Hitchcocks Forum

Sometimes you get a small victory and no matter how insignificant it is nonetheless a win. I broke the kick start return spring the other day and decided it wasn't going to put me off the bike for a week or so that it takes Mr H to get parts to the opposite side of the planet so I used a bungee cord. This soon began to annoy me so today I decided to see if I could fix the spring ever if as a temporary measure. Sure enough it had snapped right on the bend where the spring enters the shaft so I pulled it off and cleaned up the broken end on the grind stone and de tempered the cleaned up end with the gas and bent a new tang on it. Slotting it back on I immediately resized that the whole spring was now too short for it to anchor where it had but what to you know the clever now probably long dead designers at Albion had placed three alternative points at which the spring could anchor. Who knows how long it will last but the bungee is gone and ill have a replacement in the mail soon. The charm of these machines is that you can do these sort of repairs. You don't have to simply exchange one bit for a new one all the time. Sometimes a fix up job will do.

Couldn't agree more; there's so much satisfaction in that long lost art - actually repairing something!

ahh , but albion only placed the extra points on bikes for export , knowing that there would be a delay in the mail from hichcocks in the UK ,and you needed the bungee cords to retain the multiple 24 pks of larger in the back of your pickups (etc)

We Kiwi's aren't quite so addicted to the slabs of lager as our Aussie cousins across the ditch but there is no question the bungees can be put to better use in my case 2 ltr riggers of draught. S:)

Simon,
I think the days of the big beer drinking Aussies has now gone to folklore, apart from the costs now, restrictions on what you can and can't do are stopping people from drinking too much. Only big drinking goes on in the city nightclubs,and even then it is hard to tell if it is beer or drugs. Most other pubs hard to find anybody really drunk these days, it isn't worth the risk.

Yes much the same over here Norm. I think our livers have all cried enough. The kids are binge drinking but none of them seemed to be interested in driving so whilst that results in some hideous selfies on Facebook it doesn't constitute a crime of anything but good taste