Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i Back Street Heroes

Knocker picked it up in one of his many deals as Lara needed something with a little more ease of use, and reliability, than her Harley, but was still a chop, but, sadly, it was in a lot worse condition than they’d been led to believe – the engine was, effectively, mullered and needed stripping and rebuilding with a host of new parts, and the carbs’d had it, and, in the end, he ended up pulling the whole bike apart and rebuilding it all from scratch. As he says: “It was made up of some lovely parts and looked great, and the guy was using it, but once you started looking a little closer…” He’s not kidding either – there really are some nice components that someone’d obviously spent some…

One of the effects I’ve personally experienced, and I’m sure a fair number of you have, too, is a complete inability to walk away from what you perceive (but invariably isn’t) as a quick doer-upperer – a project that looks kind o’ easy and straightforward, but really isn’t. I’m sure you know what I mean – you see summat that definitely has potential, and is cheap enough for you take a risk on it, so you buy it, intending to sort it out cheaply and quickly to smoke around on for a bit before selling it on to fund the next thing that catches your eye… or at least that’s the theory anyway. The truth is that you always, but always spend far too much time and money on ’em,…

I’ve been trying to get this Norton belonging to Dave, also known as Pigpen to his oldest mates (it’s a long story), photographed for BSH for what feels like years now after seeing it, and him, at an NCC Surrey show forever ago and, finally, managed to earlier this year. It is, I’m sure you’ll agree, worth the wait. Based around what was originally a 1959 Triumph T100 frame with a Norton Atlas engine in it, it’s evolved, as he says, into something much greater than the sum of its parts. The frame now is a one-off by the legendary Dave Batchelar at P&D Custom Bikes, and the engine’s from an 850ccc MKII Commando, made for one year, 1974, before the launch of the MKIII, with a single carb conversion…

The original BSA, the Birmingham Small Arms Company, was created in 1854 by a group of Birmingham gunsmiths, and began making motorcycles in 1910. They had a good run, making some of the most iconic bikes in history, right through to the company’s demise in 1972. Probably the most famous of these was the Gold Star, a multi-race winning 350cc or 500cc single built between 1938 and 1963, and many people look back on the Goldie, as they were affectionately known, with fondness. I must admit, having ridden the other Indian-made British-named single, Royal Enfield’s Bullet, I was kind o’ expecting something similar from the BSA, especially given its low price tag (prices start at just £5,499!), so was more than pleasantly surprised when the new bike turned out to…

VOL. VII, EPISODE IX When it comes to keeping them charged up I had two available options: a ‘smart’ charger, and a traditional ‘stupid’ charger. The first has the disadvantages of being far less smart than it’s made out to be, often confusing 12-volt batteries with 6-volt ones, and it’s not exactly confidence-inspiring as its identical predecessor burst into flames and exploded, so it never gets left unattended. As a consequence, the ‘stupid’ charger did most of the work, and all of the heavy lifting, or at least it did until its smoke escaped and it died (Fig.1), leaving me without a trustworthy charging method. From my limited experience of buggering about with electronics I was aware that the power supply (PSU) in a PC has three output voltages: 3 volts,…

First held in 2013 in railway arches near the Bike Shed HQ in London’s deeply fashionable Shoreditch, it swiftly outgrew that site and moved to the much larger Tobacco Dock in 2014 where it’s been ever since, rising from an original 55 bikes and 3,000 people to a heady 200 bikes and 17,000 people. This year, 2024, it was smaller, it has to be said, with fewer bikes and fewer people than in previous years, but that, it seems, is the way of things this year with most events, as in pay-to-enter events, being down on numbers as, I’m guessing, the cost of living crisis, as the media terms it, having an effect on people’s spending. That said, for such a big event to be down in numbers was, although…

IF YOU’D LIKE TO SEE LOADS MORE VERY COOL SCOOTER CHOPS, HUNT DOWN A COPY OF THIS: THE LAMBRETTA CHOPPER BOOK – 300-PLUS PAGES OF THE BEST SMALL-WHEELED CHOPPERS AROUND!…

Way, way back to the early 1980s Dale Reardon, the owner and builder of the work of automotive art you see before you, regularly used to visit a shop in his native Southampton called Parts & Power – a shop owned and run by a talented engineer and motorcycle drag racer called Nigel Patrick. An aspiring engineer and racer himself, he’d visit two or three times a week to try and learn from a master of the craft, and it’s to Nigel’s endearing credit that he not only tolerated this young guy who kept coming in, but also taught him something of his knowledge. Wind on many years, and Nigel’d upped and moved to the USA and set up Patrick Racing in Long Beach, California, building and racing Pro Stock…

