To all those bullet fans out there, one word to begin with, I love bullets and I am still a big fan of it, but the new enfield twin spark unit construction engine sucks.
so the story begins like this. I bought this royal enfield thunderbird of mine exactly 15 months back and I have done some 17500 kms on it. first the advantages, brilliant looks, excellent ride quality, cool mileage of over 47kmpl and nice power.
Now to the real crux of the stuff. to begin with I really don’t understand why the royal enfield company is increasing their production when they have no plans to improve on their after sales support even by the smallest degree. I am from kochi, kerala and here we have to book one month in advance to do the regular service.
It was a dream come true for me to buy this hunk of a machime as I love doing long bike rides, and I thought this bike would be my real wings of freedom. For the first 6 months all was well and good, apart from the not so nice experiences at the service station. then the trouble began. at 6000 kms I had to replace the rear break shoe, only the repeat the same at 14000 kms once again. the clutch cable gave up its soul at 9000 kms. the front fork oil seal was damaged at 12000 kms and again at 15000 kms. two times I had to push the bike in heavy rains due to electrical failure. add to it the fact no freelance enfield mechanic would even touch the machine and you always have to rely on the official service, which means you have to wait for at least a couple of days before they find time to take a look at your machine.
And now I have a real bad situation at hand. from the day one my machine was suffering from perpetual oil leak which was not solved even after 6 regular services. last week it got really bad I had to gate crash into my service centre because the oil level in the engine was dead low. and after 3-4 days of ’repairing’ I was told that there is a crack in my engine casing and the total cost to replace it will be 19, 000 bucks. and sorry, your warranty period is over and so we cannot do nothing about our manufacturing defect.
So that is where I stand, contributing over a lakh rupees for the royal enfield twin spark development programme. So whoever is going to buy a thunderbird twinspark, don’t say that nobody warned you. I just did.