Back Street Heroes December 2022

Hello, and welcome to this, the new issue of BSH – the first one, perhaps, of the winter of ’22/23. I say ‘perhaps’ because, what with the way we’ve bolloxed the climate, no one quite knows, these days, where autumn ends and winter begins. The seasons’re so confusing nowadays – autumn used to be September and October, but now is just October; winter was November to the end of February, but now seems to be December ‘til mid-March; spring appears to be from mid-March to June; and summer’s now June ‘til October. As I write this in mid-October, the nights, and early mornings, are getting fresher (as in ‘feckin’ nippy’), the leaves on the trees in Thetford Forest just up the road from the BSH Editorial Hovel’re turning the most…

This, I will admit, amused me as this particular individual (stop asking, I’m not going to name them) is one of the great rebels of our generation, and for him to boycott a bike ’cos it’s a bit more minimal, a bit more impractical, just seems a little out of kilter. Mind you, he also rejected the bike that won Butchered Classic ’cos it didn’t have a rear mudguard so at least he’s consistent in his opinions, isn’t he? The thing is, these days, bikes, choppers, without front brakes aren’t anything out of the ordinary, and the new/old-skool chopper mob ride ’em many, many miles without issue and, besides which, this particular bike, while not having an actual front brake, does have, if you look, a front brake lever and,…

You might know, or recognise, Sandy’s name from the bikes and trikes he’s had featured over the years, of which there’re many, or have seen him aboard one or other of them at rallies like the Farmyard, Stormin’, etc., but you probably don’t know that he’s long had a fascination with olde-worlde engineering, and alternative fuels (he built a diesel chopper for example, which he still has, donkey’s years ago). About four years ago, after, as I said, a lifetime of building chops, he decided he was going to create a coal-driven steam bike as, as far as he was aware, no one else in the world’d done so. There are other steam bikes, of course, and you can easily find them on YouTube, etc., but they’re either gas-powered or…

During lockdown, I managed to do two bikes for myself (a homage to the two-strokes of my youth: a Suzuki GT750 engine in a Yamaha FZR1000 frame with modern running gear, and the hand-built billet Twin Cam that won Best Engineering in last year’s BSH Championship), and towards the end of it I got a phone call from a bloke named Nathan who explained he’d got a bike he wasn’t happy with (it was leaking oil, and didn’t look how he wanted it to), and asked if I’d take it on. I went to have a look, and in his garage was this very sorry-looking hardtailed 883 Sportster that he wanted completely rebuilt to look like an old-school flat-tracker-cum-board racer. It’d originally been built in 2012 by Chris Woodage, and…

Trained as an aircraft tech before he joined the Royal Marines back in 2009, he’s worked on, and ridden, sports bikes for years but, as it says in the Epistle to the Corinthians in the King James Bible, ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things’ – it was time for him to move on to more grown-up things (and, also, that rugby club in Leeds’ been around for a lot longer than I thought it had). He looked at various potential powerplants, and what people’d done with them, and came to the conclusion that an XS650 motor, Yamaha’s venerable Eighties twin, was probably his best bet,…

Funnily enough, it turned out that three of the six winners, when the information came to light later, were painted by the same person – Dave Bristow at Xtreme Paint Studio out in the Fens near Wisbech: the amazingly photorealistic Marvel superheroes paint of Steve Smith (round one); the very neat Sportster owned by Sharon Branston (round four – the Rock & Blues); and his own Fat Boy (round six). That’s not to say that the competition wasn’t strong. Frenchy’s Sporty, Malc from NCC Oxon’s Japanese-style GSX, and the quite stunning, incredibly involved AP Customs-painted Hayabusa of Matt Warner were all beautifully crafted, and all worthy round winners. As with Tony Black’s quite, quite stunning Lord of the Rings H-D last year, the overall winning bike isn’t, in the grand…