Harold,
You don’t know it, but I have just spent much of the day with you through your thread, starting over at the beginning and revisiting parts of the build I was following and then catching up on all that I missed. Like you, I also experienced time away from making things while interrupted by life and changing circumstances. What an accomplishment. Such a beautiful, well thought out build. I liked it already when it was just a kind of rough looking Villiars engine I was familiar with from my own gas bikes. Love that engine.
Medical issues including two heart attacks and two rounds of cancer along with finding a partner to share my life, moving from one state to another and then back again shifted focus away from making things with my hands. I didn’t get rid of my builds and have several in the basement kind of as works of art or something like that. I spent a lot of time staring at them as they came to life and now I can look at them again with renewed appreciation. None however approach your bike. You have more patience and skill than me, but it isn’t a competition to see who makes the fastest or the most authentic or any of that. We are part of a brotherhood (and sisterhood as I think of our friend in Australia) who like to make things with our hands and love bikes in one form or another. Like you and Rick and any number of us I used to fool around with restoring vehicles. In my case vintage pickup trucks and antique sports cars. Great fun to resurrect something and ride off into the sunset, but also expensive and time consuming. Gas bikes came later in my life and were more affordable. They also took me back to my youth when riding a bicycle was an experience of freedom and I have never tired of feeling the wind in my face. I can be a boy again on a bicycle. Or in my current case, on a recumbent tricycle.
I’ve met some fine people on this forum and made friends I will never have the opportunity to meet in real life. People like you, Harold. I did have the good fortune to meet Steve Nevison (fasteddie) as he was returning from a cross country trip to visit his son on the east coast. We had chatted some on this forum and I suggested he stop by if passing through Minnesota on his way home to British Columbia. And he did. I was in the middle of trying to figure out how to make a sidecar for my dog Aaniimoosh out of a demolished Grumman canoe and was in the middle of cutting it apart, and as usual not really having much of a plan. Stare and then start. Stop and stare some more. Stop and go. Steve got interested and took pity on me offering first advice and then rolling up his sleeves and helping. His brief stop by turned into a couple of weeks of his camper parked in my drive out in the forest. The sidecar got made and along the way he became a friend to me and to Aaniimoosh who waited by his camper door every morning for him to waken and dole out dog biscuits. Those were good times and led to a repeat over the next couple of summers, making sparks with the welder, cutting up bike frames and everyday making stuff. I had more ideas than was sensible or practical, but Steve was game and “Summer Camp For Boys Who Never Grew Up” was born. I will forever be grateful for those days in summer camp. So when I go to my basement and stare at old builds and maybe pump up a tire that has lost its air, I think of those days and of the encouragement from forum members who followed our nutty posts. We had a lot of fun and some of the people here were cheering us on, contributing in their own way to the delinquency of elders.
Anyway I wanted to say something about your amazing build and to thank you for sharing it with the rest of us. Wishing you all good things my friend.
SB