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nephew, Ben Burr, suggested Tom visit with Brady Ingelse of
Retrospeed in Belgium, Wisconsin.
“For a brief while, Ben worked at Brady’s shop,” Tom says.
“I went to visit Retrospeed and realized this is where the bike
needed to be. As a roofer, I’ve always been a fan of bartering
for labor,” he continues. “Brady’s house needed a new roof. I
put a roof on his porch and dropped
off what remained of my Triumph at
Retrospeed.”
Brady picks up the story. “The
project came in with multiple gas
tanks and raw steel fenders and the
frame had been painted,” he says,
and adds, “Tom wasn’t concerned
about the bike being original, so we
had quite a bit of freedom.”
The entire time Tom owned the
bike it never had a kickstand, as the mounting tab had long ago
broken away. That was one of Tom’s only three requests — he
wanted a sidestand. As Brady explains, that’s not as simple
as it sounds. “You need the weight of the engine, the forks
and shocks have to be mounted and the motorcycle has to be
together and on wheels before you can determine the correct
lean angle.”
As pieces of the Triumph were restored, the TR6 slowly took
shape as it was loosely assembled to ascertain the lean angle.
As delivered, the top end of the engine had been removed
from what looked to be an unmolested bottom end. Regardless,
the engine came apart and it was determined that early on in
the bike’s life there had been some aluminum repair to the
cases. The cams were shot, the cyl-
inder bores needed attention and
the valve guides were cracked, how-
ever the crank journals looked good
after a polish and the connecting
rods, with new shell bearings, were
returned to service. From the bot-
tom to the top, Retrospeed went
completely through the engine, cor-
recting all that ailed it.
Of all the gas tanks Tom dropped
off, Brady found none of them had the mounting points for
a parcel rack — and Tom wanted that rack, the second of his
requests. Brady purchased a 3-1/2-gallon tank with the thread-
ed bungs to secure the chrome grid and proceeded to clean
up the dents. He also lined it with a Red-Kote tank sealing kit.
The forks got new stanchions, and the lowers were powder
coated black. Out back, Hagon shocks went between the rear“Through all the years since
1977 when he bought the
Triumph, Tom never owned
another motorcycle.”