"Building a custom Triumph is hard enough, but building one for a person you have to sleep with every night is close to impossible," blurts Lil Davey Ketchum regarding his wife Little Jenny's bike, the Super Bee.
Davey built a few bikes-a Sporty dubbed "The Lil Stinker" and an FXR known as "The Stormtrooper"-in rapid succession, so his wife Jenny, an accomplished skin and fine artist, was getting an itch for a bike of her own. And so the wife-on-husband pestering began.
Davey looked around for a bike that could be built for Jenny on the cheap and in quick fashion. What he found was a basket-case Triumph '62 T110 Tiger, and it had only one of the two requirements. It was damn near free, but far from a gas-and-go type situation. It was going to need a total redo.
Jenny is 5-foot-nothing, so when Davey started in on the Triumph he took this into consideration. Starting with a Four Aces hardtail section, he sliced and diced it to suit her needs. Davey even got all Salvador Dali on it making it asymmetrical in order to clear the 520 chain. Because Jenny also has tiny twinkle toes, the brake pedal and shifter were both raised as well as shortened, and a set of black Hippy Killer pegs were used to dangle her size 4 Adidas on. Of course, when all of the foot controls were modified, so were the various linkages, rods, and cables that make them work. This was a chore Lil Davey does not wish to repeat. "It was a freakin' nightmare," he told us.
On the upside, the hand controls were also modified for Jenny's diminutive stature. A set of low-rise vintage aluminum MX bars with one-inch "Fuck Off" risers seemed to fit her frame well to get her in the correct riding position. A set of adjustable dirt bike ASV levers and master cylinder gave her the needed reach to get the braking and clutching done with little to no effort.
Up front a '77 H-D Narrow Glide was gutted, lowered, and shaved. Davey also used a chromed H-D banana caliper, which was rebuilt to actually work.
When Davey got to the rolling stock, a set of re-chromed OEM Dunlop rims were laced to a front Harley Narrow Glide hub and a Triumph rear drum with Davey's own home-built trueing stand.
Ye olde Triumph engine has remained as stock as the day it rolled off the line in jolly olde England and was only slightly freshened up by Davey before being thrown into the rigidized frame. The 650cc engine sucks in fuel with a single Amal carb that was re-sleeved and cleaned up. To exit the processed gasses, Davey built a stainless steel 2-into-1 exhaust and mounted a chopped-up Empy stinger muffler before painting it all black. Yes, it's a painted stainless steel exhaust.
The oil bag is a one-off unit that Davey lovingly handcrafted out of schedule 80 pipe and two end caps. That is what happens when you build industrial tanks all day, everyday. You make shit out of what you have laying around the shop.
The scant bodywork was also thoroughly massaged from a few stock pieces. The fender is an old Sporty front fender with the tip of a late-model Softail rear fender grafted to it. The fuel tank was originally a Paughco "axed" tank that Davey modified the mounts on. Once the bodywork was arrow-straight, the sheetmetal was then handed over to Billy Cruel for paint. After a million coats of paint and clear, Billy then passed the yellow and black goodness off to Ron Williamson for some seriously excellent pinstriping, lettering, and graphics.
The bike took almost two years of nights and the occasional weekend to be completed, but Lil Davey built his ol' lady one hell of a scaled-down Trump that does a fine job of blasting down those Prunedale, California, county roads.