COMBINED EFFORT

During a holiday in India in 2018, inspired by seeing so many Enfields, I looked into buying an old Bullet and shipping it home to restore. What I discovered online made me think again because of the difficulties of exporting and importing, plus the duties payable. However, while I was searching I came across an unfinished project for sale back in the UK. It was a very low mileage, Indian- built Bullet which had lost its original 500 engine - but came with a yet to be fitted 650cc twin-cylinder diesel engine. I paid a deposit while still in India and picked up the bike, diesel engine and several boxes of bits as soon as I was home.

I regularly meet in the pub with a small group of like-minded mates to talk nonsense about bikes, cars and general nuts and bolts stuff. Pat Woolford is one of our group; a lifetime biker, mechanic and top notch metalworker. I showed him the project first, hoping he wouldn’t walk away laughing. Thankfully he didn’t and was keen to be part of our combined effort. The rest of the ‘nuts and bolts club’were intrigued too; it would give us something new to argue about over the pints. During the coming months we were asked ‘Why are you putting a diesel engine in a bike?’, the answer was always’ Because we can’.

From the start Pat and I wanted the finished bike to look like it was ’meant to be’, purposefully engineered, not whacky in any way. Part of this meant keeping the original Enfield frame unmodified, but here we hit our first problem when Pat noticed the front forks and rear frame were out