Tag: Honda

Tiger Joker 120S

Since my Crown is being worked on for another month or so, I really needed to find a cheap motorcycle. It took some looking (thx Yon) and trying (thx Matt) and bargaining (thx Nam), but I finally found the perfect ride for my needs, for which there is a serious lack of information on the net.

The ride I picked up was manufactured by Tiger Motor Company of Thailand (website is hosed as of writing this). The Model is the Joker 120S. I have no idea what the S stands for, or what the different grades were. It’s a 120cc carbureted 4-stroke, front disc – rear drum, four speed autoclutch, extremely ugly bike that I would have hated to buy new, but I picked it up for a good price used. The equivalent Honda or Yamaha would have cost three times as much (Honda is the only overvalued brand of both cars and motorcycles in Thailand; for cars it shares company with Toyota and Isuzu in this regard, and with motorcycles, Yamaha). Plus, I fell in love with its Mad Maxed muffler ( I call it a ghetto supertrapp) and getthefuckouttamyway exhaust pitch.

Of course, the trade off for not buying Japanese is that the electronics are Chinese-inspired level cheesy and most were probably broken beyond repair a couple months after it rolled out of the dealer. So I have to do without an electric starter and fuel indicator, which isn’t a big deal.

The big plus is that this bike has loads of torque, which I’m going to attempt to convert to power with an after-market rear sprocket. Anyway, here’s a few photos of this increasingly rare motorbike, which surely looks better slighty rusted and beat up than it did new:

The Accidental Motorcycle Thief

The other day, I wanted to go for a quick lunch at the canteen (cafeteria), so I asked one of the students interning for the Japanese course if I could borrow her scooter. She gave me the key and told me where it was parked, along with a description. She said the license plate number was 85, and that it was a 100cc Honda Wave, with a manual transmission, in gray.

I found the 100cc manual Honda Wave almost immediately, but noticed that the license plate was actually 58 and that it was blue with gray accents. I chalked it up to the student remembering it wrong, or me hearing it wrong, and decided to test it by trying to start it up: No problem. I rode off in the direction of lunch, happily upshifting with my foot in this age of boring automatic plastic bi-wheeled conveyances.

When I got back on the scooter after lunch, the key was harder to turn. I had to work at it a bit. Then, when I got back to my building, I couldn’t turn the key to the far left to lock the steering column. I tried for a few minutes doing the jiggle-turn maneuver, but finally just gave up. When I went back to my office, I told the intern that I couldn’t lock her bike and asked if she’d had problems with her key, but she had no idea what I was talking about. A warning sign flashed briefly in my head.

“You said your plate number was 5-8, right?” I asked.

“No, I said 8-5,” she said.

Uh-oh.

I  looked down at where I’d parked the bike and saw a girl wiping tears from her eyes, our building’s custodian trying to console her, and a security guard talking into a walkie talkie.

I went down and apologized, and in the end, everyone except the victim had a good laugh about it (she was still in shock at having her scooter stolen). I felt bad for making her feel bad, but also because the first time I stole a bike, [A.] it was only 100cc, [B.] it required no skill because of the worn lock, and [C.] it provided zero exhilaration because IT WAS A TOTAL ACCIDENT.