FLAT-OUT FLAT-TRACKER
Although it obviously pleases me when people like my bikes, any outside appreciation isn’t why I build them. I build my bikes to please myself. In fact, I build my bikes to impress myself. In my head, I’m still the enthusiastic but unskilled teenage kid throwing junk together in his dad’s garage. I did up my first bike in 1965 when I was eleven, built my first chopper at 17, and I’ve never really stopped cutting bikes up since. And I still feel like that kid.
Despite 50-odd years of hacksawing and spannering, moving on to welding and fabricating, moving on to designing and constructing, even starting my own bike-building business, until in the end I could create a complete motorcycle from simply bits of an engine and a large pile of scrap steel, I still don’t actually feel like any sort of skilled or talented person. I just get driven by what’s inside me to mess about with metal.
So after I’ve been sucked into another whirlwind of relentless building, after the grinding dust has settled, after the maelstrom of fervent activity finally dies away, and I stand back and look at what’s appeared in front of me, I’m still somewhat astounded. And indeed impressed. How could a kid with a few hand tools and some old bits of metal manage
