classic motorcycle forum

I agree, Leon, there most certainly are worse ways, like knocking a golf ball around the woods, or drowning worms in the local river.

On the other hand, I used to buy/restore/get running just about any and every bike that I was offered up to a few years ago until I suddenly realised that I was spending too much valuable time on bikes which really didn't light my fires, and that had to stop.
The old adage about a cheap little stroker costing near enough as much to restore as a big four stroke isn't too far from the truth, and is certainly true, time-wise.
Nice little bike, but personally I would soon get pee'd off with it's (lack of) performance. No reflection on the bike, just the way I find Villiers engined strokers to be.
The British Two Stroke Club always appear at events and always seem to be having a good time too, and good luck to them, but it ain't for me...

{Very Bantam-like, that Tandon... }

There are loads of NOS spares in Burma and my bike has been rebuilt complete but for the cases and tank

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You've lost me there. If there's "loads" of NOS stuff in Burma then why do you want to take some there?

Its not as if there is a shortage of willing  skilled plumbing/painters/builders around here.

No, and it's not as if those Poles etc do an excellent job for 50p either. If they did, maybe it would be possible to understand the thinking behind it.

Reminds me of Birmingham Council recently who made about 100 IT staff redundant, and "out-sourced" their work to India. When the local news programmes interviewed the various parties, the Chairman of the local Chamber of Commerce praised the council's actions, and said more should follow suit in an effort to reduce costs.
Clearly this congenital idiot couldn't follow the reasoning that now there was yet another 100 families who wouldn't be spending in his Commerce members' shops/pubs/cafes/etc and the "money" had been exported to India.
Seems like the idiot middle classes are still making the same old mistakes they've been making since the end of the War, Gawd help us...

Mr Wink misses the point. It's not about "how black" someone is but how can "we" keep absorbing the waifs and strays of the world? We don't need any more Pakistani doctors or waiters, Polish cooks and plumbers, (who incidentally are generally rubbish at it) or Lebanese taxi drivers. We especially don't need them when our own semi-literate under-class can't get any sort of meaningful work and need to be paid to sit at home watching their mates on Jeremy Kyle....

That's a chunk of money, but then again, my mate was moaning a while back about an Inter tank going for £500 odd and an Excelsior Manxman engine  going for £1400 recently, so I suppose when we're buying rare parts for high-end bikes we're all going to have to get used to paying top-dollar.

We all need to keep an eye on the doings of the bureaucrats in Brussels, no question about that, but these shrieking "they won't let us change the spark plugs on our bikes next" scare-mongering articles are getting tedious now, as are the seeming endless petitions to fight  the alleged proposals.

I suppose it's part of the Human Condition that we all need someone to "hate" en masse, but these continual cries of "Wolf!" really don't help anyone's cause.

The usual cause of stroker problems like this is worn crankcase seals. It starts OK on the rich mixture etc but when put under sustained load it soon fails.
Still, a strip and rebuild only takes a morning...

A judicious swipe from the copper-faced persuader, maybe?