Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2025 i Back Street Heroes

Just before writing this, I happened to be reading an old article Jim Fogg’d written about the Kent Show back in the day, and it reminded me how much things’ve changed, and how much I miss all the interactions that’ve been ‘progressed’ out of our daily lives. He mentioned the banter with the bloke when paying at the Dartford crossing kiosk (remember that?), and it made me think of other interactions that’ve been taken away by progress; no more banter with the petrol pump guy and, rarely, unless you’re out with your mates, do you see another biker at the petrol station? Back in the day I lived in Sussex, and didn’t go to Kent very often because it was local and wasn’t much of a ride – it was…

IT belongs to, and was built by, a guy from up Norwich way called Clive, and has a history going back decades, four o’ them, nearly five, to be precise, although it didn’t always look like this. I’ll let Clive hisself tell you about it, shall I, seeing as he went to all the trouble o’ writing it all down? “It all began in about 1980, at which time I was a 20-year-old young biker with about five years’ experience riding 50-250cc bikes on L plates. I took my test, and got my full licence, and that meant I could step up to a bigger bike – back then the trend was starting to move away from British bikes towards Japanese ones as times were changing but, me being a…

AS it’s been more than half a decade since we last had one of his bikes in, I’d best remind you of something that’s really important about Carlos’ bikes: he’s not allowed, by law, to ride them. He lives, you see, in the town of Mortagua, hence the name, in northern Portugal, and their draconian, in comparison to the rest of Europe, anti-modification laws mean that his bikes’re just so, so illegal in his native land that if he were to be seen out on the roads on any of them by the local police force, they’d be well within their rights to confiscate it and crush it. Yet still he builds, knowing he can never ride them, save for when he takes them abroad for shows, and continues to…

The gentlemen who built it are the father and son team, Allan and Owen, of Legacy Motorcycles in Birmingham – the guys who built the absolutely beautiful gold Triumph chop that won Best Custom (overall) in the 2024 BSH Custom Champs. While I was there photographing that, they showed me the Beesa, based on a year-old (then) 650 Gold Star, and allowed me a quick spin aboard it to get a feel for what they think may well be the world’s first custom (modern) Goldie. The idea behind it, y’see, was to build a tribute/replica of the legendary Gold Star Catalinas of the late 1950s. “The wot?” you may be wondering. In 1956, a guy named Chuck Minert (yes, he was American, why do you ask?) won the Catalina Grand…

A good few years back, he was running a very tough FJ1200 chop, but’d gone as far with it, really, as he could, and was looking for a new challenge. Someone offered him a good price for the big Yam and, unsurprisingly, it became theirs, and he set about looking for a new project. He was offered, shortly after, the rolling chassis that would, eventually, become what you see here. It’d originally been built by NCC Devon Honorary Wellsy for another Devon member, Geoff, and’d been jigged and tacked up a couple o’ times before the style you see was decided upon. Sadly, Geoff passed away before it was done, and it sat in Wellsy’s workshop as a jacked-up rolling chassis for 14 years (yes, you did read that right…

Eee, hasn’t the world changed, eh? When I first started drinking (semi) legally, a beer (Younger’s Tartan bitter if you remember it) cost 79p in the local biker pub, and BSH was, I think, 95p. These days both a beer (well, round my way anyway) and a BSH cost a fiver each, but what would you say if we could do you a special deal, and do you a BSH at just £4.08 instead of £5.40? That’s a saving of (works out onfingers) 24% –nothing to be sniffed at! Call 01507 529529 and quote BSHDPS1 Online: www.classicmagazines.co.uk/bshdps1 or scan the QR code to go straight to our secure online store CHOOSE WHICH BSH SUBSCRIPTION SUITS YOU BEST 1: 12-MONTH SUBSCRIPTION BEST VALUE 12 print issues for £49 Direct Debit 12…

Before that, though, a word on the others in the fleet. TFB (The Future Bike) is still at Paradise Garage in Downham Market, just waiting for a few more bits; the Bandit chop went for, and passed, its MoT; the Hornet continues to start, run, n’ stop flawlessly; and the Spondon?… well, herein lies a tale. The frame of the beast has always been an unknown quality– given that it was originally built for a CB1000 motor way back when, drawing on my extensive knowledge (ahem) of streetfighter frame builders from the ‘90s, I had kind o’ narrowed it down to, perhaps, a Polygon (as in Polygon/PEST from Gloucester), having eliminated Streetfighters UK, Boss Hogg, and a few others, too, but then I was put in touch with one of…

