TRIALS With TRIBULATION

I’ve never had a trials bike and I had a sudden hankering for one. Don’t misunderstand; I have no intention of going trials riding and getting muddy. I just liked the look of a Royal Enfield pre-unit Clipper which popped up one day on my fuzzy laptop screen when in eBay mode. I’d been thinking about my next rebuild (cos we gentlemen cannot exist without a project on the bench, can we?) and taking an unhealthy interest in that great shoppe in the skye. An Enfield made perfect sense, because I’m a creature of habit and most RE designs didn’t change much from the late 1940s onward. Also, being lazy, I knew that Hitchcocks stock parts for most REs so there’s no need to go scouring bikejumbles!

I spotted ‘Tribulation’ on eBay in September last year. The vendor was honest enough to warn me that he was a bitza (the bike, not the man) and that he’d hung most of the bits loosely together so that he could see what it would