fladdeh
Puppy
- Joined
- May 26, 2008
- Messages
- 42
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- Kleinbosch, Cape Town, South Africa
- Bike
- BMW R1200GS Adventure
[Around May we fetched 60 or 70 brand-new XR's from a transport depot in Grootfontein. My bike had 0.5 km on the clock. As I recall, the highest mileage on any one of them was 4 km.]
Hi whethefakawe
Was this around 1983/84 ? I was doing time at Grootfontein from July 83 till end of 84 at Movements on the old section of the air base (old control tower, painted in Nissan red, white & blue colours) as a loadmaster. I remember unloading a flossie freighter (or was that 2) from the 'states' containing about 50+ brand new XR500R's, destined for the bush. It looked almost as though they had been parked in a line and literally sprayed brown completely, everything was brown, exept the tires, lights and seats!
Some already had thick layers of paint chipping off the plastics in large chunks, from bending of the mudguards and bumping around during loading and offloading of the plane, revealing the brand new red plastic underneath. A few of us were bikers and litterally drooled over the prospect of riding these things through the bush.....what a blast! It made me long for my KE175 waiting for me at home in Cape Town.
A few months later we received consolation in the form of a Yammie IT495 2-stroke, which was posted to Grootfontein. According to the paperwork, it was some officer dude's private bike. It stood in our freight yard for months and no one ever came to collect it??!! On weekends we used to siphon fuel from our army issue 'garry' (land rover), 2-stroke oil came from our 'connection' at the military stores and we'd 'steal' the IT for regular spins on the dirt roads around the airfield and messed about on it in the 'as gat' (afrikaans for rubbish dumps). We even did a few hi-speed drag runs down the runway on weekends with runway clearance from our buddies at the ops room. What a beast! I can remember hagging on for dear life when opening the throttle on that monster! Wouldn't mind having one of those as my toy today. They don't build them like that anymore........mean, f@%king mean is all I can say!
Thanks for that post, it brought back some good memories of those days. Those XR's were great bikes too, pity they don't build those anymore.
Hi whethefakawe
Was this around 1983/84 ? I was doing time at Grootfontein from July 83 till end of 84 at Movements on the old section of the air base (old control tower, painted in Nissan red, white & blue colours) as a loadmaster. I remember unloading a flossie freighter (or was that 2) from the 'states' containing about 50+ brand new XR500R's, destined for the bush. It looked almost as though they had been parked in a line and literally sprayed brown completely, everything was brown, exept the tires, lights and seats!
Some already had thick layers of paint chipping off the plastics in large chunks, from bending of the mudguards and bumping around during loading and offloading of the plane, revealing the brand new red plastic underneath. A few of us were bikers and litterally drooled over the prospect of riding these things through the bush.....what a blast! It made me long for my KE175 waiting for me at home in Cape Town.
A few months later we received consolation in the form of a Yammie IT495 2-stroke, which was posted to Grootfontein. According to the paperwork, it was some officer dude's private bike. It stood in our freight yard for months and no one ever came to collect it??!! On weekends we used to siphon fuel from our army issue 'garry' (land rover), 2-stroke oil came from our 'connection' at the military stores and we'd 'steal' the IT for regular spins on the dirt roads around the airfield and messed about on it in the 'as gat' (afrikaans for rubbish dumps). We even did a few hi-speed drag runs down the runway on weekends with runway clearance from our buddies at the ops room. What a beast! I can remember hagging on for dear life when opening the throttle on that monster! Wouldn't mind having one of those as my toy today. They don't build them like that anymore........mean, f@%king mean is all I can say!
Thanks for that post, it brought back some good memories of those days. Those XR's were great bikes too, pity they don't build those anymore.
