From the archives.

Aeons ago, an idea formed in my head that I should have a hardtail motorcycle, and that it should follow the "chopper" template of starting off with parts from various existing bikes, fabricate other parts needed, find some tasty custom parts, and bring it all together to end up with a complete vehicle, stripped of all non-essential items (and possibly some that it would have been better to keep, such as a front fender or a decent seat).

My upbringing conditioned me - so to speak - to envision this as a British machine, and through a series of circumstances a BSA A50 motor came up, and it seemed like the ideal starting point for the project that would eventually become the Rising Star.

You can read through the beginning of this blog to see how the build happened, although you'll probably notice that there is very little about actual rides that I've gone on with this machine.

Two of my favorite happened in the year of our Lord 2017, and you can read about those here and here.

Since then, the Rising Star has been abandoned (with a cracked oil tank mount) in the dark depths of the Monolith, and those few precious times I've been able to go ride, it has been on the Fastback or the Sportster.

I had even seriously pursued the idea of selling the BSA, but thankfully that didn't happen. I say thankfully because I have found myself thinking about this contraption more and more in recent days, and I think I'd like to improve this bike in much the same way as I have done with my Commando.

Hopefully, though there is little chance of this happening, I will get to it during the winter, and tend to some areas of the bike that are holding it back from being truly enjoyable.

In the meantime, since there isn't much happening on the blog anyway, I thought I would delight you all with photos of the Rising Star from the archives. Nothing necessarily impressive, but just to have something to look at and motivate me to get on with it.

I'll try to do a few every week. Here we go: