Bultaco Alpina 350
BULTACO ALPINA350
CYCLE WORLD TEST
One of the best Do-It-Yourself Woods Bike Kits
Henry N. Manney III
At the recent automobile GP in Long Beach I happened to run across the celebrated John Surtees, who used to be into bikes before he was into racing cars and is, I think, the only World Champion around in each speciality. Meeting for the first time in nine years, we fell upon each other’s necks and almost the first question was, What bikes have you got now? Well there was this and there was that and then he had a couple of Bultacos. I should have known. Running a Formula I car team is a pretty masochistic exercise and Bultaco owners have a masochistic streak a mile wide. Not for us the carefree abandon of an empty toolbox on sallying into the wilds; every Bul owner worth his salt car-
ries at least a heavy-duty plug wrench and spare plug while we confidently expected the latest Alpina to have a cosy fitted box for jeweler’s screwdriver, flywheel puller, blowtorch, 5 lb. bronze hammer, vernier tdc indicator and two or three sets of ignition parts, not to mention a few extra jets. Actually it isn’t really that bad as Señor F.X. Bulto is a nice man besides being an enthusiast; you feel that Bultacos are built by human beings instead of by computer-fed automatic machinery. Furthermore he does listen to remarks from the outside world which means that this latest Alpina is a considerable improvement on earlier ones even if it took a w hile, carving our way through a wall of human flesh, to dig the pearl out.
Alpinas as you probably know' are sort of a hybrid between enduros like the Frontera and the Sherpa trials mount. As such they enjoy a relatively limited market but would do better if more customers realized that what they really should be riding on their woodsy potters is an Alpina and not a fire-breathing motocrosser, much less a 90 percent street bike decked out as an Enduro. Basically the 350 Alpina is a 350 Sherpa Trials with very few detail changes (triple clamps, bars, lights, knobbies, slightly bigger engine capacity) and as such is not supposed to go flat out across the desert or, for that matter, flat out anywhere. The engine is ported for lowspeed flexibility, the quiet Sherpa pipe ditto, and thus pays rewards in meandering gently through the woods communing with nature, although for connecting road sections you can get it up to about 60. Who wants to run into trees at 60?
Our Alpina arrived in a box (promptly appropriated by Randy Riggs to store old dollies in) and provided me with a nice afternoon’s entertainment putting it all together. Once done, the Bui appeared a very handsome bike indeed and unlike the last lot we had (see tests April, 1977) fired up second kick without an orgy of cursing, bump starting and incipient cardiac arrest > although clearly jetted so rich that it must have been set up for the shores of the Dead Sea. A close survey revealed that there had indeed been some changes from last year, i.e. rim locks instead of those blasted rim screws to keep the tires on, a return to the hard and narrow Sherpa seat, a sexy black paint job on the whole engine, plastic fenders instead of the lovely but impractical alloy ones, an extremely lightweight headlamp, giant taillight mounted on a rubber strap (our desert experts wanted these) and a slightly different paint job. No primary kick, no oil injection, no overhead cams but then it wouldn’t be a Bultaco, would it?
As always with Buis you wonder how the hell a factory making off-road machinery could pull some of the odd tricks found on the Alpina. For example Bultaco boasts that they have enlarged the fuel capacity but even so, 2.24 gallons isn’t nearly enough to enjoy a day’s riding without returning to the friendly leaking gas can. Especially here in the West, a rider can easily make a hundred mile detour around a mountain before elevenses and be, say, 75 miles in a straight line away from his premix. Buddy pegs, especially cheapo buddy pegs, look very odd at the bitter end of the swing arm. The tichy little toolbox has most of its access blocked by the lid tabs inside. A fork lock on a bike with no key. Junky cable adjusters which, if the cable breaks, become lost in the sand. A headlight rim which unscrews itself, spilling the sealed beam out like a hanged criminal. A self-shorting kill button, and, under the heading of service, fork caps unremovable without shipping the handlebars. A gearbox filler difficult to unscrew without ditto the exhaust pipe. A soft plastic clutch adjusting plug. Having to pull the rear brake pedal, incorporating a double-jointed split pin, to remove the primary side case. Having to screw the bar clamps down really tight to prevent El Foldo when you may not want them tha't tight to avoid bending in a crash. Having to use an open end for the gb drain instead of a socket because the bash plate hole isn’t right. And not everybody liked the bulgy side panels. On the credit side, the finish is marvelous, the neat plastic headlight adjusts up and down, the non-shock speedo mounting is clever, the pegs are the best in the business, two weeks’ running richer than Croesus didn’t soot the plug, the handy grab rail is nice, there is a proper little tensioner for the primary chain, vent tubes sprout from both side cases, cotter keys and/or stop nuts abound, the engine was timed properly and the points haven’t lost their gap yet (and a good thing too as now there is a new flywheel ign with only one tiny window in it; the points gap, however, is cast on) and the fuel filler cap doesn’t have one of those tubes hanging from it, yet one more thing to move. And of course, it is a Bultaco which means a lot when you start down one of those gullies you shunna started down.
