Wreck To Winner - CR Launches Project Bonneville

We've seen some seriously creative Hinckley Triumph Bonnevilles in recent months, with some show-stopping Bonnevilles and fast, track-ready Thruxtons leaving us hungry for a Bonnie of our own. Being a popular machine either used or new, finding a Bonneville for a project bike would mean using our heads for something besides pudding basing holders for a change. CR's three man tech team of Eric Ierardo, Matt Houy and Blake Kelly assumed the fitting name Po' Boy Cafes to help create a timeless, corner-carving, lane-splitting beast from the ashes of a crash-damaged Triumph Bonneville. Why Po' Boys? Well, we're working on a budget of under $5,000 to prove that a good-looking, fast, modern cafe racer doesn't have to land a builder in the poor house. Sure, we'll have to switch from Guinness to Pabst Blue Ribbon for a while and Matt will be greasing his hair with Crisco instead of Royal Crown, but sacrifices must be made!

With a little help from our friends at Triumph North America, Race Tech, D&D Exhausts, Bella Corse, Hobbs Automotive, Pirelli, Norman Hyde, The Tank Shop, Frank's Engineering and West Hills Honda, we can make it happen.

Check with us for weekly updates, parts evaluations and full features in the pages of Cafe Racer magazine as we dumpster dive, beg, plead and mine our friends and industry contacts for the means to transform a Wreck into a Winner.

Project Bonneville Stage I – Salvage Yard Salvation

If you, like most street riders, have ever wondered why your annual insurance premiums were so costly, you may want to visit your local motorcycle salvage yard. With the assistance of Ryan Hobbs, amateur roadracer and all-around cool guy, I started buying salvage bikes a few years back as they generally sell for a mere fraction of the cost of comparable used machines. Hobbs, who runs his family-owned Hobbs Automotive up in Auburn, New Hampshire, hipped me to the incredible bargains available at salvage yards like his, places where hundreds of late-model motorcycles turn up regularly. Some are repossessions from owners who fell behind on their monthly payments and the ones I spot with the ripped-out ignition switches are obviously theft recovery bikes. But the overwhelming majority of motorcycles you’ll spot in a salvage yard have suffered some sort of crash-damage. Now, one would expect that a motorcycle would have had to suffer some fairly considerable damage to turn up at a junkyard, but quite the contrary seems to be the case these days. Many machines- mostly sportbikes due their comprehensive and somewhat fragile, full fairings – can be considered beyond repair – or totalled to us laymen – just for sustaining what looks like surface damage.

Ryan Hobbs’ website (www.hobbsautomotive.net) often features Triumph Bonnevilles and Thruxtons that appear to have suffered little and he promised to alert me the next time a Hinckley twin turned up on his lot. It took less than a week for Ryan to point CR in the direction of a salvage yard special, this one a 2002 Bonnie that looked as if it had lost a cage-match with an SUV. At high speed, no less.  We were nearly turned-off by the massively bent forks and the flattened front wheel and a gas tank that resembled an NHL goalie’s grill, but what the hell- we can dig a challenge. Anyhow, the bike, like most of those we've spied at salvage yards, wa in otherwise good mechanical condition, with the motors generally surviving any accidents. We’d been perusing E-bay for used Bonnies in recent months and been deterred by their astronomical used prices (hey- it’s a good, reliable bike, so no surprise they tend to hold their resale values.) Nevertheless, we were able to pick up this rough-condition, low-mile example for around the cost of a decent custom paint job, believe it or not. Worse yet, there was another written-off Bonneville for sale at the same auction, this one apparently unscathed by the fates except for a – get this- set of busted rear-view mirrors, a small, three-inch scrape on the frame and a bent rear brake pedal. The salty old salvage yard owned unplugged his stogie long enough to school us to the fact that according to some insurance adjusters, a set of mirrors, a broken brake pedal and a little cosmetic injury to the chassis are all it takes to write off an otherwise perfectly functional bike. Crazy, isn’t it? Lucky for us, we know that sweat equity and determination can transform any salvage yard Sally into a show winner, so home we went with our bargain priced haul. Now, I wonder what the Bonnie will look like all stripped down in our garage…..?

Assessing The Damage

Lots of readers have contacted CR asking whether there were any particular perils involved in using a salvage-yard motorcycle as the basis for a custom build. Well, to be honest, there are plenty. There’s the danger of bent frames, a malady that’s sometimes hidden from the eye, but can reveal itself in a motorcycle that corners with all the poise and precision of a shopping cart down at the local Piggly Wiggly. Worse, yet, in some unspoken, inflexible rule of salvage yard owners, motorcycles awaiting new homes are generally kept outside in the elements. This can leave an otherwise clean crashed bike looking poorly, rusted, and busted in just a few days. However, the money saved by starting from a salvage yard instead of a showroom is immeasurable. In these instances, it’s important not to become overwhelmed when doing your initial planning to rebuild a crash-damaged machine. On the surface, the bike’s disheveled appearance may have you asking yourself, “what was I thinking- I could have spent this two grand on a trip to the TT,” but patience, dear Grasshopper, is the key. What we did, being writers and all, was take a long stroll around the machine, making a list of everything that would need replaced. That way, we could turn to parts catalogs, Internerd sites and our friends at local bike shops to get an idea of just what parts would need replaced and at what cost. After categorizing our damaged parts list, we could approach the project methodically; letting our checking account be our guide, we were able to determine what bits would have to be forced back into service as-is and which parts would need canned.

