Unreliable Sauce

GoiNG SPARe

Recent activity in the Shed of Doom, aka my workshop, found me reflecting on a particular but significant change since I started riding these blighters over five decades ago. After a late-life return to off-roading in the early noughties, I hung up my motocross boots 13 years ago as I became too ancient and weedy to keep up with younger whippersnappers who seemed to treat every trail ride as a faux enduro, and the Forces of Darkness were steadily eliminating the number of green lanes that I could legally navigate hereabouts. But as any true believer knows, once bitten, the bug never leaves you and thus it was that I turned my attention to the world of custom bikery, a phenomenon that began as something of a cult but is now firmly established in motorcycling’s mainstream.

The reasons for this are myriad but one of its consequences is that a small if growing trade has developed in supplying stuff for those, like yours truly, who ‘re-purpose’ – horrid word, but needs must – perfectly good stock machines into something they were never intended to be. It also mirrors the even longer- established one in providing bits, pieces and especially clothing for the offroad brigade. And of course both of these specialisms are part of the aforementioned commercial transformation, namely that if we want something to replace worn or broken bits on our bikes, or in my case add something to its character, we don’t ring up let alone pop down to our nearest dealer, we go online. Indeed I was leafing through the soberingly thick file of receipts for stuff I bought to complete my last two builds and noted that 95% of it was acquired online.

I can imagine that some of you, like me, are old enough to remember when there were dealers in every town and dozens in every city offering the pleasant enough ritual of queuing at spares counters of a Saturday morning, joshing with the chaps in the brown warehouseman’s coats who’d return from the mysterious back room stores with the often inevitable, ‘We haven’t got exactly that cable but this one should do’.

And then there’s the cost: £709 for an OEM Triumph Bonneville starter motor anyone? And yet I paid ‘only’ £110 for a warranted, recon one for my Honda CB400N custom. Mind you, Finland’s motorcyclists' association supports and reports on a system that has 62% of parts from some 72% of that country’s bike dismantlers recycled to punters and traders alike, which ought to be the way to go here, if only to save the planet.

As it happens, I’ve recently visited a couple of those stoic small, solus dealers who’ve clung onto their franchises in smallish towns and of course they don’t carry any spare parts at all, not even for their stocked marques, but equally obviously they said they could usually get them delivered in 24-48 hours. But then if one really wanted to secure a missing part, one would simply go online and get it delivered direct to one’s door by UPS or Royal Mail and save a trip to the dealer.

And thus it is that the number of dealers has and continues to shrink and I’d wager that over the next ten years, there’ll be almost no small, mom’n’pop bike shops left with machines sold only in large, often multi-franchise showrooms dotted inconveniently around the country with spares, accessories and indeed clothing available only online or to an extent at shows.

Moisty-eyed nostalgia is a trap I won’t for once fall into as I think the inevitability of this restructuring, also reflected in many other retail areas these days, is pretty much a given for as long as the internet – regrettably – dominates our lives. And that’s another inevitability confirmed whenever I take a train, bus or sit in a cafe where almost everyone under 40 is glued to their smartphone to the exclusion of anything else. We shouldn’t be surprised that this is one reason why there are so few newcomers joining our little game.

But in the meantime we must be grateful that there is – just – still a motorcycle trade in whatever form it has taken and that reminds me, if anyone out there can supply a ten-bob fuse box cover for a 1985 Honda Ascot, then FedEx and the Royal Mail know where I live.