Monday, January 28, 2019

Bultaco memories from Caracas

When I started up this blog I had the hope that folks from all around might send in pictures of their bikes from times past and today and the stories to go with them. Just recently it has actually started to pick up and I am getting a steady stream of images arrive in the inbox to publish. I'm totally stoked about it, it's just way more interesting when there is a personal connection to an image rather than just some bike or some guy on a bike. So, big thanks people, keep 'em coming.

After publishing Michael Silvius' picture of himself with Bultaco in Caracas back in the seventies a couple of weeks back he has sent in more pictures and the story behind the bike, as below in his own words...

 


"Here are a few blurry photos of the old Bultaco. Yea that's me, the skinny awkward looking kid with the goofy looking overalls. A couple with my friend Pol Frendin with his Jack Piner Penton KTM 175 in our back yard. As well as a trailer I built with an axle salvaged from a stolen/abandoned Hilman Arrow, to transport the bikes. A few of us playing in the dirt. One of mom posing with my bike. I might have just been fifteen or sixteen then so that would have been about 1977 or 78?



I had pestered my dad for a couple years to allow me to buy a motorbike. He finally relented provided I earn the money  myself. I guess he figured he might as well make a lesson out of it. I bought the Bultaco from a shop that had raced it and it was all beat to snot. Rode hard and put away wet. I patched the holes in the tank where the triple clamp fork bolts had punched through from having shortened the steering stops and repainted it.  Taught myself how to do body work on it and painted a dozen other bikes and a couple cars for others in the neighborhood. Its probably all the Imron paint I sucked up back then that's slowly doing me in today. Got in a lot of trouble with the bike too. I can say I rode in the country with the highest motorcycle mortality rate in the world and survived not without a few scrapes. Wound up under a Jeep CJ5 looking up at the bumper from underneath with my long hair pinched under the left front tire and the bike seat on the right front tire. When the dust settled the ashen young driver came to look at what he had run over and was shocked to find me alive. Had ABS brakes existed back then I'd have become worm food long ago. Also had a demented taxi driver in a Dodge Dart run me off the road in to a seven strand barbed wire fence once. We were immortal back then."

Thanks Michael.











3 comments:

  1. Hey look at that, my youthful delinquency now immortalized for all eternity!!!

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  2. Linda historia y lindos recuerdos Mike! Ojalá yo pudiera contar cosas como esas - mi vida adolescente fue bastante chata.

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    1. Yea but you got to shoot guns as a kid Dougie, which I could only dream of. ;-)

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