Check mate!

Making a motorcycle is like playing chess: you need to think ahead, work out where everything is going to fit and visualise how all the parts will fit together.

Quite often you have to start with a vision of the finished bike and work backwards. This would be the case with my next project where I would be modifying the engine and needed it to fit back into the original bike, so any decisions I made during the engine conversion would affect how it all fitted together later on.

I was looking forward to converting my 70-year-old Velocette Mac into a V-Twin, and although it was going to be a relatively easy project