Yep. The good old Honda One, Plastic Honda, C90, Cub, Honda Plod. Whatever you want to call it, it was voted as the best bike ever made. They even tried to kill one. I remember the last stunt being throwing it over the top of a multistory car park and it was STILL rideable after hitting the floor. Only just, but that was only the last of a lot of attempts to kill it. Of course, we never had one with mirrors or indicators or a back box. What can you expect for less than a hundred quid?
My first Honda One was called the Road Runner. It had the a sticker of the cartoon character on the side panel when I bought it. The previous owners had tinkered with it and it could really fly - when it felt like it, which wasn't too often. I didn't call it Road Runner because of the sticker though. 3 weeks after buying it, the kick start snapped off, and with Peter being a 2nd year apprentice toolmaker with no knowledge of or access to welding equipment, the only way to get it started was to run down the road with it, knock it into gear and jump on. At least you didn't have to run far - only a few meters usually. We had a later one which you had to really run a long way with to get it going. The Road Runner was also a temperamental beastie. I had to carry a can of WD40 around with me to spray the plug even in the summer, and a plug spanner and metal nail file for real emergencies to clean the plug if the WD40 didn't work. My leather jacket had a permanent imprint of the can, even years later, long after the Road Runner had died and gone to Honda One Heaven.
I remember the first time I rode it to Peter's house and his brother Gary, who would have been about 11 or 12 almost wetting himself screeching "Oh no. Twish-Wish on the Plag-Wag". It lasted about a year before it got too unreliable, then my second, Percy, lasted about 6 months before disappearing. A bad one, like the Road Runner was a real dog (although I did get 72mph out of it once - OK, it was on a hill, but bear in mind we're talking a 1976 90cc 4 stroke), but a good one was like gold dust. We had 3 of them stolen over the years.
We all had them as our second bikes. Big bikes were great for the summer but too chancy in the ice and snow. They also came in handy when you were a bit short of cash as one tankful of petrol would get you a couple of hundred miles. Also, in later years when I got around to taking my driving test (I was 21 before I had my first lesson) during the winter I preferred it to the car. I felt safer. I know it sounds strange, but I really did feel better when hitting black ice on the bike than in the car. The first time I lost the back wheel (on a cobbled street), I did a 25 meter beached whale-type skid and broke 2 ribs. Left me with a huge skid mark down the front of my jacket which gave me heaps of cred with the Fizzie Kiddies. After that, I seemed to learn. If you lost the back wheel, lean over and kick the bike away from you as you went down and roll. I never really hurt myself again after the first time apart from some nasty bruising and a bit of gravel rash, and I used to come off quite regularly. And they were so much better than the FSIE50's that the Fizzie Kiddies were on. OK, they could leave me for dead at the lights, but I always passed them on the corners. No nerve. The Fizzie Kiddies always hit the brakes on corners.
I was hoping to put up the pictures up of the Road Runner, the MTX200 that the salesman wouldn't even talk to me about buying because I was a girl and girls didn't ride big trail bikes (OK, so I had to be standing on a step or a kerb to kick it off, and stopping at the lights meant lightly bouncing from left toe to right toe to stop myself falling off) and Mickey - the dream custom bike. Mickey was a Bottle (Kettle in Australia) which, to the uninitiated, means a Suzuki GT 750cc 2 stroke water cooled rocket. I only ever rode it once - I got into third gear and was fighting to keep the front wheel down on the road. It really scared me. It was marginally legal - the back mudguard had been taken off and the number plate put there on an angle. The law said you had to be able to read number plates from 20 feet (I think) back. We were pulled over all the time, and even had some police getting tape measures out. Whatever the distance was, one more inch and we'd have been taken off the road. It didn't have a chain guard either - spoil the look too much - so we had a bit of coat hanger wire wrapped around the important bit (we checked and double checked that it was legal, and it was, but only just and I had to remember to wear drainpipe jeans whenever we went out). The police would pull us up all the time, but most of them just wanted a look at the bike. It was a beauty and definitely a summer bike - taxed and insured for six months of the year and stored with loving care for the other six.
I can't, however, find a copy of scanned photo's. Maybe next time we hit Australia I'll be able to find the backup DVD they're on.
