When I take a bike apart, I usually rely on my memory to remember how it all goes back together. That works well enough if you strip it in the morning and rebuild it the same day, or even the same week. I once had to rebuild the engine of my Honda CB92 Benly three times in one day, because I keep leaving out important parts like a circlip and a piston ring, but I was only 17 and you have to learn somehow. Leaving the rebuild stage for 20 months, however, has its drawbacks, as I found when reassembling my Suzuki TL fairing.

The spray-painter in Knysna, Slig at Star Panelbeaters, hadn’t managed to squeeze my small job in before the Christmas break, which was fair enough. I was pleasantly surprised to get a call three days after Christmas to say the parts were ready for collection. It turned out that Slig had worked through the holiday to stay on top of his workload – which was hugely appreciated.

The work was superb. Without so much as a VIN number from me, Slig had matched the 1997 green exactly and covered the gold TL1000S decal in a clear coat of polyurethane so that it looked like new. It has taken me many months to find that original decal, with a friend in Japan trying to locate one there to no effect. I eventually found online what may well have been the last one in the world.

I wasn’t so lucky with the decal for Electronic Fuel Injection on the tailpiece, though. The only one I could find was not quite the same size as the original. Slig covered the decal with masking tape, sprayed the panel, then added a clear top coat and the result looked like new.

Figuring out what went where wasn’t going to be easy. Attaching the new faux-carbon fibre air scoop was simple enough, but figuring out the relationship between the tube connecting it to the carbs and the strange piece of shiny black plastic lying nearby was tricky. My genius solution was to remove the right-hand fairing and see how that was put together. As a tactic, it worked pretty well, until I realised that there are five different types of Allen-head bolts holding the fairing in place – all looking more or less the same. It was only when I had one hole still to fill and the only remaining bolt didn’t fit it that I decided a more detailed inspection of each bolt was needed. It turned out that some bolts had slightly deeper shoulders than others – who’d have thought? Once I worked that out, the rest was plain sailing.

The TL was now back in one piece for the first time in almost two years. Time to fit the new battery. The beautiful V-twin fired up instantly, filling the rural valley with its deep rumble. The bike needed a wash, I knew, but that could wait. Time to ride!

The oft-lamented washboard surface of the dirt road (which had broken indicator stalks and the tail light on the Ducati, wrecked the mirrors on the V-Strom and left a few stone chips on the Rune) out to the nearest tarred surface had me crawling in first gear in some places, but eventually I was on Tarmac and could let the TL do its thing. The southern hemisphere summer was warm, the sky blue and the road empty, and the Suzuki quickly reminded me why I’d first fallen in love with it. The engine was smooth, its 125 bhp ample for my needs, its exhaust note exhilarating, and the handling was as sweet and steady as ever. Built in 1997, this bike pre-dated almost every modern electronic convenience and, to me, represents motorcycling at its elemental best. Eventually we made it home for a well-deserved wash and polish. It may be 25 years old this year, but it has covered only 8,300 miles from new and now with its newly painted plastic parts looked like new. For some reason, the TL hasn’t quite reached collector status yet, unlike the Ducati Sport Classic, so it will get ridden as often as the opportunity arises. Quite simply, I love it.

‘Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a Tiger. Despite careful precautions taken 20 months earlier, the Tiger’s life support system had failed.  The same was true for the TL1000S, the V-Strom and the little Yamaha TW200.

In truth, the TL and the V-Strom hadn’t even been on life support. We’d high-tailed it back to our home Britain on 24 March 2020 before South Africa clamped down on all travel on the 27^th. There were long queues at Oliver Tambo International in Johannesburg as people scrambled to leave – a sharp contrast to the post-apocalyptic ghost towns we encountered at Zurich airport and Heathrow as we passed through them.

With Covid transforming the world, I knew it might be some time before we’d be able to travel back to South Africa. Simple mathematics said that a new motorcycle battery in South Africa runs to about R900, whereas a smart battery charger costs about R1,600. So I decided it would be cheaper just to buy new batteries for two of the bikes when we got back, but hooked up the other four and our Nissan bakkie (pick-up) to trickle chargers.

As regular readers will know, I decided to ship two of the bikes to the UK last year, the Rune and the Ducati Sport Classic. Neighbours very kindly opened up the garage for the shippers, disconnected the chargers from the two bikes and left the others as they were. The fly in the ointment was the loose fit between the plug on the extension cord to the chargers, meaning that somewhere along the line the plug had slipped out a fraction, the electricity supply to the bikes was cut off and their batteries were totally dead. Deeply annoying, but not the end of the world. The bakkie battery was fully charged thanks to a separate feed, so at least we had transport.

A quick visit to two battery emporia in nearby Knysna procured four spanking new batteries, with the tiny battery for the Yamaha bizarrely coming out the most expensive at R999. Then it was simply a matter of installing the pre-charged sealed units in each machine, adding a lot of air to a lot of tyres, and I was back in business.

It felt truly wonderful to be back in familiar saddles on familiar roads after such a long break. The Triumph 800XC came first, pressed into service for a trip to buy some groceries. Next up was the V-Strom, which I bought second-hand in Dubai in 2009 and which has been a reliable workhorse ever since. I was struck by the similarities between the two bikes, despite their very different configurations: one a high-revving 800cc triple, the other a more sedate 1,000cc V-twin. But their riding positions, comfort levels, smoothness and effortless power made them seem like they were cut from the same cloth.

The Suzuki TL needed a bit more work. When we innocently popped down to South Africa for a month’s holiday that fateful March in 2020, I’d dropped off the left-side fairing and left-side tail-piece for respraying. The fairing had become seriously scratched when I dropped the bike while trying to bump-start it due to a serious lack of forward momentum and an awkward side-saddle bump attempt. The tail-piece had been rubbed back to the base plastic in  one spot by a tie-down when a local dealer trailered the bike to his workshop to free-up seized front disc brakes several years earlier. I wanted to return the bike to its near-pristine state.

The spray shop hadn’t even started the job back in 2020 when we had to flee in the Covid rush, leaving our daughter Nicky to recover the unpainted plastic and decals from the spray-painters. Now I had the chance and the time to bring the parts back and start the process again. This meant that getting the TL on the road would take an extra week or three, but for now it was just good to feel a summer sun on my back, a warm breeze in my face and enjoy what the two adventure bikes had to offer.