Why stop to help?

Stretching to the horizon the endless Hay Plains were lit by the orange red afternoon light. Our shadows led us forward as the three motorcycles headed east from Hay towards Narrandera. Graham on his BMW R90S, Fred on his Suzuki GS1000 with Jen and I on our R80GS. We were heading home from Adelaide after an aborted attempt to get to that year’s World’s End Rally in Quorn.

Ahead of us we see two figures standing by the side of the highway next to a motorcycle. One frantically waves his arms and the three of us slow, pull to the verge and stop, maybe 100 feet past them. Walking back to them Graham calls out “what’s up?”.

“It just stopped and won’t start”, one says. He then cranks the bike over to demonstrate. As a surprise we realise that it is an ancient K2 Honda 750 Four from the early 70s. Of course the guys have no tools with them at all. Graham heads back to his bike to grab his tools. I called to him “Don’t bother, the Honda has 12mm sparkplugs and your BMW plug spanner is 14mm and won’t fit.

One of the guys says to the other “great lot we picked to stop; they don’t even have the right tools!”

With a silent nod we realised we’d stopped to help a pair of drongos.

Unable to pull the plugs to check spark Graham takes off the points cover to see if they were opening and closing ok. The K2 750 Four has two sets of points and a quick glance showed the problem, the points were not opening at any stage thus no spark was being produced.

The points backing plate was loose and had obviously gradually moved till the points were no longer opening. With a deft piece of fettling Graham repositioned the points and a quick kick over showed we had spark. The points cover was refitted, and the bike fired up cleanly. The two guys hopped on, and we told them to rush off to Hay while it was running ok.

They roared off into the distance.

“Graham, how could you continue to repair the thing once they complained about us not having the right tools?”

“Easy” he said. “I didn’t tighten the screws on the backing plate. They’ll only get a few Ks down the road before it moves again”.

We quickly agreed that whoever next spotted someone broken down they were to point to the opposite side of the road, and we’d ride on by, looking the other way.