Here is a bicycle that me and a school friend Mark Scully built in the summer of 1978. This was during the fallow years in between barrel-jumping on our Raleigh Choppers and scraping pocket money together to buy the first Puch Murray and Mongoose BMX bikes from Winstanleys pram and cycle shop in the High Street.
As I recall, the bike seemed to take all of the school holidays to build and relatively no expense was spared (for two 14 year olds!).
It originally had 26 inch skinny street rims and convenional front forks.....but we wanted it to be more like the size of a Raleigh Grifter....so those are what the wheels in the picture came off.
We had a real problem with the rear suspension. Every time the spring compressed the chain came off the sprockets!!
we kind of solved this by switching for a stronger shocker and fitting a derailleur gear set.....but it wasn't that successful.
I can remember the sinking feeling of taking the bike out on its first outing and feeling really disappointed with how it handled.
Heavy, slow, cumbersome, spongy. These are just some of the words I could use to describe it.
We had plans of jumping over 4 cars on this thing!
God knows what happened to the bike but before long it was tossed aside in the garden with a puncture and forgotten about as the BMX became everybodies daily ride!
Incidently the very first thing we did with our first BMX's was paint 'em Kawasaki green.
Here a picture of Mark Scully and me from 1974, when we were 10.
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