"2002 REBUILD"
1969 TRIUMPH BONNEVILLE
Original owner Art Maggio, Winter Park, FL


Tell me what you think of my bike:
Art Maggio, email: avmaggio@earthlink.net.


 

In May of 2002 I began rebuilding a 1969 Triumph Bonneville. This is the story of that project.



This bike was last ridden in 1982 some 20 years prior. It had been pushed around my shop all those years silently waiting for it's turn. There had been a endless procession of projects, car repairs, furniture refinishing, an addition to the house and several restorations/modifications to my son's '67 mustang. Now, the Bonneville's turn had finally come.














My first task was to disassemble the bike and clean everything. All those years of sitting meant it was caked with dirt and grime, saw dust and spider webs. At the same time I had to make a decision as to how I was going to put it back together. Numerous modifications had altered the way the bike looked. I thought about restoring it with all the modifications in place. I also thought about restoring it to it's original condition. When I was modifying the bike all those years ago it was a test bed for every Hi Performance idea and hair brain scheme I could think up. Now the vintage look was much more popular. My son, Chad, was very persuasive in lobbying for the original look. What we settled on was sort of a compromise of what the car people call resto-mod. With a few exceptions the bike was to look original but retain many of the performance modifications that didn't effect its appearance.









After the bike was completely disassembled, cleaned of all the dirt, and stripped of most it's paint I began hunting up all the old pieces that I had set aside when replacing them with specially machined parts. Something I had, fortunately, done back then was to make most of my changes a matter of unbolting the old stuff and bolting on the new. This meant going back was just a matter of finding the original parts, reconditioning, and refitting them. In some cases this was not so. I found, much to my amazement, that I had ground a lug off the right lower fork leg to make room for the disc brakes that I had built. There was no way to really fix this so a used original one was located and fitted.






Another problem that I ran into was that I could not find the original spokes for the rear wheel. I know that I would not have thrown them away but no doubt put them some where for "safe storage". After several days of looking I finally gave up and made new ones. Because I did not want to have to restring the front and rear wheels a second time, once for testing and once again for painting and refurbishing, I did all the restoration of the wheels the first time around. Once the wheels were restrung with new rims and trued, I mounted new tires and tubes.








After many weeks of reconditioning old parts, cleaning carburetors, the oil pumps, etc., the bike finally ran. I had oil pressure, the gears and clutch and brakes all worked.