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I had a dig around in the shed because I’d been told that the entire Stinger motorbike was there I just had to find it. Well after a bit of falling over and some light swearing when I dropped a plank on my foot I found the parts.
The front part of the bike, well most of it.
The front wheel and shocks weren’t looking at their best but they are there, and you can even see the tax disk holder if you look carefully. Spurred on by this I continued searching through the boat shed and found the iconic exhausts and petrol tank from the Stinger.
- The distinctive tank and exhausts
Even the soft lighting from the window can’t completely hide that this motorcycle needs a lot of work. Has anyone else restored a wreck like this? How much time are we talking?
Another good weekend of cleaning and the workshop is starting to look reasonable.
So reasonable that it will soon be possible to start fiddling around with bikes in there. With this in
Mind I yanked the bench out of the way to take some better photos of the Stinger and the TS 185 ER. These pictures have been taken on my new Iphone which has arrived just in time as some berk ran a tractor into a phone poll near us and took out our Internet connection.
Because I am posting from my Iphone all the pictures are going to me posted at the end with out captions – blame tractor man for that. We will rejoin the modern world on Tuesday until then it will be Iphone posts only and hunting with flint tools, probably.
Well I went and had a proper look at the Suzuki Stinger that was in one of the stables. It’s a bit of a basket case to say the least. I didn’t even realise it was a motorcycle at first. You will have to excuse the slightly rubbish photos but my camera phone doesn’t like low light levels. The sort of low light levels you get in dusty sheds and stables where old motorbikes go to die.
The rear part of the 'bike'
There is a huge bench right next to the bike so it’s hard to get photos of, and the bench is very heavy so I’m going to have to rig some sort of pully system together to move the bench so I can get at the bike.
Things are even worse at the front
My mum’s boyfriend assures me that all the bits of the bike are there, and it did run once but not for a while so I think that it might be a job for someone else rather than me.
To get an idea of what this bike should look like here is a picture of one of them in working order.
A rather lovely Stinger
It’s a tricky question, if you tell friends you are going to get a supersports bike as your first proper big bike they can get a bit jumpy. This is a terribly fast bike, but it’s also a well behaved bike. It’s even okay in town – once you get used to the turning circle.
It’s not even my first big bike really, I’ve been riding around off road for years, mostly trials riding but a bit of scrambling too. Some of the trials bikes I used to ride on were big thumping monsters so if anything they are more tricky to ride than the Daytona so I think I’ll be fine. Mr Insurance has slightly different ideas but I suppose that will be part of the fun.
So would I recommend this bike to complete beginners? Perhaps not, but if someone had their heart set on getting a sporty 600 it’s a very managable one. I think the thing to remember is that no bike is completely safe, and that it’s more down to the rider more than anything else.
The garage cleaning went well today, one more day and it will be a smart place to put motorcycles. I’ve got two classic bikes that will go in there as well so they needed a smart home. I didn’t find any other motorcycles, well not exactly.
After supper I was told that there was a Suzuki Stinger (a very rare bike) in one of the sheds so I went and found that today. It’s a basket case but since the are so uncommon it’s probably still worth a bit.
Oh and I paid in a cheque today from a national newspaper for something I wrote about six months ago. It was for £400 so that’s the Daytona fund started. The invoice said ‘Loo Phone’ was the name of the piece, which it wasn’t, it had nothing to do with bathrooms or telephones so they must have got confused. Either way I’m keeping the money.
The cheque is from a rather right-wing newspaper who probably disapprove of motorcycles so I don’t feel quite so bad about writing for them anymore. Maybe I could use a bit of the money to buy some lesbians or socialists a pint. That would annoy the paper even more.
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