The following was written on the evening of January 29th 2002, on Board a P&O ferry sailing to Le Havre. I was one of four Thumper Club members (www.thumperclub.org.uk) who were making a return trip to the Elefant Rally.

To give you the background to this story, the Elefant (Elephant) Rally is held each year in Bavaria, in the mountains, in the snow. Up to 10,000 bikers descend on the site for a weekend of drinking and camping in sub-zero temperatures. Those of you with long memories will recall that I rebuilt an XBR500 from bits for the 2000 Elefant Rally in the 10 days preceding my departure. It was a stupid and reckless thing to do and I swore that this time, on our planned return for the 2002 rally, I would spend months rather than days rebuilding my sidecar outfit. As it happened I was made redundant in October, so November and December passed by in a blur. Here we are in January and the bike has gone from bare frame in the garden to MOT-readiness in only 18 days.

The state of the bike was pretty grim. One of the bike's downtubes had snapped on the way back from the 1999 Welsh Motorcycle show (where, incidentally, the UK Thumper Club was started) and I'd stolen the engine, wheels and forks for the rebuild of the solo XBR I took to the 2000 Elefant. This left a perfectly good sidecar attached to a bare (snapped) bike frame in my garden. It had been garaged up until about 5 months ago so it's not as bad as it sounds.

My friend Andy is a welder by trade so I swallowed my pride and rang him to ask if he'd travel the 30 miles from his beautiful farmhouse home to effect a minor miracle using my humble home arc welder. To my delight he not only promised to do this the following morning, but also invited us over for dinner that night. Therefore it was with a massive hangover that I stood and watched as Andy did a lovely job of reuniting the two halves of the snapped tube adjacent to the sidecar strut clamp that had caused the crack. It's no exaggeration to say that the repaired item is stronger than the original.

A few days before this, however, I'd started stripping down the dead engine that the bike had originally housed some years before. I'd removed this and put it under a bench when I bought the bike and fitted a good motor in its place. I didn't really have a good engine this time so I had to choose which of my three motors to rebuild. Circumstances dictated that the pragmatic approach was to drag out and strip the top end off the dead engine that was still under my bench. With my mate Jethro's help I popped off the rocker box, head and barrel to reveal a servicable cam and cam followers, gummed up piston rings, but a servicable bore. The big end felt fine and the gear lever managed to engage things that felt like gears. Arooga! We were in business. A call to Dave Silver spares brought me the piston rings and Mr Honda provided a top end gasket set. The head was shipped off to a local engineer to have the valves seated after a mechanic friend of mine declared that the two cracks from the exhaust ports to the spark plug hole were probably not going to be a problem. Jethro looked highly dubious when told of this evaluation and I wasn't too sure either.

Jethro kindly helicoiled a stripped stud thread and then banged everything back together for me. This was good because it's what he does for a living and it left me free to work on the cycle parts. I picked up the rebuilt engine and took it off to mate it up to the chassis, which now boasted forks, swinging arm, wheels and electrics.

Anyone who has ever installed an XBR or GB motor will tell you that there is only one way to get it into the frame: from the right hand side, with loads of wiggling. I've done this job perhaps six or seven times over the years but this bastard wasn't bloody having it. If it wasn't for the fact that the engine had originally come from this bike I'd have started to doubt that it would fit. It took me an hour and a half of effort alone in my gloomy small shed to get the bloody thing in and at one point there was actually steam coming up from my sweating body into the cold night air.

With the engine finally in place I set about connecting all the ancillaries and later that night the motor was started for the first time in at least four years. This was a seriously pleasing moment, but as this was only four days before departure I didn't really have much time for celebrations. The following day I finished off all the little bits and pieces and ordered a new square section rear tyre. The square front tyre that had originally been fitted to the outfit had been pinched for the solo XBR and had done nearly 8,000 miles since then, but it is still nowhere near being worn!

This brings us to yesterday morning and, with everything in place, I had only to fit a new numberplate and the rear tyre which arrived less than 24 hours after being ordered. The numberplate turned out to be a problem because you can't just buy a bare plate and some sticky numbers anymore. A trip to Halfords revealed that it was considerably cheaper to buy a car plate so that's what I did and this was soon fitted (with a new numberplate light) onto the rear of the chair. This left the original bike numberplate holder empty so I bolted on an oval Cymru (Wales) sign. Another chum, the charmingly titled Furry John, did some last minute soldering for me to connect up the numberplate light. With the new tyre fitted it was time to get an MOT so I belted over to an MOT station that was close by, but that I hadn't used before. To say that the examination was thorough would be like saying that the Spanish Inquisition engaged in pleasant chit chat. In retrospect the fact that the outfit only failed on a loose steering damper bolt and a rumbling sidecar wheel bearing is a bit of a miracle. A quick dash back to Jethro's place of work led to a strip down of the wheel and the bearing was repacked. It was now considerably less noisy and didn't rumble anywhere near as much as before. The steering damper just needed tightening up, but by then it was too late in the day to return to the MOT station so it was fingers crossed for the following morning.

This morning I rolled up early outside the MOT station and anticipated a quick look over and a clean bill of health, followed by a trip to the nearest post office for tax and then back to the house for the last of the packing. However, this wasn't how it happened. The MOT examiner turned up some 45 minutes after I'd arrived and set about hoicking the outfit into the air on a trolley jack. One spin of the wheel caused him to grimace and I guessed that he was still concerned by the amount of roughness in the bearing and that my bike was not going to pass. To be fair to the lads they immediately whipped the bearing out and jotted down its code so that I could go off and pick up a new one from the nearest bearing supplier. When I asked if I needed the code for the race they said that they generally came as a set so the one number should suffice.

With the suspect bearing reinstalled I rode the bike to the bearing suppliers and confidently handed over my oil-stained piece of paper with the bearing code on it. The woman behind the counter looked at it and said, " Yeah, but what size is the race?".
"Er..." I replied, "don't they come as a matched set?".
She fixed a steady gaze on me and said, with a hint of a smile, "No."
This left me in a sticky position, but I quickly fomulated a Plan B and rushed a quarter of a mile to the workshop of Mr Dick Jones, one of my city's finest independent motorcycle mechanics. Dick is used to seeing me arrive in a state of mechanical distress, but even so he was a little taken aback when I pulled up on the outfit and asked if I could put it on a jack, remove one of the sidecar wheel bearings and race, borrow his CB125 to ride back to the bearing supplier to buy new parts and then could I use his tools again to put it all back together? To his credit he readily agreed and within half an hour the rebuilt wheel was back on the sidecar and I was preparing to ride back to the MOT station.
"By the way," asked Dick, "what's the rush?"
"Oh," I replied, " I'm off to Germany on it."
"When?"
"Er... in about two hours."

The lads at the MOT station had given up on me when I eventually got back there, but ten minutes later I was clutching the piece of paper that I needed and I was on my way again. Back at the house I condensed two hour's packing into 45 minutes and said a sad farewell to my wife and daughter. Half an hour later I was at Jethro Keenan's house in Newport. Even by my lax standards this was cutting things a bit fine. Two hours later we arrived at Simon Morgan's house in Reading, and shortly afterwards we were joined by Mike Cater. With a wave goodbye to Sarah and Sioned, us four Thumper Club members set off for Portsmouth. We arrived in plenty of time for a ferry and I write this as I contemplate an evening of drink and banter as we sail towards France and the long ride to Bavaria. Will the engine hold up? Will the repaired frame crack again? Who cares, for now it's enough that I made it here. Tomorrow's another day.

Graham Carrick, January 29th 2002