DRAGON SOUL BIKER CAFE Dragon Soul, the springer fork specialists, have moved from their workshop in Telford to new premises on Forton Road in Newport in Shropshire (TF10 7JR), where they’ve combined the making and fitting of their high-quality springers with a really nice, modern, but relaxed coffee shop/café/shop that has a lovely vibe, and plenty of parking, and is a very cool place to call in at on a ride-out or as a destination in itself. Their coffee is excellent, and their range of cakes huge, and you can even discuss and get yourself one of their excellent springer front ends, too! Dragon Soul Biker Café ison07807 567397 or you can find them on social media. IS THIS YOURS? Did you send in a fiction story entitled ‘And There’s…

Like the pics of Juha’s bike, these were taken last February on mine and Pam’s trip to the far north (something I’m not entirely sure she’s forgiven me for as she really wanted to go somewhere warm for a holiday, not to a country that was -7 degrees C at best while we were there, and -25 at worst). She took these pics for me, too, as I was over the other side of the river from Sami’s workshop, photographing (another) Juha’s Shovel (as featured in issue 485), as the days aren’t very long that far north at that time of year. This’ere hardtail Shovel, of 1975 vintage, which makes a 1200 (74 cubic inch), was built by a guy named Jori Jantunen in 2019 and found its way to…

The Trip Out, you see, since it moved to the Euston Estate (that’s Euston, West Suffolk – not Euston-where-the-trains-are), is maybe eleven miles away from the BSH Editorial Hovel – so close in fact that I’ve been known to drive over on the Friday morning in the van to drop all the gear off, and then come home again to get the bike and ride back across (and then do the reverse on Sunday, obviously). It’s a nice run on the bike, too; across Thetford Forest with the sunlight dappling through the trees, skirt round the west of Thetford itself to avoid the town centre, and then a few miles along long, straight roads between fields of newly-harvested corn down to Euston itself – easy and largely free of trucks,…

He’d ridden down from The Smoke to Jimy’s in Zummerzet… sorry, sorry, Somerset on the hardtail Sportster Jimy’d built for him, and was riding back the next day – 150-plus miles each way; no mean feat on a bike with no rear suspension (especially on our blighted roads). I had indicated, a few days before, that I’d be happy to go to London at some point and photograph it, but Jimy’d laughed and said (something along the lines of): “Naa, the ride’ll do him good…” A couple o’years back Ron’d bought a Bandit 600 chop Jimy’d done. “I had that bike for a year, and absolutely loved it, but it was, really, a little small for someone my height and I was looking for something to replace it. In 2024…

Those of us older and closer to smelling of wee and/or mothballs may remember that, in the dim and distant days of yore, there was a British motorcycle manufacturer called Excelsior who made bikes between 1896 (yes, really) and 1965, and so were, according to that Wikipedia, Britain’s first motorcycle manufacturer. They had some successes at the TT back in the Thirties, never actually winning but racking up a string of second and third places, and, for the Second World War, built a 98cc mini-bike called the Welbike, a small, collapsible motorcycle delivered in a pod by parachute, intended to be used by paratroopers for… er, ‘rapid’ movement around battlefields (rapid obviously having a slightly different meaning then to what it has now). You may be wondering what all this…

With the rollers arranged on the Stirling board, I was able to work out what went where and then work out how to connect them. As I mentioned previously, I wasn’t in the mood to make a second large hole to fit the angle grinder, so I reused the arm I’d made. This was going to need somewhere for the handle to screw in, and a pivot point for the other arm. With that worked out, I cut out two further pieces of 5mm plate to make the required adjustments to the main arm, and welded it all together (Fig.2). The secondary arm was then a simple case of cutting two pieces of 25x5mm steel strap and welding them together to get the required 180mm hole centres, and to offset…

“DOING WITHOUT ADVERTISING IS LIKE WINKING AT A GIRL IN THE DARK. YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, BUT NOBODY ELSE DOES”STEUART HENDERSON PROFESSOR OF MARKETING Sometime in the mid-1990s I sent the mighty Honda a present. It was an advertising jingle written to the tune of the 1965 Beach Boys hit ‘Help MeRhonda’, but replacing the main lyric with ‘Get a Honda, go get a Honda’. Along with it I gave them a script for the TV advert I wanted them to run. It started with a handsome young guy pulling up on a Honda motorcycle at a nice suburban home somewhere in America, probably southern California, where, outside, stood another Honda. Out of the house came an attractive young woman in full leathers who proceeded to mount her…