Magazine Articles

[David Lahey]

That video footage of Chris is great. Thanks. Very smooth. He made it look easy.
I'm wondering what the bike is that follows Chris' ride. The rider loses their black beret when they fall off. It looks like an early model 247 but the exhaust routing looks wrong

[tat ty]

Still loving this mag after all these years!

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[Greg Harding]

Hi Everyone,

Still loving this mag after all years!

Alastair, it turns out you are not alone as I have a copy of this great Magazine in my possession as well!

Knowing you have a fleet of "A" models, I will go into battle with the Mighty All Conquering TL 125!

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[Greg Harding]

Hi Everyone,

Here is another test:

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[Bully fanatic]

There is nothing nicer than reading about a real Trials machine. Yes a ! Should be more of it I reckon. Not that I`m biased or anything.

[TerrY]

What I liked about the article was the magazine front cover with the Kwaka Z900.
I have the later 2019 Z900RS. From a distance looks similar but is a totally different bike. Nostalgia with reliability.

[David Lahey]

Like the majority of US magazine trials bike reviews in the 1970s, this reads like the tester has a good technical grasp of how motorbikes function, but is not a trials rider and is not able to impart a helpful impression of how this bike compares to the other bikes of the time in trials competition.
US Dirt Bike magazine was much better in this regard having (trials rider) Len Weed as the writer and using very experienced trials riders (including Bernie Schreiber) for feedback and input.
Australasian Dirt Bike magazine also did very good trials bike tests. Although Geoff Eldridge was the writer and was a trials riding novice, he was an excellent writer and listened well to his experienced trials riding friends/guest test riders.

Yes Terry that Jaffa Z900 was an amazing thing in that era and so beautiful. I remember the promotional material with photos of Stephen Gall (I think) doing very exuberant things on one at Mt Panorama. I think there were actually two Z900s in those photos but I don't know who was riding the other one.
A bloke I worked with at Queensland Alumina in the 1990s used his coffin-tank Z1000 with sidecar to commute to work and it was still running like clockwork.
I didn't know you had a modern Z900. Very nice

[Rod]

Those coffin tanked Kwakas were the Z1R from around '78/'79, nice looking bike but didn't handle all that well.
Putting a sidecar on one probably helped to keep it on the road.

[David Lahey]

[Bully fanatic]

Good article. My first ever Bultaco was a model 213 which was the 350 version of this bike. I bought it in 1979 so a year after they came out. Used to ride it to work every weekday then take all the lights off it, change tyres and gearing and ride in the creeks all weekend then change everything back again to ride to work on Monday morning. I can still remember the tyres would let go on the road just after the footpegs scraped the road. That was always fun.