I BUILT THAT!

I THINK EVERYBODY HAS A LIST OF THINGS THAT THEY WANT TO DO BEFORE THEY DIE, A BUCKET LIST IF YOU LIKE. WELL, MY LIST DOESN’T INVOLVE VERY MUCH, BUT AT THE TOP OF IT WAS, AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN, BUILD MYSELF A BIKE FROM THE GROUND UP.

- SIMON HORSBURGH

I didn’t want anything fancy or radical – no nine-foot-long forks or two-foot-wide tyres, just something that looks okay, is rideable and, most importantly, a bike that I could stand beside and happily say, “I built that”.

Although I’d already altered several frames, adding mono shocks and/or hard tailing stock frames, I’d never started one from scratch so, a few years ago, I built myself a frame jig. Once it was done, there it sat for another eighteen months or so while other projects were finished. Then one day I thought, “If I don’t get on with it, it’s never going to happen”, and so the hunt was on for a suitable donor bike. Having a soft spot for Yamaha’s XS650 (this is my fifth) that’s where the focus lay, and I found a runner (bonus!) and just up the road from me.

Next up, the wheels – a pair of sixteen-inch spoked Harley wheels turned up on everyone’s favourite auction site, and they even had tyres on them. I used a pair of Bandit Twelve forks, and the basics were soon sat in my shed propped up on blocks.

An awful lot of measuring (and some guessing) later, I had some idea of what I was going to build. With the motor in the jig, and the headstock cut off a perfectly good frame, it was off down to Bodmin to buy some rather expensive seamless CDS tube from Phil at Walker Lines Steel – a fine man, and always willing to help!

One of the odd things about building a frame is that if you want the wiring to run through the tubes, which is just about the last thing to do on a build, then you have to think about that before you start doing any welding, and where to drill the holes, etc.