Sunday 1 May 1983

A Little Seedy

After a winter in the Midlands slithering around on my new UJM, I picked upa cheap CD175 as a general all-year-round hack. And what a great little bike.

This thing was bomb-proof. It got me to work during the foul winter of '84-'85, temperatures as low as -8°c,and thick snow full of coal dust - this was the winter of the miner's strike and I lived in a mining town. I plastered it in grease in about October, and washed it all off with Gunk® in April.

Even when the cam-chain tensioner came apart it kept running. It just rattled a little. Well, a lot actually. A routine oil change revealed the sump contained what appeared to be metallic silver paint. Since the poor bike was run on a shoestring, the replacement tensioner was second hand.

I parted with it after about 4 years to friends of a friend who wanted a field hack for their kid. Hard to beleive these are collectors items now.