WILD STAR CUSTOM

FOR MANY FOLK, THE BEST WAY TO GET THEMSELVES STARTED WITH A CUSTOM BIKE PROJECT IS BY PURCHASING A PROJECT BIKE, REGARDLESS OF THE ISSUES THAT DOING SO MAY CAUSE…

– NO FRIEND OF DOROTHY’S…

Reasons for a project bike being for sale are many and varied, most of which can potentially become a problem – after all, they’re usually being sold as a project, rather than as a finished bike, because the previous owner’s run into hassles. Such was the case with the Yamaha Wild Star project Alistair McIntyre found on everyone’s favourite auction website…

The bike was a basket case: bare frame with an engine, no rolling gear, no bodywork, but he knew that from the start. What he discovered though, after he’d got his new purchase home (in the boot of his car!), was that the frame’d had its headstock removed, and a

Virago one badly welded in its place! There was no log-book but, after rifling through a box of bits that’d come with it, he found an old Irish ’plate and, despite severe misgivings, after some internet searching, found that it was neither a stolen bike, nor a write-off. Phew! He could happily now start the build.

Unfortunately, ‘happily’ isn’t really the word that describes what then happened

– not only did he suffer a massive mental breakdown, but serious heart problems too. His ticker was fixed easily enough, but he found himself headed down a dark tunnel to a place that was difficult to leave.

“There’s a perception that a breakdown can be cured with a few pints, a kebab, and giving your head a shake but, believe you me, it took a lot more than that to build my self-esteem back up.” Many BSH readers will’ve experienced the trauma of depression, and you’ll all be pleased to hear that with the help and support of his crisis team he was able to claw himself out of that hole, and once he could get into the garage, he found it was the best way to keep his worries and anxiety at bay, while also challenging him and bringing focus to his life.

While refreshing the engine, he decided to go a little deeper than just a bit of paint and polish, and fitted a big bore kit (1810cc, up from the standard 1602cc), Stage 2 cylinder heads, racing tappets/pushrods, new hydraulic cams, a 42mm Mikuni carb, a polished/ported inlet manifold, and a modified exhaust to allow improved breathing to suit the larger capacity and hotter cams. Feeding the mighty beast is a fast-flow fuel system with a Pingle fuel tap (instead of the original in-tank fuel pump), while the fire’s lit by relocated Dyna coils sparked into life by a Dyna 3000 ignition. Helping to cool the extra horses stampeding out of the air-cooled motor is a neat

twin oil-cooler set up mounted on the frame downtubes, all made by Al himself.

Wanting chunkier tyres front and rear, he fitted wider yokes (300mm between the centres) that also have an additional four degrees of rake, modified the swinging arm to suit, and offset both sprockets to allow the new, narrower belt to clear the new 240 section tyre. The rear sprocket was converted to run as a brake disc, using a neat outboard caliper hanger, and the forks had a complete overhaul with new springs and seals, and a Harrison Billet caliper on a one-off carrier. The petrol tank had the factory console removed and filled in, and the clocks were replaced with a digital speedo now placed on the bars. The rear mudguard’s a onepiece fibreglass shell supporting the main seat, and a new ‘halo’ LED headlight (taken from a Jeep) was put in place of the factory bulb type, and LED indicators and running lights were also fitted, with the standard wiring loom modified to suit.

With the fabrication complete, he turned to his good friend Colin Fitzpatrick, who owns Garage Artwerks in Northallerton, for the finishing touch. “I gave him some ideas from one of my nightmares, and he did the rest! It’s the Wizard of Oz, but Dorothy’s dead, along with two of her sidekicks, and the Wicked Witch, along with The Scarecrow, rules Oz!” The name emblazoned on the tank comes from the film, along with the famous statement Dorothy makes, “There’s no place like home”, except that Al asked Colin to replace ‘home’ with ‘hell’.

The final stage was to get the Q-reg from the DVLA. It was a daunting procedure, involving a lot of form filling, and an enduring hour-and-a-half long test, but in the end he was grinning all the way home, with the wind in his face, and a pass certificate in the bag! He says it was also a massive achievement from his mental health perspective, and the perfect follow-on to the therapeutic effects he’d got from building the bike. And now, of course, he can enjoy the well-known mental benefits that can be found in riding a bike too!