SIX APPEAL

This stunning Honda Six tribute was built in just 10 months. In a shed in the UK. It’s stunning.

It looks like a genuine Honda Six, the ultra-rare six-cylinder race bikes made famous by great racers of the 1960s, but what you’re looking at here is a shed-built special that one man took from idea to running motorcycle in just 10 months!

Allen Millyard is an engineering genius who first had the idea to build his own version of the multi-millionpound race bike after watching Guy Martin parade an original at Castle Combe last July.

“I wanted one and having seen it in the flesh I had this idea of making one with a combination of an engine put together from recent units and the rest of the bike basically hand-made from scratch,” said Millyard.

“My original idea was to use a Honda NC23 motor but it was difficult to find a good one so I got a couple of FZR250R Yamaha motors and created the six-cylinder engine from those.”

Where the original Honda bike was a 247cc powerhouse, Millyard’s replica is a 374cc which means it’s wider at the engine cases than the original was, but unless you had both bikes side-by-side, you’d never know.

“I quickly realised that there are no plans that you could readily lay your hands on for the Honda Six though, which meant that if I wanted to build one I’d have to apply some lateral thinking,” said Allen.

“So I managed to get a lot of photos and took my measurments and drawings from that. It sounds like a difficult way to go about doing it but in fact once I had the photos I could scale up the measurements from there and build something that was pretty accurate and had the right proportions.”

Ten months after having the idea, the beautiful motorcycle was fired up as a completed bike for the first time at the 38th Carole Nash International

Classic MotorCycle Show at Stafford in April. If you’d like to see the video of that world first go to: www.MoreBikes.co.uk and search ‘Millyard’. Not only is there a great video of the bike firing up on the site but there’s also a completely free ringtone for your phone, too.