Leathers? Check. Cool helmet? Check. Kickstarter refusing to cooperate? Surely!
Aging, as they say, is surely the ultimate humbling experience. I just left my doctor’s office where I was unhappy to learn that, after nearly four decades of kickstarting motorcycles, my right foot is throwing in the towel on such activities. That means the sizable collection of classic British cafe racers in my garage will need to either be converted to a series of very expensive electric starters, or be sold off at auction. Naturally, the former seems the sensible course of action, though forking over the cash to install push-button starters on my old iron is a daunting proposition. Whenever I tell folks about the reason I’ve been limping around in an awkward-looking (and feeling) cast boot for the past couple months, they sigh and relate tales of others motorcyclists who’ve suffered similar fates. When perusing websites for information about electric start conversion parts, I was surprised to find forum after forums filled with testimonials from veteran British bike riders who, for one reason or another, could no longer utilize kick starter systems. A neighbor even stopped by, a Kiwi bloke named Roman who rides and builds antique British bikes, explaining how he’s perfected a kiskstarting procedure with his left foot because he’s suffered a similar injury to mine. We’ll be covering the various technical difficulties of eliminating the kickers on our 1973 Norton Commando and, hopefully, the T140 Triton recently rebuilt in the pages of Cafe Racer magazine over the next year. Even if both of your feet are still capable of thrusting through with a kicker pedal, this could be information worth checking out.
