Mistaken Identity

Poor Zippy, he has no luck at all.

Fresh after myself and Papa Phallus MOT'd our bikes Zippy popped his across to Trackside Motorcycles for his turn to persuade the tester, "It's supposed to be like that, honest mate".

His lovely blue VFR was polished and tweaked and pampered then despatched off to the test station.

Our friendly tester guy wheeled the bike in, wandered around making a few notes and nodding in appreciation. He strolled across to his computer monitor and set about typing in the bikes details, this done he prodded the enter button and all manner of alarms and red flashy lights burst into life.

"Oh dear!" said tester fella "That doesn't look good".

All UK testing stations are computer linked to a master computer at the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) in Swansea, this computer checks the bike's details and complete history before giving the go ahead to the testing station to test the bike.

"I think it's a ringer, mate" said Mr tester "can't test it"

As shocked as we all were we took encouragement from the fact that the DVLA are all a bunch of numpties and are continually making embarrassing mistakes, especially as Zippy has had the bike for a couple years and no such problems have arisen before. There are checks you can make yourself including a number of online vehicle check companies and even a couple of mobile phone based ones. So it was one of these latter companies that I decided to use to see if I could get to the bottom of this mystery.

I typed in Zippy's bike's Registration number and sent the text, wait a couple of seconds, then - beep beep, beep beep. Text has arrived, Right, time to sort this mess out.....

*Thank you for using our service, your vehicle is as follows- White, 1987, Bedford Rascal van. No outstanding finance, one previous owner, No accident damage.......end*

"What!!!!!!! that can't be right...............Or can it?

Lets look at the facts.

Rascal vs VFR - similar acceleration, similar top speed, similar desirability, both piloted by famous kids TV characters (if anyone remembers Sooty and Sweep driving a rascal back in the 80's, give yourself a pat on the back, and of course our own Zippy).

So as you can see I think this mix is up is a fairly common occurrence for poor VFR owners. Check out the pictures and see if you can tell them apart.

Difficult isn't it.

But seriously, Zippy got in touch with DVLA and they admitted to making a screw-up on his registration document, it has now been amended and the testing station now have Zippy's bike back ready to test.

All's well that ends well.....I hope

Bungle

From Joy to Pain and Back Again! Part3

Fruit 'n' barley's poor bike was in a sorry state. We had to try and track down a set of fairings and most importantly we had the engine to sort out, would it repair or was a new unit required. After a couple of days of head scratching and chatting to people in the know it was decided that the engine was too badly damaged to try and repair, it would have required welding on the damaged crank case, which potentially would have been a leaky nightmare, but more importantly it was hard to tell if any deep seated damage occurred due to the generator end of the crank sustaining a nasty smack.

It took a little while to track down a suitable donor engine. A call to every breakers yard in the local area proved to be fruitless, but eventually we managed to source a low mile unit in Scotland.

Money paid, engine delivered, time to put our mechanics hats on.

The fit was a little fiddly but fairly enjoyable but the grin on Fruit 'n' Barley's face when the bike fired up was worth all the scraped knuckles and sore knees.

Our search for fairing panels was far more difficult than for the motor, F'n'B's ZX6 is an unusual colour (yellow and purple/black) and consequently anything that turned up on fleabay was quickly snapped up for top dollar.

While searching on fleabay we spotted a couple of Far East traders selling full fairing kits, ready painted, for reasonable money. We carefully scrutinised their feedback,which was all good, and decided that we could take the risk (Paypal has plenty of safeguards in place). F'n'B ordered the Kawasaki Moto GP replica fairings and in the meantime we tried to persuade the poor lad to use his

bike as normal until his shiny placcy bike bits arrived.

He was not overly keen on this idea but a planned weekend blast around the North Yorks moors soon had

him scrabbling for his bike keys.

I think the little run done wonders for his confidence and once again he was a happy boy.

Next time : time to fit those fairings...

Bungle

Update!

Hey guys.

Finally back in the UK after spending the best part of three weeks working in sunny Holland.

So, what's new in the world of OMP? Well the Scotland trip is now all paid up and me and the guys are pretty excited, just under three weeks to go now;

Papa Phallus and his crazy/cool (delete as applicable) wife, Jane, are in the process of finalising the design for our cool OMP t-shirts which will incorporate an up to date reworking of our "pink bike" logo (and once again it's Zippy's bike which gets the pink makeover).

Following shortly will be the 3rd instalment of the Fruit'n'Barley story, and I will be introducing another new ride-out attendee.

cheers

Bungle