Hello All-
As I'm new to the forum, I suppose I should introduce myself. First off, sorry about the silly user name, it was either that or Beezerbub.
I'm currently restoring a 1963 Super Rocket. In '63 the gas tank, the oil tank and the tool box were all metallic red. This model has to be one of the flashiest bikes BSA ever turned out; if for no other reason than the sheer acreage of chrome.
Anyway, here's the story...
I bought the bike when I was 17. When I was in high school in Iowa in the late '70s, we used to run old brit bikes because you could buy them cheap and they had a certain, shall we say, punk mystique. I had a '67 Thunderbolt that I bought from a friend who needed the money for a lawyer. It was a bitsa with some horrible nazi bars, but I raised a lot of hell on it anyway. But for some reason, it just wasn't retro enough for me and I decided that I had to have a pre-unit. One day I saw an ad in the back of my hometown paper for a BSA basket case A10. I drove down, bought it for $175 (he was adamant about his price because he had already recovered the seat in brown naugahide). I drove home with it in my trunk.
I managed to rebuild it from the crank up and get it running. The gas tank had the badge holes filled with Bondo and I painted it black with a racing stripe down the top for speed. One night I got a ticket for riding with straight pipes through a small town. At the time I was *****, but now whenever I see some Harley rider with straight pipes I always think, "I was 17, what's your excuse?"
When I went off to college, I put it up in my dad's garage. After college it was off to the Peace Corps, then graduate school, then more graduate school. Eventually I got a real job in New Orleans. My dad got on my case to get it out of his damn garage, and I set up a bench in the back shed and got busy.
In the process of restoring it, I checked with the UK BSA Owner's Club and some fine gentleman over there told me that the bike had the original matching numbers, was a red '63 East Coast model and had been shipped from the factory on November 11, 1962. That made sense since the carb was dated 9/62 and the oil pump was dated 10/62. So the bike was probably built in October of 1962 shortly before being shipped out. I was born in October of 1962. That makes us twins, not identical twins exactly, but definitely twins. Don't get me wrong about my mother though.
So I was working on the bike in the shed behind my rental in New Orleans when I bought an old house. By an old house I mean a dilapidated shack. No time or money for the bike so I put it in a climate controlled storage space in Arabi, Louisiana. That's where it was on August 29th, 2005 when Hurricane Katrina, with the help of our country's finest engineers, sent 20 feet of water through. It then sat in water for the next two weeks. When I got back in October, I got the biggest friend I could find, broke into the destroyed storage warehouse and liberated what was left of my bike.
After staring at the rusting hulk of what used to be my bike for a year, I decided that I either had to restore it or scrap it. Despite my advanced degrees, I decided to restore it. I just about have everything I need, the painter is finishing up and I know an A10 guru who will do the build. But I?m not done yet, so please be kind when I need advice or just need to vent.
Cheers, BigValve
