Someone gave my father an old VW when I was about five years old. Over a few years I watched him totally dismantle, clean, measure, repair and reconstruct that thing. My older brother’s friends started showing up on neat, wellengineered bikes from the Orient. My father’s appreciation for keen engineering overcame his wartime bias against Japanese and German products.
He helped me buy a Triumph Mountain Cub which seldom ran and allowed me to get this Honda Super Hawk at the age of 13 in 1971. While other bikes came and went it stayed in many incarnations and was still running when I left it in the weeds behind a shed. I just finished a building a Superhawk engine and it will be on road soon. They are fine and fun machines.
Ross Blake
This is where my interest in motorcycles first started. I’m on my Uncle Frank’s BSA B31 with my brother, Brian, on the pillion. It was taken in 1953 so I was ten at the time. Nine years later I bought another of my uncle’s BSAs, my first bike, a 1954 250 C11G. That was exchanged for a 1961 BSA A7 500 and in 1965 I swapped that for a brand new A65 Lightning. And I still have that bike today.
Ray Jones
In my teenage years the Melbourne motorcycle scene was concentrated in the middle of town, where you could find just about every bike shop worth knowing about. When I was 16 or so, I got a book out of the library about Brough Superiors and went away thinking ‘They sound interesting! I wonder if I could find one of them?’The next time I was in
