It’s a pretty exhausted story. The bike is a Honda CG 125 (1983) that belonged to rural power development board. It was sold with some other Honda CG125 after the board employees exploited those motorbikes in every possible ways. The second and third owners of this motorbike were brick manufacturers who used the bike and did the least maintenance before the third owner decided to sell it off. I almost lost my sense when I saw the bike in real as it didn’t match the photo posted on an online buy-sell portal. But, still I decided to buy it. I wanted to repurpose it for my then future wife who still had a plan to come to Bangladesh from Australia and spend few years here. I started fixing, repairing, and collecting necessary parts with my mechanic friend. He took advantage of my absence (I was in Australia for few months then) and left it aside for nearly eight months in the rain and sun. Later, I made it somehow ride-able and brought it to another mechanic friend and I went to Australia for few months. That mechanic also took advantage of my absence and made the whole bike almost a junk. The bike was ‘recovered’ from him after I came back to Bangladesh and decided to go DIY. Most of the external parts including forks, rear shocks, swing arm, drums (CG’s stock drums are pretty smaller), exhaust manifold, gas tank, 18″ rear wheel rim are collected from junks, repaired and repurposed in the bike as I have a ‘matra’ in my lifestyle which is ‘waste not, want not’. I decided not to do paint job anymore out of mental exhaustion and left the frame, gas tank as they were. My wife and I changed our plan and decided to start life in Australia instead of Bangladesh. She never rode the bike by herself but as pillion rider for few times during her recent visit to Bangladesh. The bike is sitting with my other two bikes in my country house now. This motorbike looks pretty beat-up and exhausted but the life inside the rugged CG 125 motor still doesn’t fail me whenever I twist the throttlein ‘all-terrain’ situation. I have soft spot for 125cc engines as once I read that Niels Peter Jensen says, “The size of the adventure is not dependent on the size of the engine…125cc is enough for any adventure…”.
I named the bike Honda CG 125 Project LV. LV stands for Lindsay Varvari, my wife.