Upon receiving an inheritence I did the sensible thing and bought another bike!!!
At this point I was down to my Le Mans. The sensible thing to do would have been to buy a nice tourer
of some sort?
No I bought 2 year old very low mileage Ducati 851. The last series of the 851 series before the 888.
The Ducati was wonderful to ride. Evocative and animal like the way it moaned, groaned and roared.
Slightly on the tall side for my short legs. So I had to carefully mount the bike and had to be
circumspect when stopping as to where I put my foot - note foot, there was no way in the world I could put both feet
down. In the 3 years I kept the Duke I only had one very low speed tumble when following an indecisive friend who decided
at the last minute we were going the wrong way and the u-turn caught me out. Only minor scratches resulted fortunately. I
had a recurring problem for a while whereby the bike would become almost unrideable. I had been told by the previous owner
that he had problems with the fuel filter clogging. I informed the Ducati specialist (s) I went to about this but they were
both adament that that wasn't the problem and did various things, which never really cured the problem. So I changed the fuel
filter myself (not a particularly easy task being in the tank (as was the BMR850Rs' but that was easier to do) and the problem
never recurred. I read later that this was aproblem with the last batch of 851s and was due to the paint in the tanks
not being sealed properly.
As wonderful as the Ducati was to ride it's impracticallity reduced the sorts of annual mileage I
was used to doing and I realised I wasn't touring at all. So I decided to sell the Ducati - would have been wonderful
to have kept it but I couldn't afford a more 'usable' bike without selling it.
So the Ducati was sold and from the sublime to the ridiculous a BMW R850R bought!!
