Allen Millyard | 'I’ve always gone for the factory look with my bikes, even if it means extra work'

What an amazing privilege it is to write for the most read and longest-running motorcycle publication in the world. I’ve been reading Motor Cycle News for as long as I can remember…

As a youngster, I had a paper round, and so my first exposure to MCN was delivering it on behalf of our local newsagent in Hungerford where I lived. Of course, I always read the issues before I rolled them up and stuffed them through the letter box. I guess you could say it was one of the perks of having a paper round!

After that, I was hooked. At 15 I was buying the paper every week then sneaking it back to my bedroom to enjoy every page. I eventually ended up with a pile of them in my room that touched the ceiling! After four or five years of buying it each week, you can imagine there was quite a stack of MCNs in the corner of my bedroom!

Obviously you can’t keep everything in life – I don’t have a massive place to keep it all – but I still have one or two of that original pile from around 1973 or 1974. They’re some of the more iconic editions, like when Barry Sheene was on the cover – those were the ones I kept. That was from the days when the masthead was blue with the little helmet and goggles, and of course it was mostly black and white then, too.

• Related: Allen Millyard’s Velocette V-twin

It was around that time when I started building my own bikes. I just wanted to create something unique and individual because I really love having something that no one else in the world has got. Even though I don’t class myself as a custom builder in the same way as the Bike Shed guys and the people who build Harleys, I definitely love what they do and understand completely why they do it.

I’ve always tried to make my bikes look ‘factory’ as if they’ve been made by the original manufacturer – even though this often means a lot of extra work.

Back when I was reading MCN in my bedroom as a kid, I always wanted one of my bikes to make it into the pages. But just taking a photograph of a bike and sending it off to a newspaper was really hard to do in those days, and quite expensive for a kid, too. It was a huge thrill when I finally got my V10 Viper on the cover in 2009 – I guess it was a dream come true.

Thinking back to the bikes I really wanted back then, the Kawasaki Z1 was top of the list. I’ll always remember walking home from school and seeing the older kids who had left school come roaring past on their Z1s with their four-into-one pipes and K&N air filters. I was so envious.

A bit later on, in the mid‑1970s, I lusted after the Moto Guzzi 850 Le Mans when it first came out. To me that was an amazing bike – 130mph, big V-twin engine. But when you look back, you realise you were looking through rose-tinted glasses because they had loads of electrical problems. One of my neighbours had one and the rumble of noise as it went past will last with me forever.

Obviously I’m a total petrolhead – you can’t ride a V10-engined bike (and have a matching Dodge Ram pickup) and not be! So I was as surprised as anyone after Henry Cole convinced me to have a go on a Harley-Davidson LiveWire a couple of years ago.

After being initially reluctant, he talked me into it, and I was then faced with doing a U-turn on an electric bike I’d never ridden on a gravel driveway. But straight away, I was blown away by the throttle modulation – it was really impressive. Then out on the open road, the performance was on a par with a Yamaha R1 up to motorway speeds. I was a bit smitten, which really surprised me.

Still, I don’t think I’ll be trading in my trusty Pan European for one anytime soon.

Allen’s tool of the month

The tool I’ve not been able to do without recently is my R-Tech 211 TIG welder. I’ve used it mostly on the Norton Nemesis, as I’ve been making the front and rear exhaust manifolds.

It’s brilliant because it has a big TFT screen on the front – I dislike them on bikes, but in this case it’s actually really good! You scan through the menu and enter in the thickness of aluminium, and it sets the whole machine up for the job you’re doing… tells you what tungsten you need, what gas to use, what amperage, then it’s all ready to go.

Using a TIG welder is usually like flying Concorde – there’s a million settings and it’s so difficult to set up – but these R-Tech ones are amazing. My old TIG had 15 knobs on the front and my friend who’s a welder set it up and I just left it at that, and put lots of pen marks on the knobs to make a note of the settings!

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