Three Nortons
and a GS
Guido’s looking for
a way out of his favourite money pit, but history is defeating him…
Even Spannerman
was reaching the end of his very long tether. Two days into what should have
been a straight-forward afternoon top-end rebuild, we were driving around the
industrial nether regions of north Melbourne, late Saturday, in the rain, in
his Kombi, looking for a thread repair kit for the head on the GS1000G sidecar,
AKA Dr Gange.
Why go to all this trouble, for god’s sake? Much as I love the outfit,
it’s had the reliability of three Nortons, but still we persist.
All I can fall back on is history. In the mid 1980s I bought the bike (then
a solo) from Alan Barelli. He was the father of Ross, a bike racer who died
at the end of Conrod Straight many years before at Bathurst when (I’m told)
a set of home made disc brakes exploded. I met Alan through Bob Rosenthal (who
married one of the Barelli girls), a famous factory-backed racer in his own
right, who did great things on big Yamaha TZs, and then worked with me and Spanner
on various bike magazines as a road tester.
It was a good solo. I crashed it a couple of years later, in a long sand patch
east of Mt Hope in western NSW. What I remember is getting into the mother of
fishtails, getting it under control, then it snapped hard right and highsided
me into the dirt.
I was knocked out for a while. Then woke, sat up, checked the fingers and toes
were working, and wondered where the hell I was. Luckily van Driesum and Simon
the Brave were with me.
Driesum showed me how to repair the holes in the fuel tank with some spit and
soap, though there was nothing we could do about the front brake master cylinder,
which had been torn off the now very twisted handlebars. We bashed the latter
into some vaguely recognizable shape with a rock. It was an ugly 650km ride
home.
Some time later it grew a sidecar and became the platform for all sorts of emotional
adventures.
The longest was with daughter Ms M junior, who was then three. We had a near-death
experience when the rotten thing hit a diesel slick and speared on to the wrong
side of the road, just hours on the way into a Melbourne to Brisbane and return
trip.
Just getting the outfit chassis right has taken years. I’ve had three different
mounts break on different trips with different passengers, including fellow
Lemmings MC member Morley. The combined genius of Premier Sidecars and Harrop
Engineering (of V-eight supercar fame) finally settled it down.
Then there was the big refit. We sent it off to Dr Gange, a shed-dwelling genius
on the fringes of Melbourne (in all senses of the phrase) with orders to repaint
it with a broom. A year later, it came back reupholstered, refitted with all
sorts of weird chrome bar work, stereo, slick custom paint…the list goes
on. Gange is one of those people who could run NASA with a cigarette paper and
a used Dick Smith electronic set.
I could mention the custom wheels, Earles fork front end by Bob Martin, exhaust
and rebuilt electrics, but we haven’t time.
Of course it went through an engine rebuild along the way, with a one-off crank
reconstruction from two donor powerplants. It runs like a charm, but the engine
folk stuffed up and it leaks – big time. Which is where Spanner and I were
last weekend. Trying to fix it, with parts bought from the apparently bottomless
vat of bits and knowledge of Mick Hone Motorcycles.
The rotten thing is a money and time pit, and I should simply bin it. But can’t.
Though caught in a maelstrom of problems, I keep thinking of what it represents
and just have to keep going. Oh, and it really would be nice to ride it again…
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