Those five winners’ll go on to be the stars of the BSH stand at the Stafford Show in October, with the owners and the other half (or best mate) being put up in a posh hotel on us, and given scran, another trophy, a sizeable (both in dimensions and value!) voucher to be used with our long-term sponsors Zodiac, and whatever else we can find lying about that’s left unguarded for too long. We’ll show you the winners of the last three rounds in the next issue, no 487, out in October, and then the overall (that word again) winners’ll grace the pages of issue 488, out in November, for all to see. ‘Course, if you want to see ‘em before that, you can come to said BSH stand at…

We’ve all experienced this phenomenon at some time or another, and some of us’ve been victims of it. In 1998 the Leeds MAG Rep’ brought me a stack of figures showing how, under the two people running the Farmyard Party at the time, the event was earning next to nothing for MAG. I started investigating, and the people I was looking at started touring all the Yorkshire MAG groups to slap backs, make friends, and bleat that they were being victimised. It took me four years to get the proof they’d been ripping us off all along, but the facts, when I finally uncovered them, were unwelcome and embarrassing to those the offending parties’d duped, and their response was to shoot the messenger. So it was that I lost the…

The MT Heads MCC’ve existed in their current form for the last 19 years. They put on various events during the year, but this one is different – officially not a rally, they run the event as invite-only, and the reasons behind it are great ones… although it took me a while to find ‘em out. Y’see, as I sat and had a chat with Julie, Geoff, and Roy from the club, they insisted that, first, I partake in the club tradition of ‘The Drink of Doom’. Now, as anyone who’s tried it knows, there’re two ways this can go: you either sip it and potentially lose the use of your limbs and eyesight for six to ten hours, or you drink it in one and, hopefully, be pleasantly surprised.…

These are the words of Chris Cracknell from (near) Southend in Essex, ladies and gentlemen, and the bike you see here in front of you is that very selfsame BSA, almost exactly the same now in 2024 as it was in 1970. It was brought to my attention by, I think, Chris’ son, perhaps grandson, at the Bike Shed Show at Tobacco Dock in London last year as a genuine survivor of a bygone era of biking – the short period when, following the arrival of Fonda and Hopper’s seminal film on these shores, people customised bikes in a ‘Stateside-style’ rather than actually built choppers out of them. They were nicknamed ‘cowboy’ bikes, and’re probably the rarest of biking style, this being only the second one I’ve seen in… well,…

Backinthe summer of 2018, a guy arrived at Bod’s Custom Cycles with a box full of interesting bits: a very nice Shovelhead engine; a belt primary drive; a frame; a set of forks; a pair of wheels; and, mostly, everything we’d need to build a bike for him. Russ, my good friend and compatriot, began to build it up, and we soon found that it resembled some form of drag bike – a drag-style frame, Kawasaki three-spoke wheels, forks, and rear-sets, and the hugest slab yokes you ever did see. We talked with the owner about it a number of times, and did a fair bit to it, but it never really came to anything, and the bike build stalled. Then, about twelve months later, he offered it to me…

The Kings Lynn Crew’re a group of 15 who meet regularly on the first Thursday of the month at Snettisham Beach Bar, and meet socially on other Thursdays at the Union Jack in Roydon. They’re a subsidiary of the older and larger East Coast Harley Club, which covers… well, the East Coast of East Anglia (they meet, and hold their annual show, at the George & Dragon in Thurton), and wanted to put an event on in their local area, so approached the Gaywood Community Centre as a suitable venue. Word of mouth recruited half-a-dozen small stalls and auto-jumblers and, by utilising the facilities of the community centre, they were able to provide food and drink at very reasonable prices (and avoid the hassle of having to find available mobile…

PART FOUR I know, I know, I’m slacking – usually by this point in a road-test year, a press bike’s mileage is significantly higher than that. This year, though, I seem to’ve found myself racking up the miles in the van, carrying all that’s needed for the series of BSH Custom Champs rounds, traipsing round Cornwall (with the lovely Pam in the passenger seat) photographing bikes, or ferrying a mate who’d hurt his arm the week before over to the Hook Up so that he didn’t waste the £70 he’d paid for his ticket. It’s really not the bike’s fault, it really isn’t. Every time I’ve wheeled it out of the TARDIS at the back of the BSH Editorial Hovel (don’t ask, seriously, don’t ask), pulled the clutch in and…