When I was much younger 2000 my Dad would drive by a large shop near our house and my younger brother who has since passed used to point and say there was a mini bike frame outside the shop. At the time I was around 16 and had a 1964 Rupp Continental. I would look late enough to see the handle bars and tell him it's just a rototiller, there were always old trucks, tractors, loaders and other heavy equipment outside the shop. Many months maybe even a years later my Dad stopped by to talk to the owner, we had never seen him stop by this place, it was just me and my Dad. They talked for a bit I have no recollection about what and we stepped inside and there it was just inside the door A MINI BIKE FRAME!!
Going from memory there was a Bonanza frame with the front tag/ logo. No wheels, a rear backing with no shoes and half of a round rusted gas tank! You can look at the pictures and see half of the front forks are rusted away! If I recall correctly he said he was going to fix it up for grandkids. I offered him $20 and it was mine. This was all back in the good old days of being a teenage boy and calling stores only to have the person on the phone say "ok ma'am"
I quickly pulled the ORIGINAL rear "shocks" off and scrapped them they were probably pretty rusty. I removed the Bonanza front tag so it wouldn't melt and likely lost it in Ogdensburg, NY forever. I cut the ends off the front forks after trying to remove them with a torch and painted over the damage with Krylon "true blue" so my Dad wouldn't know what i had been up to.
Fast forward to 2020 and the Bonanza frame I've been thinking about building with a hodaka engine is still in NY State and I'm living North of Seattle surrounded by people who hate anything fun involving gasoline. In 2019 my Dad moved the frame with another home made frame from NY to TX. I get laid laid off because of the death of air travel, my younger brother and I both now jobless aircraft engineers move my Dad's belongings from OR to TX and bring home the Bonanza! The pictures in this post were taken in NY in May 2019
Going from memory there was a Bonanza frame with the front tag/ logo. No wheels, a rear backing with no shoes and half of a round rusted gas tank! You can look at the pictures and see half of the front forks are rusted away! If I recall correctly he said he was going to fix it up for grandkids. I offered him $20 and it was mine. This was all back in the good old days of being a teenage boy and calling stores only to have the person on the phone say "ok ma'am"
I quickly pulled the ORIGINAL rear "shocks" off and scrapped them they were probably pretty rusty. I removed the Bonanza front tag so it wouldn't melt and likely lost it in Ogdensburg, NY forever. I cut the ends off the front forks after trying to remove them with a torch and painted over the damage with Krylon "true blue" so my Dad wouldn't know what i had been up to.
Fast forward to 2020 and the Bonanza frame I've been thinking about building with a hodaka engine is still in NY State and I'm living North of Seattle surrounded by people who hate anything fun involving gasoline. In 2019 my Dad moved the frame with another home made frame from NY to TX. I get laid laid off because of the death of air travel, my younger brother and I both now jobless aircraft engineers move my Dad's belongings from OR to TX and bring home the Bonanza! The pictures in this post were taken in NY in May 2019
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