It was in 1977 that I had my first real involvement with a motorcycle. It was a 1971 Puch VZ 50, that had a weird three speed combined twist clutch come gear change mechanism. My friend Kev had spotted it in the local auction house and in a moment of madness had spent his entire life savings on, the massive sum of £13. He was 15 but rapidly approaching the magical age of sixteen when you could legally ride a mo-ped, I was 14. We pushed it to his house full of wild visions of a few minutes work putting it back on the road, and riding off into the sunset.
But these dreams rapidly faded when we really started to look at what he had bought, it had experienced six very hard years at the hands of someone with no mechanical sympathy at all. Every thing was seized or worn out, or both. However, undaunted by the astronomical odds against, two completely inexperienced teenagers ever getting this ageing wreck running again, we rolled up our sleeves and set to work. I shudder now to think of some of the horrendous bodges we did owing to a complete lack of spare parts, not that we had any money left for them. The rear brake shoes were totally worn out, so much so that the brake cam would turn to 90 degrees and jam the brake on. So to combat this we made the cam bigger by bending some scrap steel around it! It worked surprisingly well, we must have been very lucky, to think of the possible consequences of that piece of metal falling off and locking the rear wheel in the middle of a corner, makes me feel sick to the stomach now. But we were young and didn’t know enough to be scared. The engine had of course seized solid and required the excessive use of a Birmingham screwdriver (a hammer to you) to even get the piston out of the barrel, we also broke several fins off the air-cooled barrel, not good if you don’t want your engine to seize when it gets hot, in the process. That proved to be the end of the line for several weeks as it happened. The piston, rings, barrel and big end were all shot. Disaster as I said before we had no Puch dealer in my town so new spares were out of the question even if we had got the money for them.
Several weeks went by while we tried desperately to find a source of spares, then a miracle occurred, in the very same auction house (where I later worked, as door security guard at the age of 15!!) another VZ50 appeared but at first sight it looked far worse than the first one. Being partially dismantled, with parts like the headlight, exhaust pipe and petrol tank obviously missing. But, we were wiser now and knew enough to check to see if the engine turned over, it did and miracle of miracles actually fired when Kev kicked it over, we had to have it! On the day of the auction we got there early and waited nervously while the other lots went under the hammer, eventually our lot came up, we had scraped together another £11 pounds if it went over that we were knackered. Luckily after some early interest from some other hopeful youngsters, they dropped out after £9 we got the second, hand painted nightmare for a tenner and celebrated with sausage and chips on the way home. God we must have been keen it was about 5 miles from the auction yard to Kevs house and it was a baking hot August day I can still remember how dry my throat was, following the salty chips, when we eventually got it back to his house.
Nothing now could stop us, we got started as soon as we had gulped several pints of squash down. With both bikes safely in Kevs dads garage along with a stack of ancient furniture, Kevs Dad was a school history teacher, who restored and sold ‘antique furniture’ on the side, we managed to swap the engines by about 9.30pm. We then fitted a ‘pea-shooter’ expansion chamber with absolutely no silencer, that was meant to go on a FS1E, god this was going to be so fast!!! I remember those first intoxicating smells encountered when draining the petrol from his dads lawnmower, to see if we could get it to run. I think that was the moment I became hooked. It quickly became apparent that although it would fire occasionally the engine was far from a runner!! When you kicked it, it would cough and splutter, fire occasionally, but never quite catch, hellishly frustrating for us. Until Kev had the bright idea of giving it a push…!!!
We wheeled it out into the deathly orange sodium vapour glow outside Kevs house, he lived on a main road, not perhaps the most sensible place for the first bump start we had ever tried, but back then we didn’t think to much about the larger picture. Anyway, Kev, suitably attired in a bright blue metal flake Paddy Hopkirk ‘Agordo’ crash helmet popular at the time (they were cheap and Halfords sold them), stood beside the bike ready to push, jump on board and attempt to drop it into gear with the clutch twist gear change thing, in the fashion of a certain Mr Sheene who was a bit of a hero of ours way back then, and zoom off into the distance. It didn’t go quite that way though. What happened was that when the bike was dropped (I don’t think that is quite the right word for the awful clutch control thing that involved twisting your right wrist backward while trying to drop the clutch with the same hand movement) the bike lurched coughed a couple of times and screamed up into a massive wheely, dragging Kev alongside. Sparks cascaded from the rear mudguard as it met the road stopping the bikes upward movement and thowing the bike and the unfortunate Kev hard over to the right and the centre of the road where the both landed in a heap. As the grinding sliding crashing noise subsided the entire street was treated to the sound of a Puch mo-ped revving to infinity, at a pitch that I swear should have been enough to break windows! Until Kev managed to reach the key and switch it off causing it to die suddenly, the silence was deafening, Kev got to his feet shaken, bruised and winded, as we both waited for lights to come on and windows to be opened. But nothing happened!!! To this day I don’t know why it had sounded like a jet crashing in the street but no one even twitched a curtain!