In March 2015, I was just 5 years away from retirement.
Having overcome the major hurdle to a rebuild, the frame repair, I resolved to wait until I retired until I put spanner to nut and bolt.
…but what type of rebuild should I be looking at?
There were a number of options.
- Complete nutter! Big capacity overbore, tuning, expansion chambers, alloy swing arm conversion, flash paintjob etc.
- Concourse restoration, either as a 350 or a 250, which the frame number indicated it used to be.
- Get it on the road and tart it up a bit.
I had plenty of time to make the decision, so the first thing I did was create a spreadsheet with all of the elements that go to make up a motorcycle.
Then I evaluated each part I had in the big pile…
…and determined whether I would keep, repair, or buy a replacement part.
This, if done for each of the options outlined above would give me a clue as to how much investment would be needed… and whether it would be worth it.
In the end, I rejected the Complete Nutter option for a number of reasons. Primarily that I have done similar before, and the expenditure would never repay itself.
In short, I didn’t want another nutter two stroke.
I’m not interested in a concourse restoration, where people will be picking it over with beady eyes and accusing me us using the wrong paint on the engine casings.
But something close to concourse was attractive. Lets call it “As original as possible”
In Early 2017, when I finished populating the spreadsheet, the cost of “Original as possible” came in at just a couple of hundred pounds more than “good” examples of LCs were selling for.
Concourse, which required purchasing new many more parts, was expected to be almost double the price of a “Good” example, but approximately right for the price of pristine, or councourse examples on sale.
The key argument against pursuing the concourse route though was that the frame and engine numbers had never matched.
As the bike had started it’s life as a 250.. and I have a decent top end for a 250 sitting on the shelf, not requiring rebore and new pistons, a 250 she will be again.