The moment it became a motorbike.

Allow me to break the sequence of numbered entries.

This post can’t be defined by a number, because it’s about a feeling.

If you have built, or will ever build a project in the future, then this feeling will be yours too.

I’ve already mentioned that in the overnight shed build, the bike ceased to be a collection of parts, but a functional motorcycle. Well, the magnitude of that moment was huge, but it marked the beginning and not the end of the transformation.

When I pulled in after the first ever session on track at Spa, and the spike of interest from my garage’s cohorts died down, I simply sat in a chair, looked at the bike and allowed the moment to sink in.

Every part on the bike has a story, and I know every story. I could walk around the bike and attribute the origin of every single nut and bolt on it.

I’d been driven nearer the edge of sanity by this bike than almost anything else I’d ever faced. It was supposed to be fun to do, most of the time it hadn’t been.

But here I was having ridden it, and in this moment, the feeling changed. It really wasn’t just parts any more, it was a motorcycle. It had it’s own kind of soul, it lived, and for a fledgling it lived well.

It would have been easy to miss this little moment, this 5 minutes in a chair doing nothing more than looking at all the parts, all the labours, all the pain of the past year, and then (and this is the important bit) letting them go.

Letting them go because it had become something else.

The thing it was always intended to be – a racing motorcycle.

The moment came and went, I smiled and then did what any sensible bloke would do; got some help and started to fix the clutch, throttle and exhaust nuts so we could get out and rag it some more in the next session.

The work never stops, but maybe once in a while, it’s nice to let our heads stop and appreciate what we have achieved.

For the first time in a year, I was really proud of the bike, and even my part in it.

I suppose in conclusion,  I’d humbly suggest the moral of this story is simply this; if you have a project, try not to miss the moment you made something special happen.

PB