I have been looking for another motorcycle for sometime now, you know what it’s like when you have a combination outfit, you get stuck in traffic jams! With all the cars in Salisbury (Wiltshire) it is fast becoming a car park these days and if you don’t catch the traffic at the right time, you can be there for 30 minutes or so. The poor old outfit will just sit there and overheat, so as you may have gathered the motorcycle I was looking for is a solo. I had made a few tentative enquiries to various people but hadn’t made too much progress.  

Chris Smith (Speedway Motorcycles), knowing that I was looking for something, had a phone call from a chap in Weston-Super-Mare who had been asked to sell a Ural for a client who was no longer able to ride, restore or even know what a motorcycle was. Unfortunately this can happen to any of us in our later years.  

Not knowing how much our beloved Russian motorcycles are worth he phoned Chris Smith to find out, of course Chris gave him a completely honest price not having seen the machine for himself and thought it worth around £200, this was on the assumption that it was an M66 and made in 1975 and that it was blue and in stages of some restoration. With that in mind he phoned me to say that he may have found me a bike that I could do something with, as this price fell right into my price bracket (cheap).   

I rang a nice chap called Lea who was selling the motorcycle the next day and said to him I believe you have an old Ural M66 for sale. After a few conversations about the motorcycle, like what he wanted to sell it for, and what I was prepared to pay for it, I arranged to go and have a look at the bike. Lea must have spoken to someone as he said, “I want to make something out of this deal but I understand that they are not worth a round of drinks really”. With that I felt that this could work. I said that I would be down on the weekend with the trailer and I will possibly buy it after seeing its condition.   

He then dropped a small spanner in the works and said that there was another engine mixed up with the Ural stuff but didn’t say what it was, on hearing that I wasn’t sure what I was going to find, I made a quick phone call to a friend Chris Northcote, who already has a M66, and would know the different parts; he tried to explain the differences. In the end I said come with me, at this suggestion Chris was very eager to come with me and have a look at the Ural, so I picked him up and away we went.   

When we got to the building it had one these large steel garage doors, one of these motorised jobs that takes ages to rise. You tend to get that anticipation jittery feeling when you have to wait for something you want and you know its on the other side and its taking a long time to see it.    

Once the door was opened there stood this M66, looking at it for the first time you could see that it was in very good condition.   

The pictures do not do the motorcycle real justice, but give you an idea what we saw. 

It looked like the restoration of the motorcycle had been started, but events took over the gent and this is how it has been left, for 8 years I believe.   

The rest of the motorcycle was in several boxes and in each one the parts were carefully wrapped in material and newspaper or placed into ice cream tubs, none of which were labelled to show what they were, or even what motorcycle they belonged to.