New Zealander Brings 97-Year-Old Bike Back to Life
You won’t believe how long it took him to get this vintage bike road ready.
Finding an old Harley-Davidson is something motorcycle enthusiasts dream about. While the rest of us can continue to fantasize about the highly unlikely event, Kip Marks from Auckland, New Zealand, actually found a really, really old motorcycle and went to work on getting it to be road worthy.
Marks, a mechanical engineer, found the Harley Davidson, which is from the 1920s, in 1998 and worked on the motorcycle for nearly 20 years to get it to the condition that you see before you. The motorcycle, as New Zealand’s Stuff reports, was in pieces when Marks found it. Clearly, the roughly 100-year-old machine took a lot of work to get back into running condition.
“Finding the time to work on it was the biggest challenge I had,” said Marks. One would assume that finding working parts would be the issue, but Marks claims that simple things, like an original manual were much harder to find.
“It was about patience and not being too hesitant to ring people,” said Marks. “It’s amazing how many already know what it would look like.”
Marks, as one would expect, had plenty of difficulty putting the motorcycle together, but adamantly persisted. The report claims he had difficulty getting the bike’s brakes to work, as the first two systems broke when he tested the motorcycle.
While the antique motorcycle make look incredible, it’s not exactly the quickest machine on the road. And as Marks points out, the antique Harley isn’t about going fast. “You might get to 50 miles an hour maximum if you’re lucky with the wind and the sun behind you going downhill,” he said.
With all of the hard work that has gone into the motorcycle, one would think that it would end up as a garage queen, something that’s only ridden a few times a year to ensure that things stay lubricated. But that isn’t the case. Marks is looking forward to moving the bike to his vacation home where the roads are a little quieter.
