My Passion with Paul Oates: Going beyond the art of motorcycle maintenance

When I was 17, I had my first motorcycle, a Suzuki GP 100, which arrived two days before I could ride it, and I vividly remember the anticipation of waiting to go out on it.

There is a similar sense of anticipation in building a motorcycle from scratch because, ultimately, you want to get on, hear the engine kick into life, and set out on a journey somewhere, but need to solve a myriad of problems and engineering issues before you can achieve this.

I guess part of the appeal stems from my teenage years when I learned basic vehicle maintenance from my father and started to apply that to my own motorbikes

Before I started building my first bike, which is a 1970s' retro-styled Harley Davidson, I couldn't use specialist welding equipment. Now I can. That's how steep the learning curve is on a project of this calibre.

Many skills need to come together on a project like this and the timescales are not short. I've renovated and modified a couple of VW camper vans before and the last one of those took five years. The bike took six months.

Nothing much on the bike is in its original form. The majority of the parts come from a relatively recent Harley Davidson Sportster, but everything has been modified, from the suspension forks, to the rear mudguard, which actually came from an old BSA motorcycle. Even the exhaust pipes had to be fabricated to fit the bike's unique shape.

There's an aesthetic pleasure from seeing the finished article, but unlike an artwork or similar, where completing the project is the final act, there is a second totally different experience to be gained once you take the bike out on a run.

Everything is totally familiar to you, from the detail on the paintwork to the individually made nuts and bolts. The only part of the bike I didn't do myself was the wiring, yet the experience of riding it is completely new as it all starts to work in the way it's intended.

I'm really pleased with the finished machine and it rides incredibly well, even better than the factory-built donor bike that the parts were taken from.

I now see it as a test-piece for the next one. I've bought a 1970 Harley Davidson so that I can start the process again, but this time, I aim to restrict myself to using parts from the same year.