Recreating the Roadking: The Yezdi Roadking re –establishing itself into the travel scenario

Recreating the Roadking:

The Yezdi Roadking re –establishing itself into the travel scenario

Sekhar, a mechanic by profession has been working with bikes since the age of 5 and has been a successful mechanic for the past 40 years. His store at Krishnampattinam deals with the making/remodelling of the Yezdi Roadking, a popular bike of the 80’s and 90’s.

The Yezdi Roadking is a road bike model that was produced in India by Ideal Jawa Ltd, Mysore from 1978 – 1996, which is a successor model of the 1974 Jawa CZ 250 ridden by Jaroslav Falta, which won the runner – up spot in the 1974 motocross world championship.

The major features of the bike are its 250 cc engine providing a mileage of about 25 – 30 Kms to the maximum. The bike also has a two stroke cycle, single cylinder; twin exhaust and kick start facility. In addition to this the bike had a four gear transmission and a frontal telescopic – hydraulic travel 130 mm and rear hydraulic shock absorber travel 100 mm suspension. Weighing about 134 -144 Kg the bike was a hit amongst the youngsters in the 90’s. Though there are not many models available today, the Yezdi roadking is considered to be one of the best road bike models by travellers and there are many who are ready to spend enormous amounts to attain the bike.

In his time span as a Yezdi specialist Sekhar(60 years old), who’s popular by the name Jawa Sekhar, has worked on bikes as old as 15 years and also has created them right from scratch. He states that the minimum making of a bike takes up to 1 – 5 depending on its condition and the availability of its spare parts years and needs at least 4 -5 people working on it,. And depending on the spare availability the price of the bike also varies.

 Sekhar exclaims that a Jawa model might cost for about 1 lakh rupees, but a 350 model might costs about 1.5 – 2 lakh rupees. This he says is a very reasonable and cheap price for a bike model that has very less spare part availability in the country.

Sekhar says that the main reason for taking such a long time to deliver the bike is due to the unavailability of parts and spares. While Royapettah is the only place in the whole of Tamil Nadu where certain parts of the vehicle model are found and a majority of them are to be brought in from Mysore, Bangalore or Hyderabad where the roadking has had its utmost popularity.

A member of the biking group Road Riders, Sekhar has travelled about 3000 Kms in his Yezdi bike, with a trip to Coorg covering 1200 Kms being planned and there are many of his clientele who have rode all the way up to Leh and Ladakh.