Re: Good Morning Vietnam!
Instead of creating another thread, I thought I'd just revive this one just to show the recent additions to my garage since moving here to Saigon a few years ago.
Not really a builder, but quite keen to work with local mechanics and bike shops here to find and restore some really good discoveries. Vietnam is chock-full of vintage bikes and if you have enough patience and get to know enough people, you can really put your nose in the ground and dig up some gems. It also helps that vintage motorbikes are (thanks to the new capitalism and westernization of the country) viewed as transport merely for peasants and farmers who have grown up on the old ways. Lucky for me, I guess, huh!
Anyway, here's a great find - a '68 CB 250:
A bit temperamental right now as from what I understand from the previous owner (my Vietnamese is still limited to "hello" and "thank you" and assorted curses), it's been rebored to within a millimeter of its life to something close to 400 cc. It certainly pulls like a 350, or even more, but it's always getting too hot after getting stuck at Saigon's stop and go traffic. An engine rebuild is probably in order some time soon...
Got that one purely by chance as I was really meaning to get a daily runner in the form of this '04 FTR Street Tracker (the seller offered me the CB 250 at a really rock bottom price if I got this one, so it was a no brainer, really:
Finally, a little pet project of mine. A '67 Vespa Super that used to look like this:
And has now - with the help of some real great local fabricators - been transformed into this:
So "Xin Chao" (no - that's not a curse) to all of you and thanks for letting me share and show-off!