Some lovely news

Look! The Lomax has already been restored. I met @wrenching_wench at the Practical Classics Restoration Show and she’d snapped this photo on the Northern Kit Cars stand without realising the connection.

I’m so happy to see it restored to shiny blue glory.

Middle stack of Mind Body and Spirit, bottom shelf

That’s where you find Folklore at the Astley Book Farm. It seemed straightforward but finding Mind Body and Spirit took me several laps of the stacks. It was a good job I’d been fortified for the challenge by tea, cake and a splendid sausage roll.

I had set out on the outfit with the intention of starting my 2024 Round Britain Rally account but just wasn’t feeling it. It has been a difficult Easter and it seems that even though I have faithfully attended art therapy every week for a year, it only takes a small setback for the void to claim me again.

In times of trouble we turn to the internet. I follow a kind and gentle account on Instagram called @_great_kraken_ in which a chap with a splendid beard and a magnificent selection of hats introduces the concept of the “solo date” as a means of celebrating the single life. I struggle to celebrate my life so I decided on a solo date to the book farm, a place I used to visit occasionally in pre-COVID times. I’m so glad it has survived. If you’re not familiar with it check out the website. It’s very similar in spirit and layout to Barter Books in Alnwick, one of my very favourite places.

I can’t say the date started well, unless getting stuck behind two separate bin lorries is your kink. While the outfit has many advantages, including excellent carrying capacity for books, a proper jockey wheel for Werner, a new foot pump so I can fix my flat bicycle tyre, and a large bag of crochet magazines for the charity shop, it does mean that filtering is out of the question. Patience is required but it has never been my strength.

The cake was good, the random selection of books was good, I bought a guidebook to Ukraine which led to a chat with the lady on the till about my trip to Lviv last year to chop vegetables at the Lviv Volunteer Kitchen, and I got to spend the rest of the day reading The Other Wind which I didn’t realise Ursula K Le Guin had added to the Earthsea series until I saw it on the shelf. Was it a good date? It should have been but it didn’t really dent the desolation. Brains are rubbish.

 

Shadows and Dust

You know how it is when you used to own something unusual. When you see something that looks similar, you squint a bit and see if you recognise anything.

So when I walked past A Total Fucking Wreck of a blue Lomax at the NEC Classic Motor Show I had a squint at the exhaust and I thought “that looks a bit like mine” and then I realised.

It was mine.

Last seen being sold to a nice old fella in Redditch. Sold with a full MOT and in roadworthy order. Now faded to fuck and dismantled.

If this had been a Victorian melodrama I’d have fainted with horror. As it was the NEC on a chilly November I just burst into tears instead.

I worked so hard to put that Lomax back on the road after it suffered a cracked chassis and a complete oil loss over the Lecht. My ex, the Proprietor of the Northern Rest Home for Distressed Machinery, welded the chassis for me then gave it house room until the weekend he didn’t and I had to do an emergency rescue run with a rented box van and a white knight from Twitter.

I rebuilt it in my very tolerant landlady’s back garden. The Wingman supervised. I sold it to an old fella looking for a project to keep him busy.

(When I got home I checked the MOT record. The last one it went for was the one I organised for it in 2019. The old fella didn’t even try and keep it on the road)

Gutted doesn’t even begin to touch it. Apparently it’s off to a specialist for another rebuilding and then it will have a new owner, which is good. But it was so awful to see it, shabby and destroyed. The rubber chequerplate underneath it is the last thing the Big Ginger Ex bought for me. He’s gone from my life now (but not dead, as far as I know). The Wingman, who loved the Lomax so much, has left this life. Thank god he didn’t have to see it.

Does it spark joy?

Photo by Kenton Rose

There are two questions decluttering gurus would like us to ask about our things. Marie Kondo suggests we should ask whether an item sparks joy. Others advise that we should own nothing that we do not know to be useful nor believe to be beautiful.

Now I’m a big fan of decluttering. The only problem is that it tends to lead to recluttering. Peak recluttering occurred when I took two carrier bags to Emmaus at Landbeach and came back with a Victorian pedal organ, but I had slipped and banged my head so perhaps I have an excuse.

I was dropping some motorbike gloves that I’d bought but didn’t like in to my local RSPCA charity shop when I spotted a heavy-duty vintage picnic basket. But as well as practicing decluttering I’m trying to practice sticking to a budget and it was £30 so I looked wistfully at it and walked away.

