HARD LABOUR...
Back Street Heroes|October 2020
AFTER MESSING ABOUT WITH MOTORCYCLES FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER, I DECIDED IT WAS TIME TO ADD LOADS OF STRESS TO MY LIFE BY BUILDING MY OWN SO, ARMED WITH A DISC-CUTTER, A LARGE HAMMER, AND A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE, THE PROJECT BEGAN….
JIMY, NCC LONDON
HARD LABOUR...

Looking back on it, I really should’ve bought a donor bike, and used that as a base, but I didn’t… hence the saying, ‘We live and learn’. I found an old hardtail frame for sale on a popular auction site for just forty quid, but it really wasn’t great – the chap I got it from’d left it outside for years, and it’d been covered in some form of hard-coated plastic at some point in its life. It was pretty nasty, and the gentleman didn’t have a clue who’d built it originally or for what engine it was for – all he knew was that it was from back in the 1970s (and it was only £40!). I wasn’t really too worried as I was confident I could make this battered mess into some form of motorcycle.

Still full of enthusiasm I started searching for an engine. I didn’t really have too much of plan as to what sort of engine, I figured I’d know when I saw something suitable. Once again on the very same auction site, I found a complete engine from a 1980 GS550 Suzuki for not a lot of money, and bought it. Like the frame, it’d been stored (‘stored’? Abandoned!) outside, and was just a big ball of aluminium powder. It wasn’t seized though so that was a good start so, undeterred (and still confident), I took this pile of scrap home.

This story is from the October 2020 edition of Back Street Heroes.

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This story is from the October 2020 edition of Back Street Heroes.

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