PROJECT KANGURO
Rupert has become a glutton for punishment. Having spent ages and much cash restoring a BSA 650, as recorded in these pages, he’s bought a £1500 Moto Morini...
WORDS: RUPERT PAUL PHOTOGRAPHY: RUPERT PAUL & LAURA DYER
1982 Moto Morini Kanguro
Why did Rupert buy this bike? ‘Had to get the train... from Potsdamer Platz,’ he replied, referencing Bowie’s Where Are We Now? from The Next Day album...
If you’re any kind of Bowie fan, you’ll know the song mentioned above, and the achingly nostalgic feeling behind it. Well, that feeling is pretty much why, at the age of 62, I find myself owning a Morini again, 44 years after the last one. How strange that it’s this obscure Italian marque bracketing a biking career which has spanned at least 1500 different bikes ridden, owned, raced, thrashed and crashed.
It’s a first-generation 350 Kanguro, the X0 model. Y-reg, nine former owners, 50,000 miles. The X0 had the round-tube frame, which I think looks nicer than the later square-section version. Rather less appealingly, it has drum brakes and cast iron barrels, instead of the plated bores Morini used on later bikes.
Obviously I wanted a 500 Camel, because it’s as beautiful as the roadgoing Morinis. But Kanguros are affordable. I paid £1500 to the previous owner, a land speed record fiend who needed a little more space in his amazing garage.
The bike had obviously been looked after most of the time; it was in nice, original condition apart from a smoky exhaust, and it’s reasonably light and agile.
That last bit is important, because I have entered the bike in the Land’s End Trial, an all-night endurance event across the lanes and trails of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, as featured in CB last May, when Hugo did the event on his Morini Camel. So I need the Kanguro to be reliable, comfortable and have some lights.
Easy bit first – the wires. These bikes came with electrics that mixed 12V AC (presumably for the headlight) and 6V DC (for indicators and brake). I suspect it was to keep production costs down by reducing the amount of copper each bike needed, even though the left handlebar switch had to run separate circuits for the two systems.
Happily, a previous owner has converted the whole bike to 12V DC by the cunning ruse of disconnecting the AC coil from earth, and adding it to the other coils being used to charge the battery. The details of this procedure are on the Morini Riders Club website. You’re still left with a fairly modest alternator, powering a tiny 2Ah battery, and to keep electrical load to a minimum the bike already had LEDs for indicators, tail and even the dash lights.
I spent a day going through the modified loom, working out what each wire was doing, and checking current capacity and connections. A few new wires here and there, plus some fresh bullet connectors, and all was well.
There are two (count ’em!) warning lights on the dash, originally to tell you: a) Your lights are on, and b) You’ve selected high beam. As the indicators are invisible when you’re on the bike, I decided to repurpose the ‘lights on’ one to ‘indicators on’ instead.
This didn’t work; the indicators are weird aftermarket ones that contain their own flashing programme. They don’t need (or have) a central flasher unit. So, if you wire up a conventional indicator warning light, they all flash – whether you go left or right. Thinking I could outwit them, I made up a diode pack (what Paul Goff at Goffy Electrical calls a ‘tweaker’). This stops left indicator current from crossing over to the right (or vice versa). The warning light still didn’t flash, because – doh! – the flashing is internal to each indicator. It just lit up continuously while the indicators are on. I’ll get used to it...
To boost night vision, I found some20-watt LEDs on eBay for a mere £15. Obviously, they weren’t going to match a pair of £400 Denalis, but I hoped they’d be better than nothing. I made up some spacers to fit them, and some more for a little bracket for a tiny volt meter (£7.50) to check how the battery would cope. To keep my options open, I ran them through a little relay, so they could be conveniently switched on in various ways/amounts.
Result: the spots add lots of light for about 20 yards, and as long as the revs are above 2000 the alternator manages fine. Lathe time well spent.
Next job: engine. The simply excellent Benjy Straw, who I have known since my first Morini in 1979 (and who egged me on to get the Kanguro in the first place) reckons the smoky exhaust is unlikely to be valve guides. He suspects rings, with the possibility of needing a rebore too.
But to have a look inside, you first have to get inside. This is when I noticed the bronze exhaust nut castellations are mostly snapped off. And no amount of penetrating oil and heat would shift them. My friend Rupe Farnsworth, who has bigger muscles and some map gas, eventually got the rear one off.
The threads in the casting are not pretty. I’ll see if they can clean up sufficiently by turning the old nut into a thread chaser. Three hacksawed slots should do the trick. I’ve already got new nuts to try afterwards. So some engine expense to come. And Benjy reminds me that I’ll need to brace the pillion footrest brackets, to avoid cracks. Later bikes had it as standard.
Meanwhile, I’m loving owning this thing. Morini’s engineering philosophy is beautiful, and I appreciate the way the bike goes together. It should also make a very handy trail bike.
Useful contact: Morini spares mdinaitalia.co.uk