Gallery of each days route and miles for the return journey
The event its self wasn’t much to write home about, the location was far from anywhere and what was laid on just wasn’t that great, not that any of that mattered, as for us it’s all about the road trip, which so far had been a great experience as usual.
Sunday morning soon came round and we were packing the lambrettas ready for the return trip. After less than 30 miles with Russ leading the way my back wheel locked and stayed locked when I grabbed the clutch. Oddly the engine kept running with the clutch in so it was obvious there had been a failure in the gearbox. Luckily I stayed on as I watched Russ disappear into the distance. Before this happened the engine was laboring so badly that to keep at 60 mph I was having to ride in 3rd gear constantly, every time I tried to ride in top gear the motor just labored and slowed down.
I dragged the lambretta to the side of the road and looked around, to say I was in the middle of nowhere would be an understatement. We had a heavy late night the night before so the last thing I could be arsed to do was take all my luggage off and start stripping the engine down but as the alternative was to just lie down at the side of the road and give up, I started reluctantly taking bungee cords off.
As with anything, the thought of doing it is always worse than actually doing it. It wasn’t long before Russ had phoned and asked where I was and then started heading back to me.
We lay the lambretta on its side so as not to loose all of the gearbox oil but once the sidecase was off it became obvious that there wasn’t any gearbox oil in there to lose. When the endplate was off we could see that the gears were all blue and the bearing under the tree had completely collapsed. It was then that I had a light bulb moment, a few days before we left the UK I had taken the sidecase off to change it for a new GT sidecase. I had obviously forgot to fill it with gearbox oil, DOH. This also explained why it had felt down on power during the last day travelling to the Euro, it was getting so hot in the gearbox that it was all getting tighter and tighter until the point it just locked up.
Russ was carrying a spare gearbox and I had the spare bearing so we put it all back together and as we didn’t have any gearbox oil with us I filled it up with two stroke oil, 2 stroke oil is a good substitute for gearbox oil and has proven to be good enough in an emergency a few times before. While we were putting the last parts back on a group of riders from LCGP pulled in and had a 500ml bottle of gearbox oil which they gave me, Thanks Dom. I decided to keep that for use later as I would be able to run on the two stroke oil for a stint to wash the metal shit and baked on black shit out of the chain case and then drain it and replace with clean gearbox oil.
Excellent as usual