Retrograde Mechanica

Saturday, 16 June 2012

Olney Motorama

Great little show in the village last weekend

Friday, 15 June 2012

The Fixie

Coming along well, nice work Johnny boy, really makes my '35 Raleigh look old!

Thursday, 14 June 2012

NSRA Gt Billing

Hot Rods, a few bikes, Raleigh Choppers.....a good day!

Tuesday, 12 June 2012

Messin' with the CL

Cored the pipes and chopped em back a bit, Tanks ready for paint, wheels are now ready for the vintage ANS tyres....she's coming along!

Saturday, 9 June 2012

Marks new project

It's a disease i tell ya!

Gonna be killer fella.

"Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's some kind of a "knack" or some kind of "affinity for machines" in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a "short between the earphones," failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself"

"That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There's no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone's mind — number three tappet is right on too. One more to go. This had better be it — .I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this...that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes...pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts...all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not. Shapes, like this tappet, are what you arrive at, what you give to the steel. Steel has no more shape than this old pile of dirt on the engine here. These shapes are all out of someone's mind. That's important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone's mind. There's no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There's nothing else there. But what's "potential"? That's also in someone's mind! — Ghosts"