Master creator
It’s not restoration, it’s re-creation – or perhaps even creation. At least it is where mechanical guru Allen Millyard is concerned. For 25 years, this master of spanners has created some of the wackiest, most ambitious motorcycles in the UK, all within the confines of a single car garage attached to his 1985 semi-detached house. Allen’s creativity has spawned a YouTube career, as well as television appearances, plus he’s some thought on Britain’s education system and, in a departure from his often Japanese-based projects, he’s gone British and built a very special Velocette.
The first YouTube video ever was posted on April 24, 2005, at 2:17:12am. It was called ‘Me at the Zoo’ and showed YouTube’s founder Jawed Karim talking about elephant trunks. Now – almost 15 years later – it hosts as many as 1,300,000,000 videos with a revenue of $15 billion last year alone.
YouTube has made millionaires of stay-at-home mums, children and even pets. Among these ‘stars’ is an LA-based mortician who answers all manner of questions about human decomposition; a man who sits in a room for four hours smiling; and – most importantly for us – Allen Millyard, whose two-wheeled creations have garnered hundreds of thousands of views on the channel.
And it’s not hard to see why: there’s a touch of wizardry to Allen’s creations – a six-cylinder Kawasaki Z1 had 580,352 views, and the start-up of the ‘Flying Millyard’ five