A couple of days later I was back to drop off something else and there it was in the window for just a tenner.

Without hesitation, deviation or repetition I scooped it up, handed over the cash and hot-footed it home. According to the internet it is a 1950s Burlington Hawkeye from Iowa, and it comes complete with a pie shelf. That makes two of us.

And where should an incredibly beautiful retro picnic basket go on its first outing? To the Festival of the Unexceptional, of course, a gathering of very beautiful retro cars.

Thanks to the generosity of a friend I got to be a passenger in the not-wholly-unexceptional Moskvitch 2140. Halfway up the drive to the gate the engine decided that it didn’t spark joy, in fact it didn’t spark at all which is why we entered the festival on a tow-rope – caught by the very talented Kenton Rose in the photo at the top of this post. But if you are going to break down, where better than a festival where there were a dozen other Eastern Bloc car enthusiasts present including two professional mechanics, and a second Moskvitch to borrow spares from if necessary?

There was fettling. There was fault-finding. And once the fault had been found and resolved there were burgers and ice cream from the stalls, coffee and doughnuts from the picnic basket, and a chance to catch up with friends.

Exceptionally joyful!

It’s all gone a bit Master and Commander

I’ve been trying to fix a leak in the Triumph’s cooling system for Rather A Long Time. The leak was from the back of the water pump, and the Book of Lies recommends a replacement.

Great, except that a replacement is the thick end of £300.

I changed the pump for a second-hand one off ebay.

I used to think that adjusting the handbrake on a 2CV was the worst job in the garage. I was wrong.

Because I don’t have a bike lift changing the water pump involves extensive grovelling on the garage floor with occasional breaks to get doused with coolant.

I changed it, I refilled the bike, I refilled it again because I’m paranoid about airlocks, and the coolant carried on gently weeping out of the replacement pump. I suppose if they are of similar vintage the internal seals will expire at similar times.

You can buy replacement seals for about 20 quid, but it is difficult to change them. Fortunately I know a man who enjoys an engineering puzzle and Greg accepted the challenge.

I promised the Triumph I would get her back on the road after France. So I got down on my hands and knees again and fitted the repaired pump. Refilled the coolant, and as fast as I was putting it in, it was flowing out of the bottom where the metal pipe goes into the pump.

Tightened up the bolt. Didn’t help.

Took it all apart again. Got doused in coolant.

Found a bit missing from the o-ring.

Temporary panic as to whether the missing bit had disappeared into the pipes and was just waiting its moment to get stuck in a narrow internal passage.

Much relief when I found it hiding in the slurry of oil and coolant in my strategically-placed washing up bowl.

Fitted second o-ring (can’t remember why I had two).

Refilled the system.

Coolant flowing out of the joint still.

Undid it all.

Second o-ring borked.

Took to twitter to ask what the hell I was doing wrong. This was a problem I hadn’t had when I put it back together the first time, but that may have been beginners luck.

I think it was because I had been lazy and not undone the rubber hose at the top of the metal pipe. This meant it was going in at a slight angle and nipping the o-ring against an internal edge.

Ordered three new o-rings and another 5 litres of coolant.

Waited 2 weeks.

Reported them lost, and asked for them to be sent again.

6 o-rings arrived on the same day. Only needed one of them.

Fitted the pipe, fitted the hose, filled up the system, left the bleed screw too far open and created an exciting Bellagio-style water feature in the garage.

Filled up the system.

It’s not leaking any more, which is good news.

Now we just need an MOT.

Ferry disappointing

OK, mildly disappointing but that’s not as good a pun.

I have been on holiday. Abroad, no less. The last time I went on holiday overseas was, I think, 2015. The newly-arrived Wingman and I went with some of the RBR crew to the Black Forest. I went in the 2CV because I didn’t trust the Lomax and I didn’t have a sidecar. It’s just possible I should have come in the 2CV this time as well. 

But I was on 3Moos, the new-to-me-Africa Twin. I’d checked the brake pads and the coolant level so all was good until on the way home from a run to Cannock Chase the weekend before we went away the speedo stopped working. 

Harsher folk than you would say, how could I tell?

Now there’s an easy thing that could have gone wrong, and a difficult thing.

Take a guess. 

