Buy buy baby

Sight unseen, I bid the asking price on a popular online auction site and Richard was happy to take my money. He was busy directing a play somewhere up in West Yorkshire and seemed to be a reliable chap. I sent him the money and we arranged for A2B (a bike delivery firm with a good reputation) to bring her down south the following week.

My mate Steve has a T3 that he bought in that other lifetime when we were young, around the same time that I adopted the Le Mans. Back then I mocked his sensible choice of solid reliability over racing pretensions, the world has turned and now I envy the robustness, comfort and the glorious Boranni rimmed wire wheels. His now lies fallow in a garage somewhere near Birmingham but with a little luck and some penetrating oil she’ll be back on the road again.

My new baby arrived as promised along with some useful spare parts generously provide by Richard. I swapped out the rack that was fitted for an original grab rail then stripped and rebuilt the cute, square slide, 30mm Del Orto carburettors, fabricating some gaskets from a bit of card, too impatient to await the official/expensive ones that I’d ordered. She runs well, no knocks, no smoke, no haemorrhage of black blood and starts “on the button” as advertised. The electrics have been recently rewired and the replacement switchgear is ugly as sin but offers the promise of hydrophobic bliss.

Nothing is perfect, of course, the brakes have an issue, the tacho is sticky, the linkages have more play in them than Pinter, the seat is too firm and, like the bars, is a little too high for my liking. All small change for a bike that’s done nearly 50 thousand miles in her 42 years. One other issue is that the fuel lines, from either side of the tank, are not linked so she runs out of fuel in an interesting way after sitting on the laid back side stand (that she’s borrowed from her American cousin, the California), interesting enough to cause me to turn back on my first attempt to take her in to work.

She made it in the next day, once I’d overcome the shame of confusing a lack of gas with a major issue, and so begins her service and our story.