My little brother Nicko retired this year from a 35-year career teaching troubled teenagers. It suits, he was one. We both were.
So how’s retirement? Not much has changed. He’s always been out of step with the rest of the motorcycle world, always been a trailblazer, or a weirdo, or carving a line outside the norm. Like me, he’s usually had a few bikes to do different jobs too.
Like the 250 MZ two stroke with an enclosed chain that did 140,000km of commuting before wheezing to a stop in a cloud of smoke. We stripped it to do the rings but the bloody thing was so worn from city slogging it wasn’t worth fixing.
There’s been scooters and four-stroke singles and plenty of war plane teeth painted on trail bike tanks since then. It was Nicko who stripped our old R60 BM and painted it baby shit yellow back in the late 1980s.
For the last decade or so his daily transport to work was a bobbed Moto Guzzi Nevada. You know, the little 750 Guzzler with so much spaghetti western styling motorcyclists stayed away from it in droves. The result? You can pick up little-used Nevadas for the price of an enchilada with a tequila on the side.
Nicko found a 15-year-old carbureted version with 11,000km on the clock, quietly rusting away from embarrassment. An oil change, tank flush and new tyres and he was off, clocking another 80,000km of sheer midrange commuting brilliance.
See, what’s really weird is that buried under the Cheeky Sundance Kid look is one of the best 750s ever built. It’s a Moto Guzzi, so it handles, it stops, it goes around corners and a host of other things pretty much unknown in the world of cruisers. Once he’d stripped off all the plastic and fitted an all-day solo seat and some saddlebags, he had the ultimate city runner for the 100-kay-or-so a day commute. You just have to think outside the square.
The Nevada works as a solo but hasn’t got room for a pillion on tour. So, having sold me his last Harley as a box of bits, Nicko went looking for something to carry Cathy and their luggage in comfort. He settled on a typically Nick type bike: a 2006 VTX1300 Honda, possibly the least appreciated Honda our Aussie market ever saw.
Why? Because it was perceived as a ‘Harley clone’ and sold in numbers right up there with, err, the Nevada. It was conceived during one of those weird tariff wars – don’t get anxious; your super will survive – when Honda could build bikes cheaper in the US of A than Japan. So the result is a Honda designed by Japanese engineers and built exclusively by Americans in Marysville, Ohio. They built them between 2002 and 2009 in a few variants, but all featured a big liquid-cooled SOHC V-twin with twin counter-balancers and a shaft drive. It came with a carburetor, a cable-operated clutch and 1950s Cadillac styling.
Yep, disregard a few chrome plastic covers and you’ve got pretty much the perfect bike to outdo Harley. The shaft drive alone makes it true Aussie touring metal before considering it’s a Honda. In the outback, Honda spells reliability.
I was with Nick when he bought the VTX. It had a perfect service record for a mere 24,000km, new tyres, saddlebags and top boxes and a set of exhaust pipes sourced from a gutter downpipe factory. And it cost about a quarter of similarly specced Hogley Dogleys on the second-hand market. That’s a lot of free miles and pub rooms.
We swapped bikes on the way home and it was embarrassing how good it was compared to my Evolution Road King in every respect except one. The Harley was quieter.
Since then my Road King’s needed new engine mounts, a new belt and pulleys, top end gaskets and a partial rewire. Nicko’s VTX needed tyres and oil. Once again, little brother’s cracked the weirdo egg of happiness and fried up tens of thousands of cruising kilometres with nothing to complain about.
Except for pesky wannabes who eyeball his Honda before telling him all about the old Harley they used to own once.
There’s the riding of motorcycles, and then there’s the image and it’s amazing how far apart the two can be.
