The Lost Specials

The Lost Specials

UP FRONT

David Edwards

WHEN IT COMES TO CLEARING MY DESKtop, I probably should subscribe to ol’ Floyd Clymer’s method of filing: When the papers got piled too high at Cycle magazine, he’d simply shut down that office and move to another desk. Unfortunately, we don’t have that much real estate at CW, so semi-annual excavations have to do. Amazing what is unearthed.

Cool custom bikes, for example, sent in by “American Flyer” hopefuls or just readers who know of my predilection for weird-Harold machines of mixed heritage. Buck Pilkenton’s café-racer of a different flavor could hardly be any better.

“The café-racers built in England in the Sixties have always been a personal favorite,” he wrote. “The Triton has been legitimized and polished into its own recognized breed, but then so has the cockapoo.

Few machines have rumpled the Queen’s tarmac quite like the Norvin, and here is my own take on the concept, the “Nortley-Fartster” (NORTon harLEY FeAtheRbed sporTSTER), a 1988 1200cc Sportster engine in a wideline Featherbed frame.”

Crossbred bike names do not get any better than Nortley-Fartster. Nomenclature aside, the N-F special is backyard engineering at a very high zenith, evidenced by its homebrewed kickstarter.

“Real bikes have functional kickers and no electric foot,” explains Buck. “One day I found a Yamaha RD350 lower end in ajunkpile.

Playing with the gears,

I found that some meshed with the Sportster starter gear. The drive enters the engine where the old electric starter did, so it is now kick-only. Sputhe compression releases were fitted to the heads-one of the very few jobs 1 farmed out in the entire project. These, with ignition by Crane and Nology, a couple of squirts from the S&S (the frame fouled the enrichener) and a full, determined push on the pedal will usually fire the engine in one try-unless, of course, there is an audience.”

Construction took place over a number of years: “I built the whole thing, machined and welded all the little widgets and doohickeys, plus adapted some existing parts which were never intended to meet, all done in my garage, a lot of it to the background noise of a Honda generator as 1 didn’t have electricity at my place for much of the construction time.”

Café-racers should function well out on the road, and the Fartster delivers, though it’s been very much a work-inprogress.

"It gives a very taut and stable ride, fine cornering, satisf~,'ing acceleration and

good noise,” notes Buck. “The last few years have seen little bugs dealt with and some improvements. It doesn’t get a lot of miles, but the end of every ride leaves me with face cramps from grinning.”

Nice job and well done, Mr. P.

Next up, a sweet Norton street-tracker

sent in by David Uden, a surveillance expert and homegrown specials builder from Omaha, Nebraska.

There’s nothing remotely undercover about his “Urban Commando,” though.

He started with a 1972 Combat 750 motor and the crashdamaged frame from a ’73 850. The latter’s bent backbone was straightened and modified to serve as the oil tank. A local plating company applied the nickel finish to stay with the dirt-track theme.

“I work alone in my basement,” explains David, “but my high school buddy, Fred Cuba, has a custom-bike shop in Hastings, 150 miles away. So over the winter, when my ‘real job’ of investigations is slow, I’ll go to Fred’s Speed and Sport and work on my projects. I cut, grind and turn; he welds, mills and bitches when I get his shop dirty.”

Uden turned over the motor work to Bill Reimenschneider, a farmer/hillclimber who runs Super T Engineering in Iowa and is the local guru when it comes to British motorcycle engines. Even with David and pal Fred doing the rest of the work, though, building show-quality specials isn’t a cheap proposition.

“I do the transmission work, wiring, blasting, polishing, etc.,” says David. “But on some of these projects, I feel like all I do is light $100 bills on fire and throw them, one after another, into the trash can!”

In typical specials fashion, Uden was non-denominational when it came to adapting components. “It uses 19-inch Suzuki wheels front and rear, 35mm Honda forks and front disc brakes, and a Yamaha rear caliper-all of which came from a local salvage yard, all of which were then turned, ground, milled and blasted beyond recognition,” he says.

Custom triple-clamps come from Speed and Sport, which makes them for the vintage dirt-track crowd. Fred’s also made the pipes, rear-sprocket adapter and 1.5gallonTrackmaster-style fuel tank. “Which, while looking great, has never made it past a gas station without stopping,” David points out.

What’s she like out on the asphalt?

“It handles well and stops on a dime,” Uden says. “It borders on loud but is not so obnoxious as to traumatize the public unless I choose to-and let’s face it, traumatizing the public is just not as much

fun as it used to be. Overall this bike was an exercise in ‘Can it be done?’ and came out very well. Most of my project bikes are ‘done’ within two months, and ‘really done’ over the winter and early spring, when it becomes time to

ride, not build. This one started in the fall of 2000 and was finished in the winter of 2001. I guess I sort of had to stop and catch my breath.”

Exactly my reaction, David.