Ain’t no doubt about it, the best town bike you can buy is a medium-sized trials bike, preferably a single cylinder four-stroke. They tend to be reasonably cheap to run, are fairly hardy and relatively crash proof, have a good riding position for around town and have, in the word of Rolls Royce, ‘adequate power’. It also gives you an excuse to get a pair of those big chunky enduro boots, which are good for swinging at the doors of taxis.

When I moved to London in the early 1980’s, I soon realised that the best way of getting about the city was by bike; the first that I had was a 2-stroke trailie – a ‘V’ registered Suzuki TS125ER. It was pretty fast for a 125 as I recall, and it would wheelie very nicely. The brakes were feeble drums and I had to carry a hammer about with me in order to bash the kickstart back onto the shaft every time I started it as the splines were wrecked and the starter would fall off (the bike was a bit of a shed, it must be said). Unfortunately I can’t remember a lot else about the TS, other than it was the bike on which I had my first accident. This happened as I was riding over Chelsea Bridge on my way to work one morning; I had just overtaken a straggling bunch of cyclists and glanced over my shoulder to pull back over. As I looked forward again, a pale blue Citroen GS saloon (I recall it as if it were yesterday) had pulled into my path and then jammed his brakes on. Somehow I managed to avoid rear-ending him, but scraped up the near side of the car before juddering to a shaken halt. The driver leapt out and instantly accused me of breaking his rear light and knocking the silencer off. "Odd" I thought, "I didn’t think I’d hit it anywhere near the back of the car". At this point, the woman in the passenger seat put her ten pence worth in – "didn’t you do that when you put the car into the garage last night, dear?" After some abuse to the good lady, the bloke jumped back into his car and sped off.

It was on the same bike that I had another strange incident when I collided with the back of a taxi that had jumped the lights at the Piccadilly Circus end of Regents Street. I managed to avoid falling off, but the taxi drove off. As I restarted the bike, a policeman came over; it seemed he’d witnessed the whole thing, had radioed ahead and the taxi had been stopped by another policeman near to Oxford Circus. So we drove along Regents Street to where the taxi had been stopped, the policeman on the pillion, police helmet and all, getting me some very strange looks from passing despatch riders. The taxi driver accused me of ramming him which got him very well nicked indeed, I’m pleased to say. This was one of the top three strange incidents that I’ve had on bikes (I’ll save the others for another time, suffice to say that one involved a fridge and the other a very large pizza).

Over the following decade or so, I had a fair assortment of bikes of one sort or another but hadn’t had another trials bike. In 1996, shortly after buying a Ducati 900SS to complement my CBR600FR, the 600 was stolen which put me in the market for an everyday commuter. As the insurers were taking their time to stump up, I decided to look around for something cheap and decided that a Yamaha XT350 would suit me nicely. After seeing a few overpriced hounds, I found a D registered bike that had 23,000 miles on the clock, but it had obviously been looked after, had a fairly recent Micron tail pipe on it and a pair of decent semi-road Avon Gripster tyres with plenty of life left in them. The engine ran sweetly with no ominous whines or rattles and it appeared that the bike had never been seriously off-road. It also came with a Clymer workshop manual – much better than the Haynes equivalent – which wasn’t marked by oily finger prints on any particular page (clusters of oily dabs are usually a good sign of a job that’s had to be done a few times or has been a major headache).

The XT proved to be a fine city bike; it was fast off the line and light enough to chuck through the traffic with great ease. The brakes are only average – single front disk and rear drum but are adequate, no better. Considering that it was wearing semi-road tyres, the handling was excellent- well balanced and whilst you can’t hang off the bike as you can, say a CBR600, it can be stuffed deep into a fast bend with loads of counter steer with a great deal of predictability. The long-stroke suspension also deals well with the trail-parks that pass for London roads these days. Off-road the semi-road tyres hampered the bike and so my activities were restricted to some gentle green lanes around the Kent countryside, but the bike seemed to be well able to cope with most conditions.

Over the following year, I put over 10,000 miles on the XT during which it snapped a clutch cable, had to have a new set of head bearings, a new chain and a set of front brake pads, none of which set me back much at all and which I considered to be very reasonable for a years transportation. An apparently major failure occurred when I lent the bike for a weekend to a mate who was in a bind after his own bike had been stolen. I gave him the keys and coincidentally met him later that evening at the Regents Park open-air theatre. He looked pretty sheepish – "I’ve busted your bike," he said. It turned out that on trying to start the bike, the kick-start shaft had sheared at the point where the pinch bolt passes. Although this was annoying, it is a half shaft and can be replaced with the engine in situ, so it was not a big job at all. Not long after this, a major problem really did come to light when the rear tyre needed replacement. As the old tyre came off, it became apparent that this was going to be more than just a new tyre as the alloy rim had corroded internally, coming away in chunks and turning to dust. There was no indication on the outside of the rim other than a couple of slight blisters in the surface of the alloy near to the valve – but the wheel cannot have been very far from collapse. A genuine new rim and spoke set would be about 200 Pounds built up, so I compromised and had a standard chrome rim fitted for about half of that. I have recently seen an L-registered XT with rims that looked even further gone than mine were so beware.

continues...


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