Tales of Yellow Peril Part 1

Presented here for the first time in print, are (most) of the Tales of Yellow Peril, a bike truly as awful as the name implies, and all mine! I've pre-wriiten much of this so the tales will arrive regularly, at which point I intend to carry on with the stories, reviews, etc this blog is intended to present.  

Yellow Peril was my first ‘proper’ bike. It taught me a lot, had countless hours of love and care lavished on it, gave me absolute hell, nearly killed me more than once, and, it must be said gave me some damned good stories. Yes, it was THAT bike. 

I started biking at age 17, scarily enough, on a bike I’d saved the money for myself, using the huge wage of £1.075 per hour (note that ½ p) from my amazing job stacking shelves at Waitrose That first bike was the oh-so-very-mighty Honda CB100n. While you’re going to get something about the CB, this bike just can’t hold a candle to what followed. For starters, it worked.

I was shocked to see a CB100n come up recently for auction at around £3500! Mine was needless to say somewhat cheaper at £300 – and quite honestly the guy who sold it to me shamelessly ripped a naive first-time biker off! 

However, as my very first Enchilada of Freedom it did the job, and I learned a fair bit from it. And at an average MPG of 130 it did everything very cheaply as well. Plus, the insurance was stupidly low for a new 17-year-old biker at £93 fully comp. I was very lucky because dad paid for that, but clearly only boring people rode this bike and it was never stolen or had accidents. Just for reference, I don’t pay much more today for a far larger machine, but that’s because I am an old fart with a dammed good record. Go me! 

So to get back to the story, the lack of chutzpah was the thing, especially at age 17. Yes, the bike did everything, but it wasn’t cool, and really didn’t have much by way of legs for longer journeys, so before very long I’d convinced myself that I need a bigger bike. I really did NEED it, you understand? Nothing whatsoever to do with the lack of coolness. Nothing. Look, I was 17! OK?

Back then as many of you reading this will remember, the limit for learners at 250cc with no cap in place for top speed or horsepower. However, the learner bike of choice back then was a Honda Superdream, which in my starry 17-year-old eyes looked great and had a lot of virtues, most of them to do with the fact that it was physically big for a 250, but many of them (in reality) stemming from the fact that it was essentially a 400 cc bike with 250 cc bore in it which made everything under stressed. Not that I cared about those things, it was just a lot cooler than what I had!

Actually, in retrospect I think the coolest bike learners could own was probably the Yamaha RD250, (maybe the Kawasaki KH even if the centre cylinder did seize.) Back then I believe the first Yam 250LC models were about to hit us, but I was firmly in the 4-stroke camp, thanks pretty much to my dad, so I stand by my choice! 

However, reality kicked in. The prices of most of the cool bikes at the time were way out of my pocket, so if I wanted to upgrade to 250 ccs I’d have to pull in my horns a bit. Time to go looking. 

Checking out the Thames Valley Trader (ye olde version of Motor Trader) gave me several possibilities and I found the bike I eventually chose at a dealer in Camberley. At 7,000 miles, I careful owner (a doctor) full-service history and £300. Right up my alley!  I’d already sold my CB100, and had some money saved for the extra tax and insurance so I proudly handed over my cash and I was good to go! Right?

Wrong. 

In retrospect, I am sure Dark gods started laughing as I rode home. I know the dealer was.

I quickly discovered that this was a damned awful piece of engineering – I don’t care what the retrospective reviews may say, this bike sucked harder than a toilet in an airplane’s bathroom. 

On a recommended service interval of 1500 miles, you basically had to change the oil every 750-1000 miles. You learned to adjust the cam chain as part of your weekly maintenance or it started making noise very quickly, and I learned to take a full toolkit on every long journey, because, for a long time, with pretty much ONLY 1 exception, something would go wrong every time I traveled more than 100 miles or something would fall off. Given that I lived in Exeter and my dad was in Marlow I did that a fair bit.

What was good about the bike? Well, it had Short Vehicle stickers (yes SHORT vehicle stickers), came with a free vibro-massage with every ride (which was the root of a lot of the problems I had I think) and it was fairly easy to fix.

 

Even looking back on the thing with rose-tinted specs I really can’t think of anything else! Well, actually there is one good thing. Everyone single person who took the mickey out of my bike broke down shortly after. Every SINGLE person. From that, and a few other things, I was led to the inexorable conclusion that this bike was possessed by the devil, well a demon prince at the very least. Christine, eat your heart out! (Ghost rider wasn’t a film yet). 

I’ve talked about the bike a fair bit, though I’ve not covered everything yet so I’m absolutely certain that It’s about time I stopped extolling the virtues of the machine and talk about some of the big rides I took it in. We shall start that journey with the next post.