In the summer of 2010, we noticed an interesting 1964 Bonneville advertised on the Seattle craigslist. The bike was described as being “all there” but mostly in pieces. It was located in Everett, WA about 25 miles from our home as it was an easy trip to go check it out.
We found the owner of the bike was a long time motorcycle enthusiast who had owned and ridden this particular bike for many years. He started to restore it years earlier then lost interest when he discovered, among other things, that he had painted the bike the wrong color. Note: ’64 Bonnevilles were painted gold and so were the ’65 TR6s but the two shades of gold were very different. The owner mistakenly painted his in the ’65 TR6 color which was “Burnished Gold”, a golden color with a bit of mustard tint to it whereas it should have been “Triumph Gold” which is a brighter more metallic hue first seen on the fender stripes of the ‘63 Bonneville. Below is a picture of the “before and after” tank so the difference in color is easily seen.
Fortunately, the Alaskan white paint on the sheet metal was well done and accurate so we knew that we’d only have to carefully re-spray everything with the correct color and reapply the pinstripping, a task that Dave Wedlake, who agreed to paint and buildup this bike, could certainly accomplish.
We negotiated a price of $4500 for the bike which included a ton of extra parts from other bikes. We knew the parts alone were worth well over $1500 if sold separately, so the effective price of the bike would only about $3000. We bought the bike and transported it home in our trailer.
After performing a brief inventory and photographing all of the parts, we put the pictures online on our Smugmug account and sent Dave Wedlake and Leroy Turner the links. They reviewed the pictures and together we were able to divide the inventory into four groups …
1. The ’64 T120R engine parts that we’d send to Leroy in El Paso for the engine restoration.
2. The remaining parts from the ’64 T120R that we would take to Dave Wedlake to build up the bike,
3. Usable parts that we wanted to keep for future restorations and
4. Parts we wouldn’t likely ever use that were to be sold.
We put the sales parts up on EBay and within two weeks we had over $1500 as we thought. The engine parts were shipped to Leroy in El Paso in Rubbermaid containers, a procedure we have described several times elsewhere in this website. We took all of the remaining ’64 parts to Dave Wedlake in Portland, Oregon a few weeks later.
Leroy got right to work on the engine restoration as soon as he received it. He really likes to get the engine apart quickly so he can determine its condition and start planning his parts needs. In the past, he needed to pull the engine to see its condition. In this case, he only needed to inventory the parts and determine their condtion.
Leroy found both good and bad in the engine … the pistons were .040 over and still within tolerance so it would just require honing and new pistons rings to work well. Unfortunately, the crankcase had a chunk knocked out as well as many cracks and a bent bolt in the front end where it had been damaged at some point. Leroy advised Dave that he would have to send that out to be welded and machined before it could be vapor blasted. So even though the internal engine components were in good shape, the work needed to the broken case was going to push the cost of restoring this engine higher than we had hoped. Leroy only needed to spend about $175 for the other parts required completing the engine but reworking the case was over $200 by itself. Ledroy sent all of the larger parts back to Dave in Oregon to have vapor blasted.
Further on the positive side, I determined that chrome plating would be needed on only a few parts, including the rear rim, exhaust collars, badges, shifter, kicker and fork nuts. Since this was to be a rider and not a full restoration for our collection (we already have a beautiful ’64 Bonneville restored by Garry Chitwood on display), we felt the remaining chrome parts, including the front rim, would work just fine.
I knew it would be some time before Dave was able to get the paintwork done, but we still expected completion of this machine in the summer of 2011. Dave felt he could handle the gold re-spray without reworking the Alaskan white on the sheet metal and not have any distinguishable buildup when the new gold paint was applied over the old. It turns out he was correct. Once the pin stripping was complete, all of the paint is perfectly flat with no lines or ridges.
In the spring of 2011, Leroy dropped the completed engine off at our shop in Apache Junction. Since we were hoping Dave Wedlake could build up the bike to ride in the summer of 2011, we elected to ship the engine to Dave via Fedex Ground rather than transport it via trailer to Portland in June when we returned to Seattle. That turned out to be a big mistake as somehow one of the carburetors had a stud broken off in transit. It set Dave back quite some time figuring out how to extract the stud and eliminated any chance for us to have the bike for the summer. In the end, we returned to Arizona with the bike still on Dave’s bench in Portland.
Last month, we were able to have one of our friends from the Pacific Northwest transport the ’64 T120R to Las Vegas along with another new acquisition, a 1963 Tiger Cub TS20 scrambler (subject of an upcoming blog but pictures now available in the photo album). We transported the bikes back to Apache Junction from the auction in our trailer.
You can see many pictures of the finished bike in our photo album along with pictures of how the bike looked in pieces when we bought it.
In the end, we are into the bike for close to what it is worth … about $11,500. It wouldn’t have taken much more to perform a full restoration on this bike and it would have been valued at over $14,000 if we had done that. But this bike was always designated to be ridden. Had it been a full restoration, we would have done certain things differently such as retaining the stock points ignition rather than the electronic system we installed.
One of our friends thinks it may be too nice to ride but we don’t feel that way. We can’t wait to get out on the open road on this one in the next few weeks.
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