1970 Triumph "TrophyVille" 650
I bought this scruffy old Bonnie as a non-runner with no pipes or seat. I managed to dig up a set of TR6C Trophy upswept scrambler pipes with beat up mufflers and a rusty old "chips basket" heat shield, and installed them after rebuilding the top end and carbs. The old beater fired up on the first kick!
Back then, the Gregory family were "big time" flat track racers and they built a 1/4 mile dirt track with a hill/jump in the middle, and nicely bermed & banked turns on both ends. They started having dirt track races there a couple of times a year, so I decided maybe I'd fix up the bike and take a stab at entering a race.
I did a really good tune-up on the bike, removed the mufflers and lighting, and took it out for a test ride the day before the races. Out here on my family's property, we have a private road that has about 1/8 mile straight, then makes a bit of a right kink and meanders down a slight hill; at the bottom, it makes a sharp left onto a dam along a pond. At the far side of the pond, the road drops off to the left, crosses the high water spillway crossing, then makes a right and meanders another 1/8 mile to the back gate. I fired up the bike and set up at the entrance of the ranch and took off down the road, hammering it up through the gears with those straight pipes howling!
As I got to the right kink, I eased off the throttle and noticed it wasn't dropping revs... I made the kink and flew down the hill stomping and grabbing brakes with not much effect; I dropped it down into second gear SCREAMING, then realized I'd better prepare for a serious hard left onto the dam (dirt and gravel at that time). In my best Dave Aldana / Gene Romero impersonation ever, I powerslid that sucker onto the dam and kept trying to whoa the bike down; up until that point, I never really had much use for kill buttons before... The spillway was coming up fast and I knew it was all gravel and soft dirt, so I figured I could probably do another slide job, then just aim for the brush and take my chances with a get-off.
Well, as I entered the left-hander, it slid in beautifully, then I just lost it on a titch and off we went into the prickly pear cactus and mesquite thicket. The bike was laying on it's side screaming bloody murder, and I stupidly grabbed one of the spark plug wires to pull it off. About that time, I did my best Nikola Tesla impersonation! That son of a gun shocked the living daylights out of me. It must have starved out of fuel, because it died a second later.
I didn't get to race the next day, or ever.
Over the next few months, I ordered a bunch of parts, had the tank painted, found some better pipes for it, and did a general refurbishing from front to back. For this bike's entire life in my collection, it never had a battery, just the stout 2MC capacitor which never failed me.
Very recently, I sold this bike on ebay in order to buy a much nicer fully restored '70 Bonneville from my friend Mark. Before putting it on ebay, I installed original style pipes on it and cleaned it up.
The buyer got new tires and had me put the scrambler pipes back on it, along with a battery. The bike shipped back home, to England.