This book is a must for anyone considering the restoration of an antique motorcycle. You will be shown strange motorcycle technology that you never thought existed! Jeff Clew does a great job in explaining what manufacturers chose to do why they did it to your bike. You have to give the author credit; explaining British Bike logic is hard to do!Sometimes the logic is there, and sometimes the logic is lost, but the author makes that point too, and will tell you when and why something was better. If your own motorcycle has a particularly odd bit of technology integrated into a broken part, you're often stuck with what you've got. Jeff Clew explains how to go about setting it right, and points you in the right direction for a top-notch restoration.
The book does not cover any one project from start to finish, and rightly so. That is not the intent. Doing a step-by-step restoration of one bike would actually take away from this book. It would ignore other bikes out there and the reader would lose the great overview that this book describes so well.
So, go elsewhere if you want someone to tell you exactly how to restore your 1914 Douglas from basket to beauty. It will instead tell you what kind of trouble to expect during a restoration project, and help you get a clearer picture of what is necessary to rebuild a classic motorcycle. Sadly, some people just buy a set of Whitworth wrenches and think they can have at it! What they really need is a book like this to give them a dose of reality. Motorcycle restoration is extremely time consuming and takes a lot of patience. This book serves two purposes: It is a beautiful overview of the subject and it is also fair warning for what you might be getting yourself into.
