There’s always a one that got away moment when you’re busy building custom motorcycles. Visitors frequently stop by the CRM garage offering everything from rusty collections of long-defunct motorcycles (always without titles) to busted engines that last ran during the Regan administration. Most times we take a hard pass on piles of junk that will only end up cluttering the workshop, but a couple of years back, we skipped when we should have bought. While visiting the Kempton Park Autojumble in England, a bloke approached me asking if I was, indeed “that crazy Yank from the Cafe Racer magazine and Tv series.” My identity conformed, he insisted I join him at his swap meet booth to discover an array of 1960s performance parts designed for air0cooled Triumph twins. Among the dusty\-but-well-preserved treasures was a Westlake four-valve engine head for a 650cc Bonneville. These soup-up accessories were considered ig-time biking exotica when first introduced in the late 1960s by England’s Rickman Brothers. The team of talented framemakers and racing tuners had developed eight-valve engine heads for Bonnies in hopes of improving the 50-ish horsepower and 115 MPH top speed of the popular machines.
In the years since, these parts have become rarer than six-foot GPO racers and what few turn up on sites like eBay.co.uk are usually picked up by vintage racers and serious collectors before very long.
