It's not supposed to make that noise

All I wanted was one motorbike, that worked, so I could ride to school. My daily walk past 40 minutes of used car yards was taking a toll on my soul. I didn’t even have the tools for a fixer-upper, so I’ve been trying to understand how I ended up owning two motorbikes.

At the heart of this mystery lies the motorbike that worked me into an unrequited devotion: the Honda Cub C50. I had been grazing TradeMe for a few weeks when I found the Cub. That this bike was “the one” was the only thing in my life I was sure of. It had significance beyond just economics, mobility, and free parking. Which turned out to be important because I soon had two of them, neither of which worked.

The two motorcycles I bought for a combined $621 had frustrating histories. Both of them were sold as failed “project bikes.” Listing them was the owners’ quiet surrender. These men had run out of time, space and energy to spend on something so unrewarding.

I don’t know why I thought I had a chance of succeeding where two middle-aged men with mechanical experience had failed. It probably wasn’t a logical decision in the first place, but it was cheaper.

The international Honda appreciation society made it sound like all I had to do was turn it off and turn it back on again.

I bought the first bike from Kevin. When I came by his house to pick it up, he assumed I was a mechanic. We chatted about another C50 that had sold a week earlier on TradeMe, for over a thousand dollars. He sounded disappointed that his had only gone for a few hundred, despite it being in pieces in a cardboard box.

It was Kevin’s suggestion to get my hands on a similar model, so I could just strip off the parts as I needed them, instead of buying them one by one. It was good advice, but I didn’t tell him his was the one I stripped.

The second bike came from John. John’s had been sitting around for years, waiting for a summer of free time that had never arrived. I think I felt, deep down, the guilt of entertaining a similar delusion. Now that I owned two broken-down motorcycles, I realised that with my final university year about to start, my own free time would soon disappear, maybe indefinitely. I worried the bikes would go the way of the 1:1 scale Lichtenstein mural I had attempted on my bedroom wall in high school, which remains to this day about 8% completed.

A few years ago, the Discovery Channel compiled a list of the world’s “Greatest Ever Motorcycles”. Numbers 10 down to two were Harley Davidsons, Ducatis, Vespas, what the Discovery Channel calls “bikes that combine performance with romance, styling with sex” (personally I find it weird to call bikes sexy). Number one was the Honda Cub.

The producers showed off the Cub’s defining feature, its immortality. They filled the engine with old frying oil from a chip shop, overloaded it with more than three times its own weight, and as the pièce de résistance dropped it off a 22m tall building. None of which seemed to have any effect at all on the hearty little engine.

James May, one of the presenters on Top Gear and another Cub fanatic, went further in a column for the Telegraph and called the bike “the single most influential product of humankind’s creativity”. He reckoned you could throw one in a canal, leave it for 10 years, then fish it out and ride to work.

The Honda Cub C50 was then, by international consensus, the perfect bike for me. Even a seasoned professional couldn’t ruin it, so your average romantic like me should have no trouble at all. The international Honda appreciation society made it sound like all I had to do was turn it off and turn it back on again.

But whatever necromancy the previous owners had experimented with to smother the spirit out of those bikes was hard to undo.

For some reason it feels like I’ve put too much time in to just have a working motorcycle at the end of all this.

In any basic confidence trick there is an important part called the “pay-off.” It happens early in the game, and it’s where the conman puts their victim’s doubts at ease by letting them win. Handing someone easy cash early on is the only way to ensure that they’ll stick around to lose it back, and then more of their own.

I don’t know who or what I was being conned by, but on a day of tinkering at the end of last summer, at the edge of total regret for my new lifestyle choice, I had a breakthrough. I tried to kick-start the engine like I’d done a thousand times, and by some spiritual intervention, maybe the ghost of Soichiro Honda himself, the engine actually started.

I was terrified. It was a lot louder than I was prepared for, and the whole bike shook like it would roar off on its own if it wasn’t held down. This bike had been dead for a long time. I felt like Dr Frankenstein.

When I next tried to start it though, it gave me nothing. It wasn’t going to work for a long time after that. But it didn’t matter, because I was hooked.

For the con victim deep in debt, any advance back to net zero is a victory. So it wasn’t surprising that I was spending whole afternoons trying to remove something like a stuck oil drain plug. I knew it wouldn’t help, but finally twisting it open after battling with it for three hours felt like I was getting somewhere. The idea of getting the engine going again became more like an ideal. I would probably never reach it, but it seemed like a noble goal to work towards.

I considered selling them, but the only thing that seemed like more work than actually fixing them was the process of making new Trademe auctions. I was stuck with them.

On a recent tinker date my friend and role model, Robin, came round with a bootful of proper tools. This was something new, since I’d been doing most of my tinkering with a pair of vise-grips my dad had given me for my twenty-first birthday, and a hammer I’d gotten one Christmas.

With the help of a couple of floodlights, we tinkered late into the night. I had been afraid of messing with the carburettor since my workmate’s fiancé had told me a story of a guy who put his carburettor back together wrong; he couldn’t stop accelerating and crashed and died. But we worked through it carefully, and the engine responded to the attention and fired up for the first time in a year.

I know it was just teasing me again, trying to keep me interested, but it worked. We’ll probably be together forever.

I’m not sure what I would do if I ever got it up to running condition. For some reason it feels like I’ve put too much time in to just have a working motorcycle at the end of all this. It would break my heart to let it go, but I don’t know what it could do that would make me feel like my time was well spent. I guess the only way to avoid that whole question is to just keep tinkering.

You can hear more from Finn in this week's On The Dial.

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