Mixing trades
Who would have thought that woodworking skills would come in handy for an enthusiast rebuilding a motorcycle? Not very often, I grant you, and this is probably only the third time in 45 years of working on my own solo motorcycles that I’ve had to resort to the skills I learned as an apprentice joiner, to make bits for one of them.
The first time was to make a new chainguard from a bit of scrap aluminium sheet – a mate had just cut a new panel for his Lotus 7 and had some scraps the right size – all I needed to do was dress a piece of staircase tread to flatten off the nosing and form the sheet around the wood.
The second go was a lot of years later, when a discussion during a barbecue on competition vehicle – car, motorcycle etc – weight saving by using aluminium instead of steel ended up with me forming a wooden buck for my talented sheet metalworker friend to make a smaller petrol tank for my
