Purists - Look Away Now!

A friend in need needs help indeed. Richard Negus has just such a friend, and solved his affliction…

There is a gentleman, not far from here, who knows when he’s beaten and isn’t afraid to admit it.

He purchased a US-import BSA Thunderbolt, missing more than a few items, and started on a rebuild to while away the idle hours. Time passed oh so quickly. He realized the job was becoming more taxing, and that his enthusiasm to see it through to the bitter end was definitely waning. He pleaded for me to get him out of the mire.

So for the first time in my life, I had a BSA twin in my workshop, complete with Parts List, workshop manual, and a big box of odds and ends. The request was to make it into a working, road-legal bike, not necessarily of the original specification, but ‘use your imagination’, ‘do what you think’, etc…

Frank (you guessed?) had already fitted a pair of braced black alloy handlebars and bought a complete exhaust system for a Firebird Scrambler (the one with two silencers on the left side of the bike) so a scheme that came to mind resulted in this sketchy master plan. Frank wasn’t even quite sure what color it should be, but a quick flick through the RAL Classic color swatches at Stafford convinced him that it should be semigloss red, and bright.

Recent bad experiences with paint sprayers who couldn’t paint to an acceptable standard and chrome platers who had no idea of time scales helped me decide that I’d have no more truck with sprayed paint or, even worse, chrome plate.

First job for me was to determine whether the engine was likely to run. It had some compression but there was no oil, anywhere – not even in the forks! Taking off the frame and engine sump plates revealed only treacly sludge and no bits of metal. That’s always a good sign.