Expert ENGINEERING
Back in the late 1960s, those of us building bikes in the northwest had two great sources for spares. When we were building choppers, we went to Jack Bottomley’s in Manchester for T-bars, Z-bars, peanut tanks, metalflake seats and chopper-pot silencers. When we were building café racers, we went to Unity Equipe in Rochdale, for racing tanks, bucket seats, clip-ons, swept back pipes, short and long megaphones, and Goldie silencers in both right and left hand fittings.
Among all the generic café racer swag, Unity was well-known for supplying Converta engine plates, not just for Tritons and Tribsas, but Norbsas and Tri-fields (not as common but by no means uncommon). And indeed all the less-immediately remembered bolt-on goodies. Who recalls ‘bacon slicer’ wheel trims, the large alloy discs to enhance your front wheel? They were notionally to cool your front brake, but realistically just made a weedy 7-inch item look more muscular. Or the cooling springs that you slid onto your new exhaust pipes until they sat up against the ‘big fin’ alloy exhaust clamps, in the (usually vain) effort to stop the new chrome turning blue from the excess heat of
