When it comes to customising Vincent motorcycles, bike builders have to walk a very fine line. One misstep and they’ll have thousands of pitchfork wielding moto-purists beating down their door baying for blood.
This particular 1952 Vincent Black Lightning is a great testament to what can be achieved with classic Vincents, it was built by Jeff Decker and his uncle in 2010, they based the bike on a HVG (Harris Vincent Gallery) chassis and used a stack of parts left over by Vincent legends Rollie Free and Marty Dickerson.
The finished bike is an exceptionally clean custom with a clear salt-flat-racer influence, it’s capable of over 150mph and looks like it’s going at least that fast when sitting still.
Jeff sounds like a hell of a guy and his quote below is so good it’s almost worth putting on a t-shirt;
“I am open to critique. Please send me photos of the Vincent Black Lightening you have customised in a more tasteful manner than I did”
Personally, I prefer this Vincent to the recent Black Falcon custom, it just seems more approachable. Don’t get me wrong, I love the work of Falcon Motorcycles, but if I had one, I’d live in perpetual fear of scratching it.
Via the always exceptional Cyril Huze Post.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
