Silver turns Honda parts into gold
The custodian of 1000s of hard-to-find spares, he is the saviour of classic Hondas
Meet the man who’s made a living from trading in the Big H
‘I took a chance, bought as much stock as I could’
‘I was a proper Del Boy, wheeling and dealing’
If you own an old Honda you will know the name David Silver, in fact his company’s phone number is probably on your favourites’ list. Established in 1986 David Silver Spares is the go-to place for off-the-shelf, hard-tosource and reproduction classic Honda parts. The Suffolk-based operation has grown to a £5million per year international business that now even incorporates its own museum, housing the largest collection of publicly displayed Hondas outside of Japan. And it all started with Honda’s humble SS50. “When I was 16-years-old in 1977 I bought myself an SS50,” David remembers, “which being slower than my mate’s Yamaha FS1-E, broke down a lot. After that I stuck with Honda and bought a CJ250 to pass my test on but, to be honest, I didn’t like that much either so then
I bought a Kawasaki Z400. I’ve owned several bikes that aren’t Hondas, including a Yamaha XS750 and Suzuki GS750, but Hondas are now certainly my passion. “After leaving university I initially worked for my father selling kitchenware but I also had a parttime job at London bike shop, Sondel Sport, working on the parts counter. “At that time I was trading bikes on the side, doing them up and selling them on, and I noticed a lot of dealers were trying to shift spares stock at very low prices to clear some of their shelf space.
“I took a chance, bought as much stock as I could and at the age of 27 formed David Silver Spares in 1986. “I took out adverts in MCN and people would send me cheques in the post or it was ‘cash on delivery’ – I was a proper Del Boy, wheeling and dealing out of lock-ups with no office as such. The business started to take off and two years later I got my big break. The Honda importer for Sweden went bust, and all the parts stock was bought by a company called Mocheck and then went to Fowlers in Bristol. Fowlers started to catalogue container after container of parts but then they lost the records in a fire, so were back to square one. I offered to take some parts so filled my car then asked the chap in charge how much he wanted for them. He didn’t even look at the car and just said ‘how much do you want to pay?’ I said £100 and he agreed. The next week I turned up with a van, which I filled for £150! Eventually Fowlers got so fed up with both me and all the stock hanging around they said ‘do you want the lot?’ and so I hired a 7.5-ton
van and did seven trips with a mate from London to Bristol back-to-back before they changed their minds! “That formed the base for my business and I think I’m still selling parts from that original shipment nowadays. With so many tons of stock I needed to expand and so took on a new unit in Kilburn, bought a computer and applied to take credit card orders and the business took off. We were constantly busy and eventually, in late 1988, I decided to move to Leiston, Suffolk. “I remember when we dumped all the parts in the middle of the Leiston building it hardly made a dent in the space but that quickly changed. Initially there were just two of us but then we got another member of staff and then another, and it snowballed into what it is today. “Nowadays David Silver Spares employs 26 people and has six phone lines open to take orders. We post items all over the world and have opened a similar operation in Pennsylvania, America. Plus, there’s the museum which houses more than 200 Honda models.
“If in 1977 when I was sitting at the side of the road with a broken-down SS50 someone told me I’d be running a multi-million pound business specialising in Hondas I’d have laughed. What David Silver Spares has evolved into would have been well beyond my wildest dreams.”