Unfinished Project

 Unfinished Project. Shattered dreams and failure laid bare on a ‘well known internet auction site’ What starts out as a dream bike, more often than not, ends up desperately trying to recoup some money, trying to hide how much you have actually spunked, hiding those receipts from your better half and which is probably more telling, having to admit to yourself that you didn’t actually have the funds/acumen/skill/time/commitment to see it through.

     Hey, there’s no shame,there, I’ve had to bail a hundred times when I sat down in the shed, in the cold light of day and realise that I was in above my head. My ill fated dabble at racing bit me on the arse, I didn’t have the skill or funds to pursue my dream, my race MZ engines were £1400 a go. I blew,two at Snetterton one weekend. That’s big money. Keith Richard wouldn’t spend that much on coke. The BMW race bike was never going to be competitive, the bloke with the Laverda Jota, gixxer wheels, Brembo M4 calipers and wavy discs was always head and shoulders above a couple of wankers who liked engineering and building bikes, [to the rule book, which sadly seemed to get forgotten when the series ‘champion’ and all the money pumped in via sponsorship got the rules ‘massaged’]

 So, scanning the ‘net one night and I chanced on the fabled ‘unfinished project’ a Triumph Street Twin, the original owner bought the bike new and rode it for a thousand miles before deciding to build his ultimate machine, endless nights on the web, buying parts, stripping the bike doŵn to large component parts, a big stack of bits sitting in a [ may I say, a very, very nicely appointed manspace/garage/clubhouse] filled with expensive four wheeled exotica and classic motor racing ephemera]

 The bloke had stripped the bike down to component parts, four boxes of bits, but soon lost the impetus to to make his dreams real. He showed me the receipts for the bike and parts he had bought, bloody hell, serious mullah! He’d realised he was in above his head and decided to bail, unfortunately he’d already offloaded the Brembo brake conversion kit but the sum of the parts was more than I had into the 790 Duke so a simple swap deal was my offer which he jumped at. He gets a complete, running, mint bike and I get?well, I get a bunch of bits that needs bolting together.........