After several years of hankering after an old motorbike the opportunity finally arose this year when we moved house in October 2009. With the new house came a very nice purpose built garage that was simply too good to just put a car in it, this enabled me to put my long held off plans into action and after several bids on ebay for old bikes and being outbid or not being impressed with the sellers attitude, I had a flick through the classified section of Classic Motorcycle Mechanics, after several late night texts to various sellers mobile numbers I had two very nice guys who called me back looking to make a sale, one had a delightful looking Kawasaki and very kindly emailed me some pictures and the other was this XS850.

I chose the XS850 as it was closer to home so in theory easier to collect and offered more of a challenge,it was older than the Kawasaki being a 1980 registration and the owner told me he'd last started it some 3 years ago. I'll state in advance that though I have a motorcycle license the last time I owned or rode a bike was, well, I had more hair on my head then than I do now and Maggie Thatcher was Prime Minister but as I've said I've wanted to do this for a while guess it's a mid life thing but what the heck you only live once.

After several phone calls to the vendor to ensure the cheque had cleared etc. and contacting a courier, Alpha Couriers who were very reasonable in price and I must say very helpful. I'd use em again and would recommend em, and no I've no need to praise them up just speaking as I find. The bike arrived on the 27th of April at around 8.00am in the morning the courier had two other rather nice Norton's in the van and two more covered up by a tarpaulin on a trailer. My bike was inside the rear off the van. We wheeled it into the garage I paid the driver and that was it, I had to go to work.

This section of RigsVille will be covering my expolits and progress of this restoration project, wish me luck!

Richard