Vendetta Vincent

VENDETTA VINCENT

CW READER' COLLECTION

A Black Shadow built for two

FUNNY THING, FATE. PAUL Zell, speedboy CBR600 owner, falls in with a bunch of classic bikes on a breakfast run a few years back, likes the action, decides what he really needs is an A65 BSA. He scans the want-ads, locates a likely candidate, only to find it’s a Hornet off-road model. Not interested. Well, says the seller, I do have this Vincent basketcase...

Turns out to be a 1952 Black Shadow with a tale to tell. In the late ’50s, so the story goes, George Disteel’s only son offed himself while haring around on a Vincent. In an effort to make the San Francisco Bay area safe from the evil British brutes, Disteel-hereafter known as “Crazy George”-goes on a vendetta, buying up as many as 19 Vincents and squirreling them away.

“He’d put them in chicken coops, bams, caves, wherever, then nail the doors shut,” recounts Zell.

Crazy George’s eccentric old heart ceased beating in 1979, and there being no will or next of kin, an auction was arranged to dispose of his far-flung estate. Seventeen years and numerous owners later, several boxes’ worth of Black Shadow ended up in Zell’s living room.

“The big problem was that the bike had been broken down to its spoke nipples,” he says of the 11/2-year restoration. “Plus, I’d never really seen an assembled Vincent up close.”

Parts were another problem. “When you order something for a Vincent, it’s never a perfect fit,” the 41-year-old laments. “You pretty much treat it like raw material-you know, chuck it up in a lathe.” Zell ran the completed bike as a solo for a while, then came across a sporty little sidecar body left languishing in storage for 15-20 years. Obviously British, the rig had no known maker, was badly corroded and without chassis, but Zell saw its torpedo shape, wooden ribs and Brooklandsstyle windscreen as a perfect fit for the Vincent. And for his fiance Julie, partially paralyzed after an auto accident 10 years before.

Armed with old sidecar books and the advice of friends, Zell cobbled up some steel tubing, a Triumph wheel and a hidden Harley Softail shock into a pretty effective outfit, pulled along quite nicely by all that Stevenage locomotion.

“It’s the styling, the aesthetics, the character of old bikes that drew me in, but what keeps me in is being able to use my skills to work on, modify and improve them,” says the man whose current project is fitting a covert electric starter to his Velocette Thruxton.

Julie, meanwhile, has a project of her own. Deep into physical therapy, she vows to set the couple’s wedding date only when she can walk herself down the aisle.

You can guess the honeymoon vehicle.

—David Edwards