The low life will steal anything.

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Trabants? They were Eastern Blok weren't they?

And for the two wheel fans among us - Cossacks and Urals.

I had a MZ years ago, jeez it was awful
My mate used to race an MZ, yes, they had their own class,

No oil in the forks, just grease, and a series of "dampers" that were basically big washers with varying sizes of holes drilled in them,! 

 
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I remember the MZ race classes, mostly ETZ 250 s

I had an ETZ 125, horrible, horrible thing it was. Didn't stop, didn't turn, didn't go. Bleurgh. Wouldn't want to take it anywhere near a track! I eventually crashed it into the back of a car and left a wedding tackle shaped dent in the tank. Sold the scrap to a local fella who left the tank as is, so whenever Id see the bike around my eyes would start to water 

I never tried but I heard that there was no ratchets anywhere in the motor, so if you bump started it backwards youd get four reverse gears

**edit** just remembered, the shift pattern was 4 down, took a bit of getting used to after riding jap bikes pretty much all me life. Only other bike Ive ridden with the same was old British iron

 
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Changed my bike to race shift after I jammed my toe into the tarmac changing up through Devils Elbow at Mallory and nearly got spat off, changed all my bikes over at the time, but have gone back to road pattern since I stopped racing.

Them were the days :)

 
Worst place for thieving i ever worked was Walthamstow bus garage, this about 18 years ago (London Transport spent a couple Million refurbishing it then sold the site off for housing less than 2 years later)

We rewired the whole place, it was still Vir & rewirable dist boards.

We had 2 sea containers inside the garage as stuff kept going missing. We had 3 flying carpets (scissor lifts) & they even nicked the batteries out of one so had to get a compound put up round everything. All that was outside this was a lead going to a socket. One night they nicked the plug, next night after it was replaced, they nicked the plug and the whole lead.

The skip was never changed in the 6 month contract, there was a continuous stream of bus drivers, mechanics etc taking anything & everything out, little bits of plasterboard, as small as foot square, any old bit of timber, studwork etc. I watched one driver unscrewing loads of plasterboard screws from a stud and putting them in his pocket.

The car park was full of hand painted old bangers in red or yellow or grey which was the bus colours then, but the guys i got to know all had new cars at home their other halfs drove.

 
Were  Trabants made of some cardboard composite?

probably not.....my assistants are goading me
Yes they were a cardboard type composite, and they smoked like hell. I worked for a bloke that had one.

 Dozens of them were abandoned on the streets of Berlin when the wall came down, presumably they had done their job and got the occupants to the west.

 Those old Lada  cars were underrated , many of the British and foreign contemporaries were worse for reliability.

 
One of our aveling barford centaur dump trucks was found outside a local village, one of the drivers borrowed it after his car broke down. We never found out who borrowed a mini digger that was found in a pub car park.

The police found one our compressors on the hard shoulder of the M1 with a flat tyre. One of the fitters watched as it was towed out of the plant, “I thought they were taking it for servicing”.

Drums of zinc wire went missing out of stores, they broke in and used our FLT to load it. Fortunately they didn’t realise the thing next to the wire was an induction furnace heat shield, about 1.5 tonnes of pure copper. (Fortunate as I needed it the next day for a major break down.)

 

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