BSA STARFIRE PROJECT

When a friend was in need of a suitably sprightly Britbike, Odgie sprang into action to build an affordable 250 Beesa. So starts another saga to resurrect another unit single…

When a friend was in need of a suitably sprightly Britbike, Odgie sprang into action to build an affordable 250 Beesa. So starts another saga to resurrect another unit single…

My mate Fiona is no stranger to motorcycles. When I first met her some 25 years or more ago, she was riding an 850 MK2A Commando Roadster. As her sole transport. When I tell you she is slight and slim, not much over 5 feet tall, and was also working as an ICU nurse (her shifts consisted of early mornings, late evenings and nights, sometimes all in the one week – and her bike got her to work throughout the winter, snow or no snow), you’ll be even more suitably impressed.

It wasn’t just a ride-to-work machine though; she’d be up and down the country to the big biker events, or across to the Isle of Man for the Manx or the TT. And when the Commando wouldn’t keep up with the big Jap fours of the National Chopper Club guys on their Bank Holiday runs, she bought herself an XS1100 lowrider off one of the local Satan’s Slaves, rigid frame an’ all.

Fiona is no stranger to mechanics either. Plenty of riders are daunted by four cylinders and overhead camshafts, but when the XS head gasket blew she bought a manual and some metric spanners and rebuilt the top end on the Yammie. But her true love has always been British bikes – even though she admits, ‘I loved my pre-unit Tribsa, and resetting the points in the magneto at the side of the road with a Rizla paper is just part of it. Although doing it in the rain too many times loses its sparkle.’

So, credentials firmly established. But Fiona hadn’t had a bike for some twenty years, having gone off adventuring, selling up and moving first to the Canadian Rockies, living and working on a buffalo ranch, and doing the whole real life Ice Road Truckers thing, snow chains on the ice roads into the mountains taking the tankers up to the well-heads where the pipelines couldn’t be laid. Followed by a few years on the vast plains of Kansas, breeding horses and driving huge tractors with 40 tons of grain trailer behind across fields you can’t see the end of, interspersed with regular spells spent nursing but also relaxing in the sunny climes of California, criss-crossing the States several times solo in her beat-up old pick-up.

Now living back in the UK, she kinda had a hankering to relive some of the old times by

getting another bike. But what...?

Brit bike it had to be, no question. A black MK2A Roadster is still one of her favourite bikes (along with a C-series Black Shadow – she has very specific tastes), but Commando prices are just stupidly stupid before you start putting right all the faults they inevitably come with. And truth to say she hadn’t gotten any bigger or taller in the last 30 years. So although she still manhandles Spanish Mustang horses daily, at nigh-on sixty, I suggested something a little bit easier to manage might be, er, sensible. Luckily we’ve known each other long enough that that wasn’t considered ungallant.

After some deliberation, we decided on a 250 BSA Starfire. Light enough to be user friendly, powerful enough to give some degree of excitement when you hit the gas, reasonably cheap and plentiful spares, and still not ridiculous money. The hunt was on...

In truth the frame took a lot longer to find than I’d hoped, despite all my connections with various BSA people. But eventually some expert wheeling and dealing by my very good friend Paul Wilkinson from the BSAOC turned up this frame and associated bits and pieces. Eyes down, here we go

There are two ways to go about building a bike. One is to buy something complete, then sell off all the standard bits. This can work well if you can find something cheap enough – you can hear it running, and you’re not chasing round for all the kazillions of fiddly bits and pieces. The other is to buy an engine and frame and start from scratch. I couldn’t find a donor bike in my price range, but I did come across this engine on ebay at handy money. Supposedly rebuilt. We shall see...

Anyone got the faintest idea why BSA put these lugs on the headstock? Presumably for some sort of fairing for racing, but on a road-going 250...? Doubtless the Real Reader will inform us later Surprising how much ‘junk’ there is on a standard frame. Build enough bikes and you get a regular reward when you cash it all in at the scrapyard The ever-helpful Paul again came up trumps with a set of ex-wd Marzocchi alloy yokes for the project. They just need stripping and, er, fettling... Paul also loaned me a cut-off headstock. Since the lathe I borrow is in the next village, it saved me hauling the full frame around while I was making steering parts Luckily the stem was the right sort of length. So that saved me making a new one, and a pair of top-hat spacers machined up on the lathe adapted them to the BSA bearings quite nicely I was stuck for a dust shroud though (see ‘kazillion bits and pieces’ in the first caption...). But an old rattle-can lid proved to be just the very thing...