Tales of Whoa! Pt.4

It's a long way from Bournemouth...Pt.1

You know how it is...  you’re a student and the money doesn’t go very far. What with pubs, food, women, oh, and books and paper and study related stuff, the grant (remember those…before the days of Thatcher the Hatter) simply wasn’t sufficient.

So it came to pass that I had to get home at the end of term; Bournemouth to Worthing on my little Honda CB100N.

Now please bear in mind, gentle beings, that this bike had provided sterling service, moonlit crash notwithstanding. It had taken me, my record player and records (remember those) and my other assorted crap to and from Bournemouth for a year and it had done it very well; however, there are limits.

Being short of money the maintenance had slipped and the oil, what there was of it, was well passed it’s best, but the daily short runs to college and the occasional longer but local runs meant that nothing serious was happening to the bike. However, the summer vacation arrived and I duly loaded up all the stuff I needed/wanted back home and set off one Friday afternoon, blissfully ignorant of what a long journey home this was going to be.

Being a 99cc motorcycle, the motorway was (thankfully) out of bounds so I left Bournemouth and headed towards Southampton on the A35. All was going well although I did notice a lack of power as I got closer to Southampton, but, hey, it’s a 99cc motorcycle and I had a lot of stuff on it. Once in Southampton, however, it became apparent that all was not well; even less power, erratic tick-over and a funny smell were my clear portents. I pulled over at a service station to get some more fuel and I noticed that the engine was really hot and, on removing the oil filler plug/dipstick, the smoke coming out of the engine and the lack of oil on the dipstick, reinforced the thought that maybe something was not quite right. I bought the requisite oil, filled the gearbox, fueled up and, after attempting to cool the engine by leaving the garage hose running on it for a bit (Yeah, I really wasn’t that bright; is it a wonder that I didn’t pass my Engineering course?), I had a brief struggle to get the bike started and off I went.

The valiant little bike struggled on, albeit slowly, until I got to Portsmouth where, just as I got onto the A27 it once again stopped through overheating. A passing rider stopped (They used to in those days!) and offered advice and assistance, taking me to a local bike shop and buying the oil I needed (I’d used the last of my money.) and took me back to the stricken bike. Oil refilled, an exchange of addresses so I could get the money back to him and a few kicks of the kick-start later, I was off on my slow journey…to the bike's eventual failure.

That occurred only 20 minutes later in Southbourne when the bike finally stopped working. Once I realised that nothing was going to get it going again, I abandoned the bike at the service station there and caught the limited stop bus back home. Total journey time…about 10 hours!

The bike was salvaged a few days later and the extent of the damage? New piston, new top end, new bottom end and all associated bearings and gaskets.

Sadly the bike went to the scrap yard in the sky later that summer when a fault in the wiring, probably caused by the excessive heat on that journey home, caused a total power loss at speed, at night and the poor little CB100N was written off.