T-BIRD BOBBER –RAT BIKE MADE GOOD…
IT’S RARE THAT WHEN I POP DOWN TO SO LOW CHOPPERS THERE ISN’T SOMETHING BEYOND COOL TO POINT MY CAMERA AT FOR BSH, AND THIS VISIT TO DO JONNY’S T-BIRD TRIUMPH IS A CASE IN POINT.
The bike, a ’61 Thunderbird 650, was originally bought by Jay there from a mate of his, Billy Whizz. It’d been chopped years back, and had a bit of history with the shop already as it used to stand in the container at the back of So Low years ago when it belonged to a guy called Rene. He’d sold it to Billy at some point, but it hadn’t been on the road (legally) for 15 years or more.
When Jay bought it, it was pig-ugly (Jonny and Jay’s words), and he was just going to use it as a ratter, but the more he used it, the more bits broke (thanks to 1970s chopper building skills), and so he ended up, basically, starting again from scratch as it’d be quicker (and safer) than trying to fix it. Good job too really – just before he started, the oil tank fell off, as did the rear mudguard. The frame was so long at the back that it just looked wrong, so Jay cut it up one afternoon, shortening it three inches to get the proportions right. He didn’t do anything fancy as it was just meant to be a hack to use when he wasn’t riding his gorgeous Shovel chopper
(an ex-BSH cover bike), but ended up replacing the rear ’guard with a Manta
Ray one from Lowbrow Customs as it’d snapped, and the mounts for the very cool original ’70s hexagonal oil tank were so bad they needed redoing too. He chucked on an old Wassel tank that they’d taken off an old chopper a few years back and, satisfied with his handiwork, rode it around for a bit.
The single carb motor, though, was as smoky as hell, and rattled like Granny’s false teeth in a tin cup, but he thought, or hoped anyway, it’d last the season. It did for a while, but once it started to burn more oil than fuel he decided to strip the top off and found a cracked barrel, no big end shells left at all, and knackered valves and guides… as Andy P from
Pacoima M/cs said to me when they rebuilt the absolutely worn out engine of my 45, “it just goes to show how strong those old engines are” because, really, the
T-Bird (and the 45) shouldn’t’ve run at all, let alone as well as it did. There was nothing for it but to rebuild the motor with a new sludge trap, new big ends,
LF Harris barrels n’ pistons, bigger T120
Bonneville bigger valves, a re-faced head, and all new… well, everything really.
It’s at this point that Jonny, the current owner, comes into it. Working at the shop (he’s no mean mechanic/ fabricator in his own right), he’d watched Jay re-do the Triumph, and’d fallen in love with it. He bugged Jay to sell it to him until he finally gave in and sold it, and immediately set about making the old Trumpet his bike (rather than Jay’s old one). He’s a self-confessed shine fanatic so he re-made the electrics box out of stainless, and mirror-polished it, took the makeshift exhausts Jay’d made, and refinished them, blending in the welds, and polishing the hell out of them. He and Jay also made up a new sissy-bar from off-cuts they had lying about, and he changed the ’bars for some narrow 10-inch apes from Westland Customs, and set about cleaning everything up, and polishing the engine cases and the forks.
And although it is now properly bling, like all So Low bikes, it wasn’t built to be a show pony. No, Jonny rides it to local shows and bike nights, and uses it to go backwards and forwards to work (not every day, but often enough). As I said, he quite likes polishing and so doesn’t worry too much about his alloy n’ stainless getting a bit dirty, and he’s not too worried about smoking about on a 60-year-old engine either – one night while on his way to a bike night at the Route 11 Diner near Attleborough, the rotor welded itself to the stator. He got it home, and put a new rotor and stator on, but couldn’t get an even air gap between the two so had to machine the stator posts down a bit… like I said, not precious, not fazed, just how you should be really.