The Travels of the
Techno-Freedom-Fighter

So most of you seem to think that I have been having a wonderful time cursing the back roads of France on a wonderful motorbike, sipping wine, eating great cheese and dam well having a jolly good time of it all. Well I would like to pop that bubble for a second.... Z the 550cc workhorse of a motorbike is a fine machine but you have to lower your expectations when it comes to cheap 22 year old, 300 euro bikes. Even though I was born in Canberra, Australia because my father is Dutch I am was granted Dutch Citizenship in 1998. Having both Dutch and Australian Citizenship means that I am able to register a motorbike in the Netherlands, its just one of the benefits of being a duel national.

The first major issue that I had with the bike was in Belgium, my first day out, on my first expedition to the llama farm. I had a flat tire just outside Brussels, sure that is not so much a problem for you out there that drive cars, you feel a bit of a loss of steering and you just change the spare over and away you go again. Well on a bike it is different. It is better to have a back wheel go than a front because with the front you are very likely to have a fall. So I was coming around a corner and suddenly I lost all steering in my front wheel. I managed to keep it upright until I got to the side of the road. I jumped off the bike to see that I had lost all pressure in the front tire. Buggar! So I was luckily near a town so I pushed Z (220kg of bike and 50kg of kit with a flat, yeah not a lot of fun) to the nearest corner to see if I could see a petrol station. After asking for directions I found that the nearest station was 3km down the road. So I pushed Z all the way to the petrol station. I was hoping that I didn't damage the tire at all, being a tubeless tire if the seal on the edge of the tire goes that you are stuffed. Once I had inflated the tire I checked for any puncher marks. I couldn't find any then with a dab of spit I checked to see if the valve was leaking. Well the valve was leaking like a sieve. So I needed to get valve key to tighten the valve. So there I am out the front of tire repair shop in the middle of Belgium trying to explain in French what a valve key is(yeah try and find that in your pocket oxford dictionary :-) ). Eventually I got it all sorted, one thing that I remember my cousin Ad saying was that I should check the tire once it gets warm for ant leaks... gulp... that's one I forgot :-).

So the next major issue is the clutch, ever since I have had the bike the clutch has not been 100%. The trouble is that there is this really weird adjustment mechanism on the Z. First the clutch would not work at all but after fiddling with the adjustment mechanism I got it to work. the clutch would slip at high revs all the time, the smell of burning clutch plate was getting to me eventually so I did something about it. At the Llama farm I decided to redo the clutch adjustment mechanism, bad idea... first rule with old bike ... if it ain't broke don't fix it. Well on the way back to Holland from the llama farm the clutch went again. I spent 2 hours trying to fix it with not the right tools. The problem was that every time I adjusted it I would have to remove all my kit from the bike so that I could get to the tool kit. Eventually after 5 or 6 goes I finally got it into a workable order. Although I still have issues with it now.

On the way from Lyon back to Normandy where I was grape picking I had another interesting problem. Z would just shut down all of a sudden and then it would take me a long time to start her on full choke and then she would not run all that well. After a few 100 kms I had deduced that the old girl was running on 3 cylinders. My #2 piston was not firing or miss firing. The odd backfire was a good clue that this was not working all that well. After half dismantling the bike pulling out all the sparkplugs one by one and cleaning them the problem seemed to go away.

An other self inflicted issue was the oil Cap that I forgot to put back on after filling up with oil in Normandy. Yeah I hate to admit it because it sounds like such a silly mistake, but I had just packed the bike and also I was doing a number of other things that took my attention away from what I should have been doing. So I rode 50km with no oil cap, yep you guessed it my leg was covered in oil like the half of my bike. I only noticed it because I had to fill up with petrol at that time. So after stopping at a super market I got some plastic cups and some gaff tape. I made a temporary repair and kept on going. Well that lasted an other 50km and so I had to bung the hole properly. Designs of champagne corks and all number of things where rushing through my head. While refilling the oil that I had lost I noticed that the cap to the oil can was exactly the right sis the bung the hole. So a bit of Gaff tape for insurance and I was off again. The funny thing is that I mad this repair out the front of a café in the middle of a town square so I had quite a few anguish Frenchmen wonder what a 6'4" smelly aussie bikie covered in oil was doing trying to fix an oil cap to his bike. I didn't even bother to try and explain the situation to then.

Not to go into to many details but at the moment I have issues with one of the front break disks, I have fork oil leaking out on the left safe pass the seal. Then there is the oil leak coming out of the head gasket, I loose about 1letre of oil for every 1200km. But look at the bright side, I have done close to 8000kms on the bike and I have just 800 to go to get back to Netherlands. And then we'll see what I do with the bike. I'll see if I can get some money for the old girl.