Irony, don't ya love it - 'in the day' cutting edge World Champion winning machines were crushed and destroyed, and these monuments of mediocrity, blandness and crap survived; are loved and restored .
Irony, don't ya love it .
Yeah, Graeme it's pretty ironic alright but you're a bit cruel with the bland and crap descriptions! The funny thing about this whole exercise is that Jonesy and I entered into this little journey with out tongues firmly planted in our cheeks. We liked the idea of restoring the most unloved of bikes, perhaps a vintage motocross version of the old "
dirty old men need love too'' 
The deeper we got into the project however, a number of surprises emerged, the first being that the Sprite didn't really deserve the 'shitbox' reputation history had thrown at them. They are solidly build machines based on cutting edge
for the day engineering principles. The chassis, suspension components and cycleparts were better than that of most of the period opposition and even though the Sprite engine had its issues, it had the basis of being a pretty good unit and came so very close to being an exceptional race engine, let down only by typical British sloppiness. The other engines used by the factory, Villiers, Husky, Maico, Kawasaki and OSSA were all proven quality units so when looked at forty years later, they have the potential to make a good vintage racer. Alan Jones is building a matching set of American Eagles, a 250 pre fastback and a fastback 405 Alron clone. I'm assembling parts to build a '67 360 Maico Sprite clone using an early frame that originally housed a Kawasaki engine. I believe Birko is going to fit a Husky engine to his enginless Alron and I don't think it'll be long before Husky Pete gets involved.
The other surprise to emerge is the unbelievable story that's emerging from our research. Without giving away too many story lines, the yarn that emerges is one of a bike that was born to take advantage of a loophole in the British tax system, marketed under a number of different names by a collection of liars, fraudsters, tax cheats, copyright thieves and media tricksters. There's drug dealing, prostitution, a murder and all sorts of scams tied into the yarn that this very forum thread has publicly uncovered for the first time. We've only just started on the research and it's become so intriguing that the magazine piece I was slowly putting together has morphed into a book project. When I discovered that the Frank Hipkin story and it's amazing side tracks have never been comprehensively written about before I couldn't resist the chance to produce a tome on the mans unique vision.
I'd been wanting to write a book for a long time and this great yarn has given me the perfect subject matter. The research needed is formidable but as we've discovered, there are a lot of great amateur detectives digging into this amazing story so any help will be greatly appreciated and referenced in the book.
