Our Bikes: MCN’s Simon Relph’s home-built T110 Desert Sled
‘I couldn’t afford a Triumph T110 Desert Sled so there was only one thing to do... build my own’
I always loved the story about Johnny Cash building his Cadillac by taking home one piece at a time when he worked on the General Motors production line. Just like Johnny, I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford a T110 Desert Sled, but what if I started gathering parts bit by bit?
I’d cut my restoration teeth building a 1961 Triumph Tiger Cub TR20 trials bike some 30 years ago, but had always had my eye on its big twin brother, the Tiger 110. Fate intervened when I was giving a friend a hand to pick up a bike and stumbled upon a 1961 Triumph T110 bottom end. It was complete and the guy only wanted £20.
I vowed from the day I bought it that it would become a motorcycle again. My head was full of ideas; one of them was a Triumph Bobber, mainly because I love riding bikes with a rigid back end. This notion was soon shot down in flames when I found out just a frame alone was fetching around a grand. Somewhat out of my league.
So I eventually picked up a 1955 swingarm frame for £120, that was a bit more like it. I felt now I had a bit of direction with the project. My mate Tom Griffin has been building old British bikes for years, and has a huge knowledge of old Triumphs, so he has been a great help in pointing what parts can be used from other models when a problem arose.
With my fetish for dirt bikes and the love for some of the 1950s and 60s Triumphs built by their competition department for the International Six Day Trial, pictures of these and a head full of inspirational ideas, I was up and running.
‘The list never seemed to get shorter’
I wanted the bike to be lean and minimal. Just a BTH magneto for the ignition, so two HT leads and one single wire for the cut out. This was the sum total of wiring on the bike. Using only the best original Triumph parts available throughout, from the later 1970s type twin leading shoe front brake that went on my shopping list, along with the QD (quickly detachable) rear hub, to the Triumph Trophy top and bottom yokes. All nice touches, and things that would make the bike that little bit more special.
The shopping list never seemed to get any shorter, but to be fair to myself, I had only started with the bottom end of an engine. And that’s another story. I knew a little bit of the history of the engine, it had been used in a grass track outfit and only when fully stripped down I discovered a lightened/balanced crank and race cams. This thing had been a flying machine.
As this is how it came to me, I decided to preserve its racing pedigree and give it a good service with new bearings, shells and a bright, shiny new oil pump. The head and barrels were missing, so it was a no brainer to opt for a later 60s nine-stud alloy head, which with a bit of searching, turned up on eBay. My mate Tom put me on to a really nice later Triumph tank from a T120/ TR6 American model, only thing was I hated the badges that fitted it. They were nowhere near as nice as the old style mouth organ badges, like the ones on the Triumph 3TA, which as luck would have it, the curve of the badge matches almost perfectly to that of the tank.
Only problem, the screw holes are in the wrong place, which meant making threaded top hat inserts to weld into the tank. It was possibly
the worst day of my life when I had to drill holes into my brand new tank; eight in all as I wanted to fit the Triumph toast rack on the top of the tank. I know, watch your nuts! With all the major problems solved, and a colourscheme decided, everything came together quickly towards the end, with of course the odd teething problem. That was partly due to the fact that it had never been a complete machine before – the engine had never been an engine before either, just an amalgam of Triumph bike parts which had been manufactured over the past 55 years. So all the bits had to be introduced to each other.
All this effort has made me the owner of a one-off Triumph that suits me down to the ground, that no one else has, totally bespoke to my mind’s eye. I am chuffed with the finished product, it has had a few outings around the Lake District on VMCC runs and is the perfect bike for little lanes and mountain passes.
Is it good to ride? It’s the b ***** ks!