So cool it’s as chilly as a draft whipping down from Up North. Spindly sinewy muscle ready for a lightweight rip along the B roads on a June afternoon.
June 23, 2015
Cafe’d Cub
June 18, 2015
Monkee Man
The Nez: one of the sixties assembled pop groups to thwart Beatles domination the guitar singer songwriter Michael Nesmith enjoyed all things cool Californian. And that included his love for Triumph motorcycles.
Plenty of zany shenanigans on their TV show.
And that green wool bobble hat!
June 16, 2015
Ago
Today is the birthday of multi world champion Giacomo Agostini 73. 122 GP wins, of which 15 were championships in the 350 and 500cc class. He also gained 13 TT wins on The Island. A career spanning from ’64 to ’77 he is considered to be one of the greatest. He was the MV Agusta factory rider making good use of the superlative Italuan machine on tracks around the world.
June 1, 2015
Chuck Yeagers ride
It is known that Ian Fleming, the creator of none other than James Bond 007, also wrote the children’s yarn Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. A tale about an inventor called Caractacus Potts who took his children on voyages of land, sea and air in their old rebuilt racing car with speedboat carriage work. Well if you’re going for a two-wheeled version then a period Triumpg Speed twin is a suitable candidate; rocket powered too. Not steam punk more rocket-punk. 50’s style technology. Hey I’ve just invented a new genre…
Looks like Leonardo would have been proud of those wings! I believe the front mudguard registration plate holder acts as the vertical stabilizer… (Aka pedestrian slicer)
Concept art by http://www.leadinglightdesign.com
Side note: the original Chitty was a 20’s race car built by Count Louis Zbrowoski who used a Mercedes chassis with a 23 liter 6 cylinder aero Maybach engine…
… Just add wings!
May 26, 2015
Dune
“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
Frank Herbert
One of the greatest scifi books with far reaching topics of politics, religion, economy, ecology, and eugenics, its setting millennia in the future could be read as a shadow of the world today. Dune was published fifty years ago and is as fresh today as it was in the sixties when the environmental movement was in its infancy.
May 20, 2015
Oil
Liquid Engineering: gears, bearings, axles, bushings, pistons, pushrods, chains, sprockets, moving around, up, down, spinning. All to get the engine’s power to the wheel. Lubrication from oil and grease. Castrol was the fluid to use back in the day. Even for winners.
May 17, 2015
Emerald eyes are smiling
The Triumph Cub reached an important hurdle today and we leapt it with style. Fenders (mudguards) attached with relative ease, the front with nice tight clearance that a trials should have, and the rear trimmed down item giving a suitable tail to the proceedings. The tank and seat are just placed on for rough setup but achieve a classic balance to the project.
Lookin’ like a real bike!
May 14, 2015
Ernie & Edie
My granda would have been 100 years old this week. Here he is back in ’65 with my nana on my Uncle Dave’s scooter. The pair look so cool like Gregory Peck & Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday,
ROMAN HOLIDAY, Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck, 1953
Though it’s a close call I think Ernie & Edie are the cutest!
May 5, 2015
Diggin’ Life
Desert Sled in oil. Fag loosely attached to his bottom lip our Triumph racer Steve McQueen takes a rest at some fast ‘n’ dusty event in SoCal mid-sixties. The Moto looks spare and ready for gravelly action.
“Diggin’ Life” – original oil on canvas painting (28″ x 37″) by Tom Fritz www.FritzArt.com
April 28, 2015
Vitamin C
my next Meriden project will be a tracker for sure.
The orange tang colored frame gives this suitable spare example a fiery look. Carbon black TT pipes, chunky tires on alloy rims, medium rise bars. Cool tiger tee shirt too. Let’s file this image…
April 26, 2015
Colours
Starting to consider a color scheme for the Cub. This one is looking good. Classic red topped tank, silver mudguards and black elsewhere.
February 11, 2015
The Countess and Enzo
Today marks the 81st birthday of John Surtees OBE. Undeniably one of the greats of two AND four wheel racing. He won both Grand Prix championships on motorcycles 1956, 1958, 1959 & 1960 and cars 1964. Riding and driving MV Agusta and Ferrari respectively.
Why he is not Knighted is one of the deepest mysteries of modern history… Well, he’s a Sir in many a book.
July 18, 2013
North East connections
10 Tiger Cubs all wrapped up for an overseas flight aboard a BEA Vickers Vanguard to some foreign land. The aircraft was one of the last mid size turboprop passenger planes before the jets really took over. It eventually became a purely freight carrier well into the nineties. The engines are the powerful Rolls Royce 4000hp Tyne model. Apparently pilots could cruise at 10,000 ft with three engines feathered and a remaining outboard at max power – a feat unmatched by an early contemporary Lockheed C130.
The Tyne is of course the river that flows through the heart of Geordieland! And Vickers Armstrong was a major Tyneside engineering company in both shipbuilding and military manufacturing; with a workforce of Geordie’s all!
July 9, 2013
Filler
A little too busy to put up a proper blog post so here’s a dirty desert sled for your viewing pleasure…. “Just look at the size of that chainring!”
July 4, 2013
Fifty Years Ago Today
… One my All-Time favorite movies was released. And to celebrate the Fourth of July in “Great” style here’s a image as the Americans in the camp march with home stilled liquor and pipe a merry tune.
left to right: James Garner as Hendley ‘The Scrounger’, Jud Taylor as Goff, and Steve McQueen as Hilts ‘The Cooler King’
Alas celebrations go awry when tunnel Tom gets discovered, Ives goes fence-crazy and is shot…
“Dedicated to the Fifty”
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