Rett Comer wanted to build a bobber. Now, Rett's put plenty of bikes together before. However, he wanted to really build one this time from the ground up. And he did so with this here 1965 BSA Lightning.
You see, Rett's good pal, Headcase Casey of Headcase Kustom Art, was tinkering with a Triumph, and it really caught Rett's eye. That was all it took for him to get the ground-up build blood flowing. And being that Rett owns C&C Collision in Pasadena, California, he definitely had the resources to get the parts needed for a build.
Rett bought the '65 BSA basket case from an old coworker. The bike was in pieces, but Rett could have cared less. "When I got to it, it was a box of parts; a rusty old frame and a pretty clean motor," Rett recalls. The condition of the bike didn't matter too much to Rett; he had his eyes set on the end prize: a bare-bones bobber with only the necessary components to make it roll down the road. "I knew I wanted to make this thing as lean as possible," Rett recalls. "I wanted to hide all the electrical and keep it as simple as I could." From the looks of things, he achieved his goal.
Rett hardtailed the stock frame and molded the neck to his liking. He reworked the peanut tank by lowering the tunnel and correcting the mounts to fit the backbone just right. He added MCM fork covers, bent the stainless tubing just right to make the perfect set of pipes for the Lightning. He added rear fender struts, fabbed a new battery box, license plate bracket, and headlamp bracket.
Rett had seen some bikes that ran on a capacitor instead of a battery, so he called Keith at Moore's Cycles in Anaheim, California, to get the Boyer ignition and electrical goods for the build. When he first got the bike going it idled so low that it died when he hit the brakes. Keith warned him this might happen and told him that if he got tired of it, to just add a battery, so Rett did. "I threw a battery in it and tucked it as close to the motor as possible," Rett said. He tucked it nice and neat; in fact, you don't even know it's there.
With every bike build, there are always challenges that leave you with less hair on your noggin and skin on your knuckles. Rett's main challenge was the rear fender. You see, it was made for a 18-inch wheel, and of course, Rett wanted a 16 in the back, so he spent many long hours trying to make things fit. Getting the chain to line up also took some time since after he got the wheel/tire on the back the chain sat on the tire. He relaced the rim to change the offset. "It took a lot of time, but it came out bitchin," Rett said.
After six months of wrenching, he had the BSA up and running. He wasn't too excited to strip it all down after mocking it up, so he skipped painting it for 10 months to just enjoy riding it. And according to Rett, everybody loved it that way anyway. But after a while the rusty frame, primered tank and rear fender, and the "rat's nest of wiring," needed to be stripped off the bike to get it looking tiptop. He started with the frame; he blasted it, molded it, and then gave it a fresh coat of black powder. His good buddy Headcase was given the rear fender and Wassel tank along with strict directions on how to paint them. "I told him to run wild with it!" Rett said. So Headcase got started on the blank canvas and used House of Kolor Teal Kandy Silver Leaf and black. Rett was stoked on the outcome.
After stripping it all down, sending it for paint, and then getting it back, it only took Rett 30 days of final assembly. He worked on it every spare second he could and logged a ton of miles with back-and-forth trips to his local hardware shop, the polisher, and of course the chromer. He loved every minute of the project, and as a result of finishing the ground-up build, he's hooked for life and is looking to start a new project. Good luck, Rett. Let's have a look-see when that one is done.