When I was sixteen, I got my first motorcycle.  It was a Puch 125 street bike that had been made into a dirt bike. Puch was a fine Austrian bike...sold at Sears and Roebuck.  Mine was used, of course, costing the unbelievable sum of $150.00.  My father bought it for me from a guy named Charlie.  Selling the bike was apparently something Charlie regretted because he almost immediately wanted to buy it back.

    Charlie had done a ton of work on the thing.  He had probably turned every bolt on the thing at one time or another. It was a two-stroke with a homemade expansion chamber (performance exhaust pipe) which I didn’t care for.  It would ruin your clothes by covering you with burnt oil.  But it was fun.  When I got where I was going I was greasy and stinky with a smile on my face.  I had a white “shorty” helmet with a peace sign painted on top of it.  I decided to change the exhaust and put on a big chrome pipe with a smaller pipe inside.  I drilled about a million holes through the inner pipe, poked a screwdriver in each of the holes and bent them in the direction of the exhaust flow.  Then, I wrapped it with fiberglass and pushed it down inside the large chrome pipe.  I had a big ol’ flat washer I was going to use to close the space between the ends of the inner and outer pipes, but I never got around to it.  When I would ride down the road, the inner pipe would start coming out and the oily fiberglass would flap in the breeze.  Sometimes I wouldn’t notice it for several miles and it would be sticking out about a foot and a half or so.

    Once I was talking to a guy at school and told him, “...yeah, the carburetor is leaking and I can’t get it to stop.  I think I’m going to put an Autolite carb on it.”  I was speaking of an old single barrel carb my father had taken off of a 1963 Ford Fairlane 6 cylinder.

    “You can’t put a car carburetor on a motorcycle!  That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard!”  My friend, Dudley, thought I was an idiot for even suggesting it.  I was just talking.  I hadn’t really planned on doing it.  At least not until he said it couldn’t be done.  A brief argument ensued and suddenly I had all the reason in the world to do whatever was necessary to put a car carburetor on a single cylinder, two-stroke motorcycle.  Nobody tells me what I “can’t” do.

    I got a friend to make a special manifold for it.  It was special alright.  If I hadn’t known what it was when he handed it to me I would have never believed it.  It was made out of a piece of TV antenna pipe and some flat plate that was cut with a hacksaw.  The plates had torched holes in them and weren’t cleaned up at all.  The welding resembled two big wads of bubble gum.  He did it for free, so I certainly couldn’t complain.  I drilled some holes in the plates, hacked off a little more of the edges and got it to bolt up to the cylinder.  I made a gasket out of a milk carton and mounted the carburetor on it.  The downdraft carb was so close to the frame that I couldn’t make any type of air filter fit.  The throttle cable wouldn’t work so I tied a piece of trotline to it instead.  We were go for ignition.

    I kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked until I began to have doubts myself.  Finally, for some unknown reason, it started to fire over a couple of times.  I kicked it for about another fifteen minutes and it slowly cranked. Poom.......poom......poom....poom...poom...poom, rat-a-tat-a-tat, poom...poom...rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.  It cranked but the throttle response was extremely slow.  I’d pull hard on the string and it took about ten seconds for the engine to respond.  I kept it running for a while then decided to complete the mission.  I got on the road and headed over to Dudley’s house to show him he was wrong or maybe that I was right.  It was a daring ride, using the clutch and steering with one hand and pulling that piece of trotline with the other, all the while making certain that it didn’t go dead.

    When I got to Dudley’s house I went up the driveway and around back.  I didn’t have a horn, so I pulled the string tight for a few seconds and let the engine slowly rev up so it would make a loud enough noise to get his attention. When Dudley came out of the back door I pointed to the carburetor with my non-string pulling hand.  We didn’t say anything.  He just looked at me and I drove off.  It was my finest hour.

    When I got back home, I removed the Autolite carburetor and put the old leaky Bing carb back on.  I kept the Puch and rode it for thousands of miles before I moved on to bigger challenges.  I learned a lot about engines and even more about myself with that old bike.  Years after I was grown and had moved away from home, Charlie still wanted it back.  I hadn’t ridden it in years so one day my father gave it to him.  You know, it’d be great if there was a kid somewhere riding an antique motorcycle, getting his clothes covered in burnt two-cycle oil and smelling like exhaust.