Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Shakespeare cautions, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”** Easy advice when you’re neither a borrower nor a lender. But I’m a borrower, and using the simple formula, my income times my debts divided by my wife, I cannot get another motorcycle.

As soon as being short of funds stops a motorhead from dreaming about his next vehicle, let me know so I can stop breathing–no sense wasting the effort since only in death does this ever happen. With leaves turning and temperatures dropping, it’s the perfect time to start fantasizing about that basket-case BSA, Triumph, or Norton you’re going to rebuild in your basement over the winter.

If ten skull-rappingly lucrative freelance projects materialize in my inbox during the next couple months, I’m going to hunt down a BSA Shooting Star. This is my pet resto quest for a few simple reasons: they look cool; they’re not stupid expensive like Bonnevilles and Commandos; and they’re lightweight–light enough, in fact, that my wife isn’t scared to consider learning to ride one because she can pick it up if it falls over. The overarching dream here is to get her motorcycle-compatible because only with the little lady on her own ride can a married guy get all the wheel time he really wants and needs.

Restoring a bike would be really cool in and of itself. Tearing apart and rebuilding a car is great fun too and a must, at least once, for any classics fan. Yet cars take up a lot of room, you can’t carry them down into your basement where it’s warm and there’s a toilet, and they have a lot of parts. A bike you can take down there in pieces and have a great time cleaning up the wheels and the frame, gathering missing bits, polishing and painting stuff, and ultimately mocking up a finished bike (remembering not to assemble the whole thing down there because you’ll have a miserable time getting it out).

If you want to learn to ride, why not learn the pieces of the machine as well? How satisfied will you be then, once the spring comes? So, search the ads, find a project, wrestle it home and start pulling stuff off and taking it down to your work bench. Oh…but clear this idea with the missus first. ;^)

**Actually it’s Polonius who says this, but I only know the line because they performed Hamlet once on Gilligan’s Island.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Motorcycle tales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.