Take a bycicle and add a new fangled internal combustion engine to it and the motorcycle is born. Fast forward about 100 years and behold the Philips Panda. The Panda being a close relative to that original concept was little more than a bicycle with a small wheezing 2 stroke engine attached. However unlike a real live panda it was neither cute nor cuddly. I rode this inadequate contraption, through all weathers, over the handful of miles between my home and my place of work. It had a habit of dismembering it's exhaust on route and I spent many a cold, dark winters morn scrabbling about trying to find some indespensible part of the silencers anatomy. A baffle here, wingnut over there, end cap in a hedge. Trying to reassemble the hot parts in the dark with my limited mechanical knowledge was a challenge one could happily exist without. It's hard to remember that, in these days of universal car ownership, a small motorcycle was seen as a viable means of everyday transport for several decades after the war.
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