The Fredder
Nowadays the term ‘Bobber’ has become as ubiquitous as café racer or street tracker, with manufacturers jumping on a potentially profitable bandwagon. But Fred Walmsley, 71, is old enough to remember genuine Bobbers first time around, when they were created in the USA post-Second World War.
After toying with the idea of building one for 50 years, he’s finally gone and done so in the well-equipped workshop attached to his farmhouse on the edge of the Lancashire fells. Except it’s not a Bobber, it’s The Fredder – as in, built by Fred, not Bob, using an array of Norton parts to create a cut-‘n’-shut, street-legal, vintage racer with heaps of attitude.
This Anglo-American concoction sits well with the 1952 straight-six, ¾-ton Chevy pickup it shares the Walmsley farmyard with, or the 1931 Model A Ford hotrod nestling in a nearby stable that’s been channeled and chopped to produce a totally authentic 5.7 litre flathead V8 speedster.
Yet Walmsley – aka ‘Kentucky Fred’, on account of the KFC franchises in nearby Blackburn that he made a good living from before selling up to concentrate 100% on fettling motorcycles of a certain age – is best known for the succession of Manx Norton and Matchless G50 classic racers he’s furnished over the past 25 years. Barry Sheene, Wayne Gardner, John McGuinness and other stars past and present have all ridden Fred’s bikes. Together, they’ve won dozens of historic races around the world from the UK to Australia with Walmsley-prepped bikes, all of which were prepared in that same farmhouse workshop. But this isn’t a racer, so what’s with the Fredder, err, Fred?
“I’ve always liked building stuff like this,” admits Walmsley, “ever since the early 1960s when at 14 years old I built what you’d now call a mountain bike out of my pushbike. My mum has a picture of me with this creation, complete with wide handlebars, moped wheels, big tyres and stuff like that. I had it in my mind for a long time to build a Bobber-type hotrod to ride around on, but it wasn’t till I came across an ideal donor bike that I finally got going properly on it, about two years ago.”
