Snake - a never ending story - Part 1 : Snake I

This is how it started it´s life. I´m sorry to say, I never saw it in this state.

(Picture is in fact a bike that survived time and is still in showroom condition. The owner is Fried Anepool, a friend from the Netherlands, and founder of "Yamaha 650 Twin Klub Nederland")

This is how it looked like when I bought it second handed. Previous owners had fiddled around with it a lot. Especially the electrics suffered a lot of abuse. It also had Suzuki clocks, which gave a totally wrong impression of the actual rpm of the engine. The clock showed 5000 rpm which was in fact over 7000 rpm. I still wonder how come the engine never blew up trying to reach the (supposedly) 7500 rpm red line.

I found original clocks for it, and fixed the electrics. I used to clean it too, and was very proud about it being in more or less original state. I did ad the top case, because the Krauser sidecases kept falling off due to vibrations. Mind you, everybody kept hassling me about that. To be honest, the bike is much better looking without a rack whatsoever, but as I didn´t have a car at that time, and worked quite a long way from home, that was the most effective way of not forgetting my rain gear, and keeping the luggage dry.

And then disaster struck. I crashed when I hit a patch of gravel in a corner doing something like 60 Km/hour. The bike went skidding off through the gravel, with me caught under it. Lucky for me I had the Krauser side cases on it, and they protected my leg.The door of the right hand side case went sort of missing underway, I never found it back. I did smell a lot of burnt plastic, though! So I was lying there with the bike on top of me, right in the middle of a zebra crossing. A woman, crossing the street, stops and asks : "did you hurt myself?" I replied : "No, I always stop like that" Luckily a mate came past and helped me to get the bike to the side. I didn´t feel any pain. I actually managed to ride it home, but it was a mess. Once home I went to the doctor to have him have a look at my knee, which was a bit scaved. Didn´t hurt though. He had to get the gravel out with a pincit. That hurt ... A LOT!!!!

Being low on cash, I fixed up the bike with what I had lying around. I did have to get it back on the road by the time my knee was better, as it was my only means of transportation, to get to work. As the insurance never paid up, it sort of remained in that state for some time.