The cable could have come loose at the bottom and fallen out. But it hadn’t. The internet suggests that  a plastic gear in the front hub has probably shattered. I decided that taking the wheel off just before a week touring Normandy wasn’t a great plan so I plumbed the satnav lead into the battery and got used to using the Garmin as a speedo instead.  We’ll come back to whether that was a good idea later. 

I’d pushed to get the ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe as I had happy memories of getting the Northlink ferry to the Simmer Dim.  For the Simmer Dim you load the bikes about 5 then can go and get a beer in Aberdeen, walk back to the ferry, go to the bar or snooze in your cabin, and disembark in the morning. 

That’s not how it works with DFDS.

We had a trouble-free run down to the south coast, with a pause for a pasty at Stokenchurch and a fabulous pizza in Lewes at a biker-run place under the railway arches.

We checked in nice and early like good citzens. We took our places in Lane 8 at 9pm.

The boat was in the harbour. 

We waited a long time. Once you’ve passed check in there are no seats, no loos, nowhere to buy refreshments and no shelter. We were lucky, it was a mild evening. If it had been raining it would have been grim. 

If you are a motorhomer or a caravanner and you see some sad-looking bikers in a ferry queue, please think about sticking the kettle on for us. Or even making a bacon sarnie. All the saints in heaven would reward you.

I had been looking forward to a beer in the bar all day.  Eventually we were boarded just before 11pm. There was a brief dispute about whether my bike would fall over or not before the deck crew remembered there was a second set of straps they needed to use, and by the time we got upstairs the bar was closed. 

We had to resort to the buffet. I had the world’s most expensive Shitty Lager; Platonic Road Companion had a tiny bottle of red wine and we looked at the moon. 

At 3.30am our time we were booted back out of the cabin to disembark. It cost £93 and we got to use it for about 3 hours.

Scotland did it better. 

..and meet these two imposters just the same

I guess they are called shakedown miles for a reason….

After resolving the concern about the front of the barrels being covered in oil (minor fail, oil filter not done up quite tight enough) I was feeling lucky and brought the outfit to the RV for self, Platonic Road Companion and Rödskägg for a trip to Stratford Autojumble.

It was running brilliantly, the new cut-down screen looked the bollocks, and we even found the missing doo-hickey that means you can start the bike in neutral without the clutch in.

We have an established order, PRC goes first because he knows all the good roads, I go in the middle in case of disaster, and Röd rides tailgunner in case anything falls off the outfit. This normally works brilliantly but today we got to one of the big roundabouts on the way to the Fosse where you lose line-of-sight on the approach. When the roundabout came back into view there were bikes everywhere, it was like the casino scene in Sister Act where the nuns scatter to make impossible for Vince’s goons to find Dolores (Van Cartier!)

I guess it sounds a bit romantic but I always think that, a bit like medieval knights, we get to know each other through the colours that we wear and how we sit on the bikes. Even against a scene of a dozen scooter boys and another ten or so adventure riders I know who to follow.

I got even bolder, sneaked up to 70mph on the motorway (which the bike didn’t used to do at all) and tried a “GLF” at the national speed limit sign after some roadworks, my joy only slightly marred by being overtaken by a Porsche driver who didn’t see the need to wait until we’d actually passed the sign before winding it on. My right-hand mirror went limp in sympathy with the Porsche pilot’s dick, he got 30 yards before I caught him up.

Then disaster 😦 on the outskirts of Stratford the bike suffered a massive backfire and started bunnyhopping around. Maybe I’d underestimated the amount of fuel in the tank? Wouldn’t be the first time.  We were just passing a Shell garage so I nipped in, filled  up and that seemed to help, the final few hundred yards to the racecourse went smoothly.

Excellent cheeseburger, some good haggling, nice cup of tea.

Then homewards.

Oh dear god.

An occasional backfire at exactly 4.5k revs was manageable.

Then it became a frequent backfire.

Then it became almost constant with the engine under any load at all.

Then the throttle began randomly surging.

Trust me on this, when you are wrangling an outfit, the last thing you want is unexpected throttle input. That’s going to plunge you abruptly to the left.

So I’m juggling the clutch, bouncing around nearly as much as the rev counter needle, trying to use as little throttle as possible, fighting the bars, cruising down hills -except of course you can’t cruise round a downhill lefthand bend with a sidecar…. many apologies to anyone who had their peaceful Sunday rudely interrupted by something that sounded like Ukrainian air defence at work.

