The Mongrel

THE MONGREL

American FLYERS

Ain't no junkyard dog

CABIN FEVER BROUGHT on by a Wisconsin winter can drive a man to do strange things. String three of ’em together, and who knows what might happen to a basement-ridden bike nut with a stack of old parts, some machine tools and a figment of his imagination.

Actually, in the case of professional machinist Peter Foster, we know what happens: The Mongrel, a melange of BSA, Norton and Suzuki parts concocted from Foster’s impressive stock of Beezer bits, a trip to the wrecking yard and some good old-fashioned horse trading.

Foster, 49, is a British bike fan in a dual sense, as in he loves Britbikes, and also hails from England. But he and his wife Moira seem pretty fond of the States, seeing as how they came here for a three-year stay.. .nine years ago!

While they’ve now settled

in Southern California, it was during their stint in the Midwest that the Mongrel was bom. Foster had purchased a large stock of old BSA parts, among which was a rigid frame of indeterminate vintage. The 1967 Norton PI 1 Atlas 750cc engine came from a friend through a parts trade.

While the frame was pretty fresh-no welding required-the Atlas powerplant had seen better days.

“The engine was in a hell of a state, almost like it had been stored in water,” says Foster. “So I did a total rebuild. The gearbox was pretty good, but I cleaned it up.”

Thus prepped, it was time to crossbreed engine and frame. “The hardest thing was fitting that big 750cc Twin in a frame made for a 500cc Single, but I did manage to squeeze it in after a few attempts.”

Foster could easily have

gone with a BSA front end seeing as how the bike uses thus-sourced triple-clamps, but there was method to the madness of using a latermodel Japanese fork: “Mainly, what I was going for was the disc brake,” he says. “The front wheel hub is actually a BSA rear, but with that big engine, I really wanted to be able to stop the bike. The fork is from a Suzuki GS something or other-I really don’t know enough about Japanese bikes to say what it was.”

Detail work on the Mongrel is excellent and the bike is covered with custom bits Foster machined himself, including the engineand transmission-mounting plates, the organically contoured exhaust brackets for the cool, mid-mount PI 1 pipes and the front disc-to-hub mount. Clearly, as snow fell outside, plenty of metal flakes fell inside his workshop.

Having originally conceived the bike for his wife

to ride (the reason the bike primrose yellow and uses ratherthan 19-inch rims), found that the clutch pull was too much for her, as the engine’s power. But that didn’t matter.

“It was quite rewarding make something out of pieces of scrap and make run,” he says. “I probably had more fun building it than I do riding it, although I do like riding it. I especially enjoy people coming up to talk to me, asking,

‘What the hell is that?!’ trying to figure out all the parts on it.”

You’d think with Wisconsin winters in his past, Foster would settle down and ride the Mongrel or his 1946 Norton Model 18 and call it good. Foster counters: “Actually, I’ve got two more BSAs in the works, one a Gold Star Catalina Scrambler.”

California sun can do strange things to a man...