Fisher King

After a two-year build, the mighty yamaha xv-engined fisher trike is ready to rumble – and we think you’ll agree it looks sensational.

- Chris Rees

How many times have we heard this story? A trike gets half-way through its build, stalls and then has to be finished off by someone else. Predictably, it would have been far easier to start from scratch but hey – it wouldn’t have such a good story to tell, would it?

So let’s start at the beginning, with the owners of this amazing machine: Mike and Jan Fisher. Mike’s an environmental consultant, while Jan works part-time in a school. They got into trikes when Mike suffered a bike accident way back in 1982, which damaged his left leg and meant he could no longer hold a bike up. As a result, he bought a hard-tail BMW 850 trike and used that for many years.

However, when Mike’s leg unfortunately had to be amputated in 2010, it was time to move on. “We wanted a soft-tail trike and decided to get our own built,” remembers Jan. “We bought an engine, front end and back end and we went from there.”

The trouble was that the trike only got half-built by the original builder, and not terribly well built at that. Needing help, the pair turned to Marc Quinn, aka Dr Q, a local custom bike specialist who normally works on HarleyDavidsons but also does custom builds, one-off fabrications and is a bit of a wizard with paint.

“It was a mess and the whole frame needed reinforcing,” says Dr Q. “There’s months’ worth of fabrication in this trike, from new gusset plates to frame extensions to all-new bracketry. We must have got through half a ton of steel in the end!”

The rear end is actually a TrikeShop item, which is superbly engineered. The trouble was, it had been incorrectly fitted into the custom frame. “It had been welded on all crooked,” says Marc, “and proved a very big job to fix.”