an indicated 70 on the clock.
After getting it home, I drained the fuel system completely and then stood the bike up for a couple of months whilst I concentrated on getting a few jobs done on some of my other bikes. Around about the end of May and armed with a list that would get a bit longer before I was finished, work started in earnest.
More to follow.......
womble
anyhow, back to the story...
oh and the colour,