Paul's Rants - 'Bad' bikes!

We all hear the horror stories, you know the ones - 'I wouldn't touch one of them with a bargepole', 'Terrible machines, I remember my uncle saying a man down the road had one', 'They all go bang in no time', etc, etc. This just touches lightly on a subject which could be looked into much more deeply, but, in a nutshell, are many 'bad' machines as bad as some stories would have us believe? You decide!