Constructing one complete motorcycle entirely on your own, engine and all, would be enough of a challenge for most mortals. This would especially be the case if the result turned out as well as the vintage-era BSA Empire Twin M46 created single-handedly in Melbourne, Australia by Emu Engineering's one man band, electrical engineer Doug Fraser, as featured in the February 2023 issue of RealClassic.
That 30s-style tribute to the historic BSA marque, in the form of a rigidframed girder-fork 50-degree V-twin what-if motorcycle based on doubling up the Val Page-designed M23 Empire Star single which debuted in 1936, was Fraser's attempt to build a bike he wished the British firm had produced in the prewar era, except they never did. Its year-long construction took 1400 hard hours of spare time graft in between earning a living, and more than fulfilled its creator's intent to produce a practical, good-looking bike which moreover has proved thoroughly rideable. That's evidenced by the 2000-mile roundtrip shakedown ride that Doug undertook on the M46 (= 2 x M23 – geddit?) immediately after its completion in 2008. He rode it to the BSA National Rally on the Queensland Gold Coast at which the brand new bike won the Best of Rally award – an achievement equalled at almost every such event it's ever turned up at. Indeed, since taking to the highway it's covered over 20,000 trouble-free miles in the hands of its creator – so, job done, right?
Well, yes – up to a point. The trouble withbike that BSA ought to have made in, say, 1938, Doug figured he still had unfinished business with the British marque's postwar era. The 500cc ohv B33 model introduced in 1947 was BSA's sporting single, which in due course gave rise in 1955 to the legendary DB34 Gold Star that completely dominated the Clubmans TT races on the Isle of Man for successive years in the 1950s, so much so that they both essentially became onemake events.
