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CHAPTER FIVE - 27
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With the tent
set-up I sat there and reviewed the journey and how many time I
came close to death on the way there. I think it may have been
at least 3 times, twice on the A34 where some drivers either
don’t see you or they just can’t be bothered to overtake and
think they get past you without pulling over a bit. Of course
they don’t hit you but come within 6 inches of the handlebar,
enough for them but scare the crap out of the rider. |
The
other one is where all bikers can agree; drivers of all kinds of
vehicles pull out in front of you thinking that they can accelerate
quicker than you are travelling at the time. This rarely works of
course, as your perception of speed when anything is travelling towards
you is pretty poor. I think that all motorcycle riders are very tuned to
that anyway and are always aware.
Time
to check the bike, I placed it on the stand so that the back wheel was
off the ground, and gave the wheel a push to see if there was any play
in the bearings, and to my amazement the wheel had a huge degree of
wobble, no wonder it felt like driving on ice. Went to the front wheel
and it was the same, so out came the trusty Ural tool kit kindly
provided by Nick Amor (another madhatter biker) and we set about the
bike. We had a job adjusting the bearing so I purchased new ones from
the F2 shop. I must say that even though it is reasonably easy to change
most parts on the side of the road, trying to find a flat hard surface
to knock down bearings in a field can be a bit of a problem, but we
managed to find a block of wood, which did the job quite nicely.
Bearings in place and the wheel back on, now came the time to check the
play. In the Ural tool kit is a lovely tool that winds in and out the
bearing adjuster, so away we go tapping the adjuster round until (ping)
one of the tabs that are seated in the holes snaps off. Several words
came to mind like; oh bother; blast and oh dear, it has broken!!! I’ll
leave you to use whatever word comes to your mind, and it may come close
to what we said. Back to the old way of doing it, tapping on a
screwdriver, I don’t like doing it that way really as it usually breaks
the screwdriver and distorts the holes, but when you have nothing else?
I
found it a bit odd that the adjuster was sitting out quite a long way,
but the bearing was tight, so I shrugged it off and went to the front
wheel where we went through the same process of adjusting.
Wheels
done we noticed that the headrace bearing was also loose; this meant
that the entire steering head and handlebars had to be removed and the
bearing tightened. By now there were four people all round the bike
helping to do what they could. It is one of the good things about bikers
on such rally’s is that all will help if they can, brilliant!
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Once my
initial problems were done, it was time to turn to Nicks bike
where Peter Ballard (COC President and Technical adviser)
noticed that he still had the carburettors restrictors in place.
Now that the rain had started, the skills of Alistair (Isle of
Wight chapter) better know as ‘Matilda’ in Robot Wars was
employed to hold the brolly. As you can see, he is at the
height, sorry, short of his profession. |
The
next day came the ‘Run-out,’ which I was looking forward to, as it would
give the bike another run. We started off quite well, but by the time we
got into Banbury someone decided to empty the contents of a small inland
sea on our heads. The usual words like ‘raining cats and dogs’ didn’t
even come close to what started to fall on us. In bikers language; “it
was a bit damp”, with this the bike started to misfire and loose power
and I thought that it would be silly to go on, so I turned round and
headed back to the camp site. |
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