The “Bonnie” Files - Part2

By Marco Capoccia (@marcocapoccia)

November 21st, 2022

No time was wasted to get the Bonneville stripped down to its immobile state. We started the deconstruction under the supervision of Robbie at Barefoot Racing over in Gaithersburg, Maryland (there will be a full feature on Robbie in a future blog!). Robbie has helped a ton with previous builds of mine and always has some wisdom to spill in the process.

With some R&B spinning on the turntable, we started cracking into it. The forks were pulled to get refreshed with new springs and fork oil, then dressed up in some period correct fork gaiters. Next came the removal of the handlebar, cluster, and hand controls. 

I had Roberto (@robertocapoccia) carefully stow away parts as I removed them to keep everything organized and neat. Upon test fitting the “new” gauge cluster I realized that we would lose various function lights such as neutral, oil pressure, and high beams. This is something that just wouldn’t work for us, as these function lights were all very necessary for a street ridden motorcycle. We had to come up with a game plan to remedy this issue at hand, but for now we kept on wrenching away and put the gauge cluster issue on the back burner. 

We then slipped in the forks to roughly set up the Paolo Tarozzi Clip-Ons. The easiest route for throttle and clutch cables were to utilize the OEM Triumph cables from the Thruxton of that year, it made the fitting process very much plug and play. With the front end roughly buttoned up we could start fitting the brackets for the fairing. While adjusting the brackets, we were able to fit the new headlight housing and adjust it accordingly.