RealClassic Magazine May 2016 Back Issue

For the first time in a very long time, I have decided to buy a bike as a project. This rarely happens. What’s more usual is that I’m offered some ghastly ruin – or I see a similarly ghastly ruin at a jumble somewhere – and my customary caution deserts me and I buy it, or more usually sanity prevails and I don’t. What is more usual is that I don’t know that I’ve bought a project until I try to ride the new machine. If you suffer through Tales From The Shed you will know what happens next. It takes a very long time, but usually I do get around to rebuilding them. Eventually. However, only rarely have I actively looked for a project.

Cast your mind back to the last issue. The cover bike was a Triumph, a factory custom TSX, and I liked it lots. So much so, in fact, that had the wallet been a little less anorexic I would have added it to The Shed’s fleet of elderly ruffians, but it wasn’t, so I didn’t. But I kept thinking about my all-too-brief ride on it. I did like it.

I know! (This is a lightbulb moment.) I’ll build my own. I should use a lot more exclamation marks here of course, but I am restrained by restraint. I could, I reasoned, buy a common or garden Triumph twin nice and cheap and convert it into my own vision of a TSX. And then, discussing this with Rowena, as is my way, we somehow decided that what we’d really like would be to build a tracker-style bike based on a BSA, an A65T, one of the very last. Coo! What a great idea. Buy a reimported rolling bicycle with an engine, and build it into something lean, black and mean, with lots of blackness, and rearset rests and wide bars and…