Home-grown
Poverty is no barrier to
building your own motorcycle, says GUIDO, but farm machinery and foot clutches
should be…
It was one of
many times that I had reason to question the career choice. Muggins, circa late
1985, was a staffer on Australian Motorcycle News and had just ridden the recently-purchased
Kawasaki GT750 to Horsham, in western Vic, to do a feature on a ‘special’.
It was a home-made machine with a Subaru boxer four car engine in it.
Now this thing was not an oil painting. It looked more determined than engineered.
For example the frame was clearly welded steel tube, but when I asked where
the steel came from, there was nothing reassuring in the answer. I was hoping
for “Reynolds tube, number #”, but got a long and weird list of failed
farm machinery that was far from reassuring. Terms like “harvester”
and “Massey Ferguson” were in the mix. “Shed door” might
have been in there too. The conversation ground to an uncomfortable silence.
“It’s fast,” he offered, as a way to restart our chat. Great.
I would have much preferred, “It’s as slow as a wet week and probably
won’t start.” Now I was scared witless.
My silence was interpreted as acceptance (which has a fine history of being
wrong) and the owner decided to walk me through the controls. There was no gearbox.
“No need!” he proudly declared, “this thing’s got plenty
of grunt, but you have to ride the foot clutch (yes – a left-hoof clutch)
until it gets to about 60.” To this day, I’m unsure whether he meant
miles or kays per hour. I think it was miles.
So we got it running (I remember a knotted rope and a pulley being involved),
and after a few appalling kangaroo-on-steroids hops down the road while I got
the hang of the clutch, we went for a ride. At a time when performance motorcycle
powerplants were mostly up to 1000cc, something with the torque and capacity
of a car engine was unthinkably and stupidly powerful. Having it strapped into
some dodgy frame was just plain insanity.
It went like the clappers and had nothing we now recognize as handling or brakes.
Perfect for the mostly straight roads in the district, though I couldn’t
imagine tackling the twisties in the nearby mountain range.
Funny thing is, 20 years later, I’ve ended up owning a 200-plus horse Hayabusa
which, back then, we both would have considered weird and outrageous science.
It’s techno and Tainton-grown, is so much faster and capable than even
the wildest kit 20 years ago that it feels like it’s from another planet,
and I love it. Mr Horsham would have liked the speed but have been unimpressed
with the chequebook approach to tuning.
I had cause to think about the home-grown factor recently, while cruising through
a mag published for flyers of mostly shed-built aircraft. Mr Horsham was in
there somewhere, probably among the folk shown posing with their hand-built
gyrocopters. Mad and dangerous people (in the nicest possible way), all of them,
with a wild look in their eyes.
There was a whole tribe of these folk in motorcycling a while ago – I could
also tell you a tale of a VW-powered BMW I rode in Brisbane – and I’m
starting to wonder if they’ve disappeared off the landscape.
Maybe not entirely because, at the Ulysses AGM in Canberra, I tripped over a
likeable madman with a six-pot Porsche-powered trike that was clearly nut-built.
Interesting, but not as edgy as a two-wheeler with the wrong powerplant.
The problem home builders have now is that it’s pretty hard to define outrageous.
A 2.3 litre triple? Triumph does it. A Chev-powered cruiser? There are a number
of people who will happily sell you one, complete, and ready to roll down the
tarmac like a tanker in a hurricane.
Maybe my Horsham contact had it right. He said he built it because he initially
couldn’t afford a bought one and, even if he could, the project became
much too interesting to give up. At the time, he managed to combine poverty
with creativity to come up with something unique.
Is anyone else out there doing this? Let us know and, if you’ll let me,
I’ll come for a ride. But, please, spare me the foot clutch…
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