The Thrasher. Volume 3. September 1982.

This was the third edition of the Portsmouth Polytechnic Motorcycle Club magazine. Produced in late 1982 as a club sponsored publication to make life more interesting for the student membership. This is the Fresher's Edition, created to help new students find their feet in the Portsmouth area, with respect to their motorcycling based 'lifestyle'.

This edition seems to have been generated primarily by Tony F. and myself, as most of the content was by us, with Jane L. and others providing essential backup. In fact this is Hedge Pig's very own copy (Tony, how'ed you nick it from her?)

Interestingly enough, I had left Poly by the time this was sold (left, booted out, what's the difference?) The articles by myself had been done the prior trimester, in fact I had created a large enough body of loathsome work that it continued to appear/dribble out for sometime! I was ribbed about the 'J and The Thrasher' cartoon for some considerable time, as it was assumed that "J" referred to my girlfriend. Not so! I maintained, but then I was a computer nerd and many of them were sociology students, so I guess they knew Freud better than I.

It may not pass with out note, that the Motorcycle Dealer section in this issue, while long, is no where near as complete as the Pub guide. Don't for a moment think that we were alcoholics... we couldn't afford to be! The Government didn't pay us enough Grant to be polluted in an on-going basis, so we sipped economically at many establishments. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. But we got around, finding hostelries in some fabulous locations

Of note too, is the cartography. Tony and Jane were doing Geoger's, majoring in Cartography, so they had a good old time creating maps. We never suffered for lack of maps at PPMCC!!!

The motorcycle engine logo was nicked from the pages of the old "Cycle" magazine, where it appeared as an advertisement, for some company selling oil, I think. We had used it previously, but this was the first big splash it got. It went down well. I think we even sold it emblazoned on tee shirts and sweat shirts.

Inflation must of been catching up with us, this editions 30p price reflected both the enormous size of this edition, and also the effect of continuing, though slowing, inflation in the UK at the time. Maggie had been in power for a couple of years and was reigning in the, under performing, out of control, economy.

Tony scanned this edition, though I have another copy, and may take the time to replace some of the harder to view pages (sorry Hedge Pig, you guide is barley readable.) Tony supplied an Adobe Reader formatted file containing all the scans, which I then edited in Adobe Photoshop CS2. I cropped, rotated, changed image contrast, and scaled the images down to approximately 600 * 900 pixels. I have also retouched some pages removing some scanning blemishes.