The Bike Part II

So, I had my heart set on getting my hands on another Africa Twin and spent quite a bit of time on eBay and various other websites trying to track one down. All of a sudden there seemed to be very few available! Time was ticking away and I knew I had to find and buy one pretty smartly in order to have enough time to get it ready for the trip. In the meantime Mike suggested I look at joining him and 'going orange' but after sitting on his Adventure it became clear that I was a wee bit too short for the KTM.

Finally after a few weeks of looking, Mike heard about a friend of a friend who had an XRV he was looking to sell. Result!



A nice looking RD07a with only 17k miles on the clock. Trouble was it was running like a dog, on one cylinder, running rich and blowing a bit of smoke. I had to have a good think before committing to buy. So I consulted the brotherhood at www.xrv.org.uk and the general consensus was that the choke plunger was seized - a common problem with these bikes. Armed with this advice I bought the bike and the suspicions of the forum were confirmed - a seized choke plunger in the front cylinder - easily remedied. After fixing this and giving her a service the Africa Twin is running real nice. With the addition of crash bars, a touring screen, new rear brake pads and the Hagon rear shock from my old AT we are nearly ready to go.


A few good things have come out of me having my accident. Mike and I can now leave together in mid December rather than meeting up on the road as originally planned and I now have a bike with 22,000 miles less on it than the first model.