Our Wreck to Winner needed plenty of TLC, elbow grease and, of course, cash, for it to live again, the main list of problem areas being:

1. Front Wheel: flatter than an opera singer with laryngitis. Used replacement a must.

2. Front forks: Bent, like our staff on a tour of the Bushmills distillery. Both tubes would need replacements and new, stiffer springs for the odd track day.

3. Clutch cable, rear brake pedal, left side rear-view mirror and left side switchgear housing: broke, just as we’ll be by the time this motorcycle is roadworthy. Replace all, with used parts whenever possible.

4. Tires: mud-caked and cupped from cornering under improper pressure levels. Replace.

5. Exhaust: Someone, somewhere in between the crash site and the salvage yard had stripped the bike of its mufflers. Slip-ons would be fine, but a full system even better.

6. Gas tank: bashed in beyond repair. An aftermarket replacement would have to be sourced.

7. Frame: Doesn’t appear bent, but we’ll measure the distance between both axles to ensure there’s no bends in the neck where the crash seems to have made the biggest impact.

8. Transmission Cover:  Small dings on chrome – we’ll have to treat this they way one would a pimple on a supermodel’s bum- we can learn to live with these kinds of imperfections.

9. Motor: With its inherently strong chassis design, Bonnevilles would have to be smashed-up pretty badly for the engines to suffer. This one started right up once we replaced the battery (which was also killed off by sitting in the cold for several weeks.) This being a T-100 model, there’s plenty of power, so we’ll leave any aftermarket modifications to the aspiration, changing only the exhaust, airbox and re-jetting the stock carbs. For now…

10: Handlebars, also slightly bent. Clubmans or something similar will do nicely.

11. Instrument cluster. We shudder to think what must have happened to the rider who clearly catapulted his or her self into the Bonnie’s gauges. The speedometer has survived intact, but the housing and the pancaked tachometer would have to go. New Triumph bits, please.

And finally, the stock footrests would have to go if this Bonnie was to truly capture the café racer look and ride, while the shocks, which weren’t too bad for the wear, could be sold off on E-Bay, replaced by something more, ahem, kind to our girth. Now, for the teardown…

Fork In The Road

One of the first things we noticed about our Bonneville when we spotted it sitting unloved in that snow-covered salvage yard was the bent front fork tubes. Bent forks on a streetbike not only point to a particularly violent head-on collision with a solid object, but a blunt-force impact with a solid (or much larger) object can often transfer force to a motorcycle’s chassis, which can result in bends. Now we’re all about rescuing motorcycles from the salvage yard here at CR, but we tend to draw the line at damaged chassis as they’re so difficult and expensive to remedy. Our pal Ryan Hobbs from New Hampshire’s Hobbs Automotive taught us a nifty and rather easy trick to discern whether a salvage bike has a bent frame, which we put to good use on our Wreck To Winner Bonneville. We simply strung a tape measure from the real wheel axle to the front, recording the two measurements to see whether they came out the same. Different readings would mean that the frame is seriously out of line, he told us, and lucky for us, the Bonneville turned out just fine.

The bent forks, however, are more a casualty of design than anything else. Why? Well, most upside-down roadracing style forks are so stout that the aluminum perimeter frames will distort from an impact before the thick-walled fork tubes will. Conventional forks, like those on the Triumph Bonneville, however, have relatively thin-walled tubes that will bend more easily. A solution rests in a set of more sturdy aftermarket tubes available through Frank’s Engineering in Pitner, Illinois (847-475-1003) These guys have been making replacement fork tubes since the early days of choppers and bobbers and stock sets for just about every roadbike ever made. If Frank’s doesn’t have your desired tube in stock, they’ll machine a set for you in a matter of days, which is pretty cool in our book. Their Triumph tubes are, indeed more stout than the stock units, but owner Mary Stankovich told us to be sure to order a set of aftermarket springs from Race Tech as her tubes have a slightly narrower internal diameter than stock. Inconvenience? Not hardly as a stock set of Tubes from the local Triumph dealership ran about $500, while we sourced new tubes and springs from Frank’s and Race Tech for just over half that much. Better yet, since we planned to take our Wreck to Winner Bonneville out on the track this summer, this presented a perfect opportunity to install some stiffer fork springs along with a set of Gold Valve emulators and thicker fork oil from our friends at Race Tech. Even with the new fluid and valving we were still set to spend less than we would have with O.E.M. equipment.