BULTACO
ALPINA 350
SPECIFICATIONS
$1290
The Alpina's forks are potentially good but excessive seal friction and heavy oil make them far toQ stiff. Gut the top seal in each leg, or swap the stockers for a set (one per leg) of accessory or Honda seals. Use 10 wt. oil to provide proper damping rates and fork action.
POWER TRANSMISSION
DIMENSIONS
I ne DUI S WdF enu IS tOO Still 101 IlIUSt riding conditions. The d~iaI-rate springs are fine for the bike's weight, but the shocks' excessive compression damp ing prevents proper suspensiOn action. A set of aftermarket shocks would be worthwhile.
We first went up into the mountains to take photos and in spite of our dropping the needle in the Type 84 Bing as far as it would go, the poor 350 was still rich as all buggery. Furthermore, as delivered the suspension was harder than a Harley Chopper’s which meant that in spite of letting air out of the Pirellis until they “pooched” at rest, the bike was still a handful on anything washboard, sandy, ridged, rocky or gravelly as either the front or back wheel would hop violently sideways at the odd pebble. I don’t know what the factory was thinking about. The consultant services of Ron “Crasher” Griewe were called into play and we drained what looked like 90 wt. from the forks, removed two of those little spacers from each leg, and filled up with 5 wt. Bel-Ray (20 is specified) so as to begin with Too Soft. Too Soft is right as the fender would hit the frame on braking, let alone whoops, and there was the interesting display known as Pogodie Pogodie Pogodie Thud. One spacer added back in was still too soft really so both were restored with the result that the forks are lovely and responsive for slow trail riding or rock picking but will bottom given sufficient reason. Probably 10 wt. is the answer or even 20 with one spacer out, all depending on what the Empirical Research Institute has to say. Like Caesar's wife, dirt bike suspension is all things to all men and each rider has to fiddle around a bit to suit his own needs, not just accept what the kid at the parts department wants to sell that week.
Likewise the rear suspension was punishingly hard, perhaps to suit the buddy pegs, but surprisingly enough be came a lot more efficient when the front was softened up. Perhaps because of better shocks, the rear wheel control on the 350 (as opposed to the 250 Alpina I had) is pretty good and young Oley the trials rider pronounced it "just right" for trials work even if a bit hard for trail riding, curiously enough. Perhaps when the seals wear in.
Carburetion was another problem as we dropped the needle as far as it would go without any results, really, except losing that diabolical plastic bucket that lives in the slide. Do you know' how; strong that spring is? and how far a plastic gizzie w ill go in a cluttered garage? Mike Kane at Va. Beach however had sent along spare jets and the next size leaner needle jet with the needle in the next place from top put it in the ballpark for around here. At one point the throttle cable mysteriously shrunk about two inches, causing a lot of bad language and a general disassembly; the trouble eventually proved to be the plastic tit guiding the slide’s developing a burr on its leading edge, hanging up said slide about halfway down. The Bing is very sensitive to needle position, one notch being the difference between no power above 1500 rpm and well-nigh perfect carburetion and all I can say is that the Bing is a powerful improvement on the 250’s Amal.
All the battle is worthwhile when the Bui is finally right (or close to it) as the 350 engine is smooth, responsive, and provides enough unfussy low speed grunt in third even, picking its precarious way up through a trough full of baseballs. The remarkable thing about Bultacos is that they go precisely where they are pointed and do so without being deflected too much by natural hazards. Naturally the rather hard-mix Pirelli knobbies don’t give anything like trials feeling but a couple of semi-pros who rode the Alpina felt that it needed only a wider steering lock plus removal of some of the weight (speedo, light, an alloy tank perhaps) off the front end to be as near as dammit. CW contributor Chuck Johnston also had a bash, doing wheelies all over the place commenting that this was a real 350 Bultaco and climbed a couple of impossible hills to prove it, mentioning only on coming down that it was time Buis built a better rear brake. Well it does provide gentle retardation even if tending to go away after water splashes, the front one anyway working very well even for occasional road use. (The Alpina ain’t legal here without battery, horn, and mirror, and I think the lights are extra in the U.S.) The 5-speed gearbox shifts faultlessly from the left (thank you Uncle Sam) but can be modded to shift from the right for traditionalists; its normal knife-through-butter operation was marred somewhat by a sticky clutch which made getting neutral at rest a dodgy business. We have to look into it. Every Bul I have owned had a super clutch.
Well. Bultaco is a state of mind and my mind is very pleased with the 350 Alpina at the moment, thank you, as it runs sweeter than any two-stroke Ï have ridden since my old Mk 4 Matador. Power is abundant for anything besides half-mile as the torque curve goes straight up, and the Sherpas didn’t get their reputation for good handling from advertisements. Isn’t it comforting when the bike’s potential is greater than the rider’s? Who’s this guy Sammy Miller? g]
