Devon TRF Group Forum

At the risk of boring everyone who's already seen this on various forums.... 

I was very lucky that my parents live right in the middle of a farm where I worked every hour possible during school and college. This allowed me to buy and run lots of motorbikes, and somewhere to ride them of course- happy days!  

Obsessed from an early age, my first ride on a motorbike was a heavenly-experience on a friends Honda monkey-bike at about age 10. But having started driving tractors at age 12 it seemed only natural to buy a car once I hit 13!  It was a very-tired Vauxhall Viva Mk1 for £50, the year 1978:

One litre of raw power to go with my Honda 50, bought for a fiver.

Well you have to start somewhere.    but soon after  a very capable Montesa 250 trials bike came along:

and a year  later a lovely KL250 that I really regret selling:

followed by many very ropey cast-offs bought for little money.

Only got a couple of pics a CD175 twin

And the most rubbish bike ever a Raleigh Runabout:

But my sister liked it.   

Me and my mates soon found that a stripped down Honda C90 was THE bike to have for its amazing bomb-proof reliability, crashability and light weight. And these were the bikes we spent most time on round the farm, even alongside other, much more respectable bikes that we had.

Which is an important lesson for life you dont need the latest and greatest to have a bit of fun.

There were frequent wipe-outs, usually resulting from going way beyond the limits of what a C90 should be expected to do anyway, but we worked hard, played hard, and sure learned a lot on the way.

Back to the car, I have to mention is that a freshly manured field was the ultimate skid-pan which soon taught me how to handle a car drifting on full lock. Well, sort of.  As it was often myself who had done the spreading, my nose was already well-accustomed to the, er, aroma.  

We had a few riders come and go but there were two other key players in my gang:

Alec on the right - farmers son, generally quite sensible. However, after a road accident in which he broke his leg, I watched, open-mouthed, as Alec pulled a long wheelie on his C90, leg in (full) plaster, crutch tucked under his arm - mad!  

Sesh, from down the village - had natural talent but was a complete nutter with it, and would take extreme risks to get ahead - flat out round blind corners where a tractor or milk tanker might be coming the other way, for example

And there was me, fitting somewhere in the middle - I like going fast but have a strong sense of self-preservation!  And my bike?

Awesome.      

The C90 is pretty useless as a trail bike due to its lack of ground clearance and modest power, but round woods and farmland this was never a problem. The engines would also run quite happily even when completely submerged in, er, sh  er well it was  farm!

Roosting each other with cow-pats was standard procedure, but as we all worked on the farm we never smelt too good anyway.

The complete lack of suspension was not a concern either as Sesh admirably demonstrates:

The rear mudguard was soon modified for wheelies, which the C90s were made for. You could go the length of the lane, round a few corners and do a 180 turn into a cow-shed if desired. Two up wheelies were common but required a little trick to get the wheel up, more of in a bit.

I never let on to my mates on about the secret of using the back brake to steady things and could go further than any of them.  In fact they never found out for years until one of them noticed my brake light flickering on a road-legal bike, tried it and realised how much easier it is using the brake!

But karma has its way and this photo shows Alec not using the back-brake and about to fall off right on top of the photographer - me!

The C90 engine is very torquey but would also rev like crazy, especially once the exhaust had fallen to bits, which didnt take long. If the valves werent clattering against the piston you didnt change up it was as simple as that!

As we all had the same bikes it was no concern that we rarely got above 40mph, it was just all about using every trick in the book to get that extra ½ a wheels lead at the end of the ½ mile drag-strip up or down the lane.

Heres Sesh airborne again:

The C90 has an automatic centrifugal clutch which engages at quite low revs. Now this was no way to get a good start from the line! One of us eventually figured out that the clutch is completely dis-engaged when the gear lever was held down - there was a possibility to beat the system!

So, the trick was to hold the gear lever down in 1st with your wellie (clutch dis-engaged), apply max revs and then feed in the clutch as gently as possible by releasing the lever, but over a working movement of only 2mm! not easy, but made for a much quicker get-away, and was the way to two-up wheelies as mentioned earlier using a quicker release.

Of course, in the dirt (and cow pats) you just let the lever fly at full revs - max power at a genuine 10,000rpm!  

Heres me preparing for a hard landing, (Ive still got the same hair  )

One of the disadvantages of the older C90s like we had was the positive-stop neutral between 1st and 2nd. Vital speed would be lost if you couldnt do this double stab down 1st N- 2nd  in a blur of wellie and crashing gears!

Alec got hold of a later model towards the end of my C90 ownership which had a N 1 2 3 gear shift pattern which left the rest of us standing with its full throttle continual shifts! And also the possibility to change 1st to 2nd mid wheelie, which I was very envious of!

Sesh stylin it good:

The tractable motor and gear-lever-clutch technique allowed some surprisingly steep hills to be conquered the next photos show a hill that could be ridden up from a standing start (in the dry), which is pretty impressive for such a small engine:

The exhaust tended to be a high maintenance item due to its low mounting continually bodged together with drilled tin cans and tractor radiator hose we were always accompanied by the smell of burning rubber, and the sound of back-firing exhausts. The bikes certainly sounded quite impressive when on full-song, or we were just young and impressionable.

Baler twine held on any loose bits, even on my new MkII C90:

 The mudguard got split after a failed wheelie and myself and bike ending up in a bush. The front wheel came down on a broken branch which speared the front mudguard.

A major problem was the non-folding foot pegs, and it didnt take long for the metal rod to protrude through the end of the rubber part, nasty.  I once landed on my backside, on this protruding rod after another wheelie went spectacularly wrong - I think my mates were in as much pain from laughing so much!  

The fixed pegs did however allow for smoking starts!

The basic drill when riding was to find any obstacle that you had at least 0.001% chance of clearing, on or off the bike. Tractor tires, piles of straw bales, logs, concrete blocks, ditches, whatever.  If you couldnt stay on the bike then you would simply throw it forward as far as possible and jump off the back. Very crash-proof those C90s

Silage heaps (cut grass) were a real challenge made sand dunes seem easy. Hit the base of the heap flat out, and if you werent very determined, decelerate to a complete stop in about 1 ft...!

Think thats Sesh, and me in the tractor.

Its a wonder none of us got injured. The standard safety gear was basically what you worked in - wellies, jeans and not much else. If you were really pushing the boat out, some John Deere overalls were the latest fashion ware. Talking of safety 60mph one handed on a KL250:

And a couple of action shots to finish up:

So there you go, everything Ive ever done stemmed from a humble C90. Perhaps. I had mine from about age 15 to 21-ish when the pics were taken (25-30 years ago!!). The frame collapsed at one point due to rust and continual pounding and was duly replaced, even with some fresh paint!  (the Mk2). The remains were handed over to the farm for  cattle herding duty when I moved out of the parental hotel(and take that heap of junk to your own house!)

Perhaps the C90s incredible dependability, over actual function, set the scene for my choice of bike when I got back into trail-riding in the late 90s. Splashed out on a new leccy-start DR350 a lumpy but ultra-dependable machine, and followed this with a lumpy but ultra-dependable  DRZ, while all around were buying much-nimbler KTMs and the like.

I did eventually succumb to the orange brand as they are great bikes, but they do need a little more TLC than the average jap trail-bike.

-- Edited by thedktor on Thursday 14th of February 2013 10:57:17 AM