After over seven months of regular wrenching on our 1967 Norton Atlas project bike, the big, black beast fired to life on the second kick yesterday, promoting a n outbreak of grins around the CRM garage the likes of which haven’t been seen since the first keg of Fuller’s Extra Special Bitter was tapped last year. The project, if you’ve been following the regular magazine installments, started out a good 16 months back when Alex Puls, chief tech from Billy Joel’s 20th Century Cycles helped us retrieve the long-idle 750. The bike had been sitting in storage in a warehouse that’s home to a still-considerable collection of machines owned by Sonny DeFaeo, son of Pat DeFaeo who ran Long Island’s Ghost Motorcycles back in the day. The Atlas was surprisingly clean and complete for a bike that hadn’t turned a wheel ion nearly a half century and we were instantly struck by how easy (well, relatively) the restoration promised to be.
Thanks to the knowledge of local Norton guru Nick Coumos and some generous help from advertisers including California’s Raber’s Parts Mart, the Atlas is about to rule the streets again, just a few weeks shy of its original, 1968 sell date. Check out more details in the June/July issue.