BACK IN THOSE APPARENTLY GLORIOUS youthful days when we were all masters or mistresses of the universe, also impossibly vigorous, good-looking and quite possibly kind to animals, there was a great two-wheeled obsession with building specials. I even tried this myself, and several of my more spannery buddies built a few that were almost acceptable riding machines. Unlike my own attempts. About which I will never darken your lightness, because some things are simply too awful to see the light of day.
In case you’d either forgotten 1960s specials – or are in the happy position of being far too young to have experienced them – I will offer a few general thoughts. These are personal, based entirely on the genuine life experiences (or whatever we’re supposed to call them) of someone who passed his bike test in 1970, aged either 16 or 17, whichever was legal at the time.
Although the classic myth has it that specials were built to combine the very best bits from all manner of machinery in order to excel at competition, grim reality in my part of rural Somerset was that specials were built to combine mysterious confections of bits from crashed bikes (the source of engines) or