And when not trying to stay in a straight line I’m wondering what the fuck I’ve fucked up.  It feels like ignition. When the Lomax had these symptoms it was condenser failure, but the W650 doesn’t have points and a condenser, it has a black box.

Oh shit – a horse coming the other way, with an HGV behind it. There is NO WAY ON EARTH I can fart and bang my way past.  So I pull over, and switch off.

Unwise. Horse safely past, I try and start – nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Fuckall.

Now actually this was a massive clue and led to the problem being spotted and sorted. Should I tell you? Best guesses in the comments and I’ll come back and finish the story tomorrow.

Just back from the NEC Show

No, not that one. That would have been a truly epic car park snarl up. The Camping and Caravanning Show. And while it was – perhaps unsurprisingly – mainly full of large white wobble boxes, tucked in a corner was this absolutely brilliant bike trailer. 

I hate loading bikes onto trailers and avoid doing it unless I can rope someone in to come and help me. I just have visions of losing momentum halfway up the ramp and the whole thing toppling sideways and pinning me to the tarmac.

This genius design gets round that in two ways. The tail of the trailer drops more-or-less flat to the road, and it’s a wide piece of chequerplate – you can’t fall off it, though I’m fairly certain I could still drop a bike on it. It is, after all, my special talent. 

And it folds in half for storage! 

Anyway – if you’re as impressed as I am by this almighty piece of kit, you can get one from LNB Towbars. Ask for Clare, she was lovely and very knowledgable about it. 

Happy New Year

Bah Humbug.  I didn’t get Christmas, again.

Last year I didn’t get Christmas because I had temporary custody of an extremely high-needs rescue dog which I couldn’t turn my back on.  I spent Christmas day sitting on a camping chair in my kitchen, the only place I could make safe for her until she went to the next kennels, listening to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy when she was asleep and Classic FM’s Sleepy Dog playlist when she wasn’t.

This year I didn’t get Christmas because I came down with the awful Not-COVID-but-still-shit bug that was doing the rounds.  I started shivering on Thursday 22nd and I’m still struggling with the tail end of it now.

But New Year’s Day was warm and sunny so Platonic Road Companion and I nipped out to Cannock Chase for a toastie and a brew.

On the way back we pulled in beside an ancient church, mainly so I could take my helmet off to cough and de-snot myself.  According to the sign, Henry Tudor had stayed there in the run-up to the Battle of Bosworth, and a few decades later Henry VIII and one of his wives stayed there so that they could visit the battlefield.

I like the idea of Tudor tourists.  And I’m going to go back and be a tourist myself – the church used to be the gatehouse of the Cistercian monastary of Merevale, which sounds well worth a visit on a warmer day.

Like catching fish in a barrel

There should be a gin at my right hand but I’m keeping it tea at the moment so there’s a mug of Tetley’s finest in a lovely autumnal orange mug from Aldi.

Why should there be a gin? Because I have spent the day crouched over the W650’s crankcase removing swarf from the inside, and it has gone Quite Well.

It shouldn’t be there, but then the barrels should come off without the need to recruit a firm of specialists with a big hammer. They had to drill things free and as a consequence there are little shavings everywhere.

And I’m picking them out, one by one. 

There are other things I will be doing later, like flushing the case out and changing the oil as often as I can afford, but it seems to me that the more tiny crunchy bits I can remove now, the better these other options will work.

I’m a child of the 70s and we had to amuse ourselves in ways that didn’t involve electronics. One game I remember involved magnets on strings, cut-out fish with paper clip noses, and a cardboard “tank” which you fished inside without peeking. The long winter nights simply flew by…. but my magnet-fishing skills have turned out to be an excellent foundation for several hours this afternoon with a small magnet on a wire.

Even better, it didn’t fall off the wire and disappear in the bottom of the crankcase, which I’d placed a 50/50 bet on. 

It’s less than ideal and I’m sure I won’t get all the flakes out, but there are very few examples of people successfully getting those barrels off thanks to Kawasaki’s decision to have four of the retaining bolts run outside the engine and rust into immobility.  I found one person discussing it online and he said he’d had to destroy the barrels to get them off. As replacements are £1,000 (or “one set of Africa Twin wheels”) I’m just glad the workshop got them off. 

More fishing tomorrow. Perhaps a squad of handsome Norwegians will turn up to make sure I’m not going over my quota.