Here is a little story about me and my 1967 BSA Lightning 650. PART 1: I bought this bike sometime around 2008. It was the first motorcycle I ever bought and the first one I ever rode. I had just sold my '32 Vicky and I was looking for something a little bit different. I think right around that time I was reading Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs and Sonny Barger's Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club Reading those books, along with finding Dice Magazine, seeing vintage bikes at The Hunnert Car Pileup, the Rust Revival, and the H.A.M.B. drags really sent me down a rabbit hole of 60's style choppers. Through little research and a lot of lust, I decided to look for a vintage Triumph or BSA. I had been scouring Craigslist for weeks with NO results whatsoever. I think this was the year that me, Tom (53dodgekustom) and Alex (bobblehead) drove Tom's Dodge to the Rust Revival. (I'll try to find some pictures of that event to add here) I believe we were at the show when I was looking at Craigslist on what was probably my very first iPhone and I found a listing for a 1967 BSA with the tiniest, grainiest picture ever. I emailed the guy and was so nervous. It felt like it took forever to get a response, but it was probably only a few hours. I remember that communicating with him was kind of difficult and strange, but we were able to make a plan to pick up my truck on our way home from the Rust Revival and go out to this guys place to look at the bike. We rolled up on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and it was sitting in his front yard. My heart was racing. It looked SO COOL to me! I wanted to throw money at the guy, hop on it and ride into the sunset. However, I knew almost nothing about motorcycles, not even how to ride one. So Tom, being the good friend that he is, test rode it for me. He went up and down the street a few times. We had a little side-bar and he basically told me it was a pile of ****. That discouraged me, then he followed that up with "But its still so cool, if you don't buy it, I probably will!" That was the nail in the coffin for me. I had to have it. Me and the Craigslist guy struck a deal for the bike an extra engine and a trash can full of old parts. Here it is right after I bought it. Wow, what a mess! But it was my mess of a vintage machine! After I bought it, I got it running a little bit better. Almost crashed in my neighbors yard because I had no idea how to ride a motorcycle. But once I got the hang of it, I rode it around the block a few times to get it running smoother. Along with some mechanical fixes, I rewired most of it. The very first time I tried to ride it further than the edge of town, on my way to the Father's Day Rod Run in Highland, IL, It broke down on me about 15 miles from home; completely out of commission and puking oil everywhere. Over the next decade (and then some) I worked on it about 3-4 weeks per year. Those seemingly random months ****tered through a decade were usually fueled by a pipe dream of riding my chopper into The Hunnert Car Pileup that year, or ripping down the dragstrip at Mo-Kan another. - Side note* I did actually get to ride it into one of the last Hunnert Car Pileups after thrashing on it for a month straight. However, I was being pushed by Tom, Wes, and Johnny Sparkle. Ha! Sometimes skipping a year or more from paying any attention to it all together. Here it is at the 2011 HCPU next to Wesleys amazing Ford. Some people gave me a hard time about not working on it more often. Some people tried to get me to sell it. I'm sure most people thought it would never again see the light of day. But, I always had this vision in my head of the bike I wanted, however, the combination of motorcycle ignorance, chasing girls, lack of motivation, and dealing with normal "life" stuff kept me from progressing faster on the build. Those first couple month-long thrashes left me with a pretty cool looking rolling bike, but little progress was made for a looooong time after that. The super-long Fury springer I got from Craigslist on the original frame. I ended up getting a different (stock) frame because this one had a lot of cracks in it. It looks like so much more work was done between the previous picture and this picture, compared to this picture and what it looks like now. However, I ***ure you, all of the little detail stuff that happened AFTER it was a roller, took way longer than the big stuff like making the springer fit and putting the hardtail on. Narrowing the stock BSA gas tank. My old '79 BMW and the BSA Probably not noticeable, but getting this twin leading shoe Triumph/BSA brake drum to work on a springer was a little harder than I thought would be. I had to make sure the geometry of the brake stay was the same as the rocker. My wife Megan in our backyard. That's Joey's (J.Ukrop) old bike in the back ground! One of the many times I moved it from my house to the shop and visa versa. Stay tuned for part 2...
Thank you! Hey, take it from me, if you really slack off, procrastinate, and work on it for 3 weeks at a time, every 2-4 years, eventually you will have a finished bike! Haha.
I'll tell you this, @Nick32vic's BSA is the bike that got me into choppers. We've had so much fun talking and dreaming about this one-of-a-kind machine, and I'm so excited to see a build thread on it. Looking forward to the next installment!
Just now seeing this. Cool story, cool bike too! I have lots of friends that own British bikes, I've always wanted one but all I've owned were Harleys.
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