Erlkönig: Honda MB5

Intro to Motorcycling

In high school, while I had the MB5, I thought: How does a 50cc motorcycle do 55 m.p.h.?... If all bikes were so engineered, we could do mach 1 on the highway. I didn't ride this bike much, only through a few tanks of gas; In fact, the first time the bike stopped dead, it took me half an hour to figure out that low fuel was the problem, and switch to reserve -- I'd effectively forgotten it needed gas at all. :-)

Aspects of small motorcycles

Interesting things about the bike

• Didn't cost much.
• Easy to pick up.

Problems

• Easy to steal.
• Poor acceleration.

Mishaps

• Ran over a curb once when I was just learning to ride and didn't make a sufficiently small radius turn. I stopped just fine in the grass, then dropped the bike.
• The aforementioned running out of gas in the main tank, and taking forever to figure out the problem.
• The drivechain came off once, I think.