To anyone asking if a motorcycle is too powerful to learn on. Remember this.

Once upon a time, people did self-regulate somewhat like the animal kingdom does. Only the strong survived. Today we not only support the weak but the weak that don't want to learn how to support themselves through effort and work. Therefore, the weak thrive and drag down the strong. I'm all for helping those that are unable to help themselves but not those that can help themselves but just want to live off of other people's handouts and work without putting forth any effort to improve their own situation when they are able to. Give a man a fish or show him how to fish......

Back to bikes and regulation....less govt. not more. i already know who is going to chime in so go ahead now. :topsy_turvy:

 

The Lord writ upon tablets of stone with a finger of fire. Drifting along writes on fish wrappers with a #2 pencil.

 

I remember back in the early '90s a friend used to teach bike riding on the weekends at a reputable school in Toronto. He would tell me (I even went once to watch and confirmed) about all of the rich young 16 -18 year olds that would show up on brand new 1000 Ninjas (the bike of choice then) that just got their beginners that week and were even falling off the mopeds they learned on at the course. Often when they showed up on the second day there would be road rash on them or the bikes or sometimes they would be driving a car because the bike was too damaged to ride. Occasionally they wouldn't come back on the second day.... Some of them even failed the course.
I wasn't that stupid at that age, I also didn't have the money for anything either so maybe that's my saving grace. I do know that at 19, my first bike was a tired GS850 and that didn't seem too hard to handle for me. I was lucky to have the same friend teach me and did a lot of riding together and that was the best way to learn.

 

I was so poor all we had to play with were rocks.

 

We would find dead lawn mowers or edgers and fix the engines then mount them in just about anything, mini bikes, go karts, an ill fated bicycle........

 

We envied the rich kids with their Briggs&Stratton engines.. We considered throwing our rocks at them but then all we would have had to play with was dirt.

Some of the first Brit bikes to hit my hood in SoCal were powered by 175cc Villiers two strokes that as I understand were originally designed as pump engines (bilge pumps ??) Then, port work and port timing was very experimental. The 250cc Villiers was probably top of the line with the Greeves MC.

Kind of makes me wonder if since Honda-Sans first commercial machine was a farm implement, where he got the engine...

 

Rocks AND dirt! lucky lucky lucky.

 

Pah! That's not poor. We were so poor that if I didn't wake up with an erection on Christmas morning I had nothing to play with.

 

:eek-new:






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You guys are cracking me up.

We once put a B&S engine in a mini bike with a chain directly to a sprocket we rigged, no centrifugal clutch. Had to be pushed until it started, it took a while but it was fast! (For little kids). Stopping was very sketchy, brakes were almost non existent and with no clutch you had to force it to stall while burning up the brake. More than one wipe out into the grass when it would not stop. Lasted all day before it all was trashed.

 

Or BadBilly!

 

There are others that I purposely didn't post that are not suitable for mixed company.