The Thrasher. Volume 4. Spring 1983.

A galley proof!

When the package containing this issue turned up I was a little surprise to see the Red cover. It was unlike us to splash out in such am egregious fashion merely to sell the magazine, we were much more likely to steal your money and leave you a copy - black sufficed for this act of skullduggery. As I got into the scanning of the edition I realised I was looking at something of a pre-production release. The page numbers are all over the place, and page 4 is even missing. Actually, it's not missing, it just says "See Noticeboard". In felt tip. Tony has now supplied an impression of the actualy page 4. It didn't seem right to waste the bits, so I didn't save it, it suggests this is the actual markup copy, used to create the copy we then photocopied a million times (In our dreams.) This copy was on A4 paper, also suggesting that it had not been 'productionised' yet, it would likely eventually be copied to A3 sheets that had 4 pages. These A3 sheets would be assembled, then stabled in the middle to make the issue. This issue was also produced on blue paper, except for the cover, which proved to be a bit tricky scanning.

This was the fourth edition of the Portsmouth Polytechnic Motorcycle Club magazine. Produced in Spring 1983 by the Portsmouth Polytechnic Motorcycle Club, to entertain its many members.

This edition seems to have been put together by Editor Extraordinaire, Adam Overton-H, though I detect a good bit of input from Jane and Carole still. Tony, Adam P. and myself were all long gone by now, though we still submitted a substantial quantity of this editions stories and cartoon content.

Selling at 25p a copy, a trifle really, considering the prior Freshers copy had been 30p. Though this got you less pages.

The newly found page 4 images of Tony and myself, show us on a day we went out to see what lean angles we were really experiencing. Sadly, my efforts look paltry in the images, but still felt like the bike was a long way over. This is one of only a very few images of me anywhere on the website!

Maybe someone could fill us in on what happened with respect to the BMF (British Motorcycle Federation) affiliation that is mentioned on the back page?

This issue was one of several that Martin found in a closet and sent to me recently. I scanned it in using an Epson 1250 scanner, then edited the images in Adobe Photoshop CS2. I changed the image contrast, and scaled the images down to approximately 600 * 900 pixels.