I found it in the back of a local shop, I swear. The shop, Garage Company, is known for its eclectic mix of international vintage hardware from European brands you've never heard of, models you never knew were made by major Japanese brands, and rare Harley-Davidson race bikes that the Milwaukee factory wished it owned. While in the back checking out another clean Japanese-styled neo-bobber in the fab shop, the sort of thing Garage Company is known for in bike-building circles, I looked over to the yard and I saw this thing poking out from a field of scooters and dirtbikes.
Dodging display fixtures and a giant pile of seats, I took a quick walk-around, snapping pictures (some of which are shown here). I went inside to talk to owner Yoshi Kosaka about getting some better shots of the thing. As I was about to take off with one of his builders to shoot another bike anyhow, he loaded it up on a trailer and sent it along.
On the way to the beach I tried to get as many details from the tech as possible, but between his broken English and my restaurant Japanese (sushi, wasabi, tempura), I didn't get much info. What I did get was that the Garage Company guys merely restored it to some semblance of cool, but didn't build it.
It apparently showed up in pretty rough condition, and it was stripped-down, blasted, cleaned, and re-assembled. The reason it had to pull trailer duty to the beach is that typical of '50s Brit bikes, it had some untraceable electrical gremlin keeping it from running under its own power. Don't try to act shocked that a magazine's feature bike doesn't actually run; I've seen bike show winners that had no coils.
While down it had its old school, Invader wheels re-chromed to their original glory along with the one-off exhaust, the frame and Paughco tank were repainted, and the original seat re-upholstered. There were even original BSA pegs mounted to the mid-mount controls, which is not surprising considering it was restored by a vintage parts house.
The bike is also awash in cheese. While the dual rectangular headlights are dated but classic, the plastic iron cross rearview and taillight are not. The kickstand mount is one of the worst things I've ever seen on a bike, and the supposedly one-off seat doesn't match the contours of the bike. But still, the original Invader wheels are almost worth the admission price.
So three months after work began, this 1955 BSA twin was in the state seen here, theoretically just waiting to fire to life.
I take some kind of perverse pleasure in bikes like this that neither the eventual owner, nor the shop will ever really make any decent money on. lovingly built by one and carefully restored by the other, this museum piece was on sale at the time for under $6,000. In an age where an entry-level custom with no soul or history comes in at $19,999, that's something.
Anyhow, this BSA, both now and when it was built, was never set up like this because that's what folks are buying. Somebody thought that it would be cool to have this bike and ride it. At some point it left his hands and moved on to its spot in the yard at Garage Company, where they thought it would be cool to see it whole again.