The idea here, is that I get to play around with a project without having to worry about deadlines, or get too technical.

If technical is what you're after, then the excellent Back Street Heroes magazine ( http://www.backstreetheroes.com/ ) has a regular helping of technical articles that I write, and I can also recommend TheFont ( http://www.thefont.info/ ) if your web browsing experience would be enriched by some technical discourse.

I was hoping that this would be a little more "Zen and the Art" and a little less "Motorcycle Maintenance", so to speak.

Take this BMW for instance, the R65. It's not happy is it? It's been hanging around in a garden for 10 years judging by the date the tax expired.

It's interesting that according to the DVLA, there are numerous millions of untaxed vehicles running around the roads of this sceptred isle. Or possibly, they're parked in back gardens, sheds and garages, much as this BMW has been and the 20 or so other derelict, semi-derelict, and just plain forgotten why it's not up together, motorcycles I have lying around the place, have been. It's a fair bet that I know at least three other people, none of whom know each other, who each have similar quantities of similar vehicles. I wouldn't be at all surprised if each of those three people knew two other people with their own accretion of rolling stock.

So the DVLA loses money, processing the millions of SORN forms where we all tell the government that we're not committing an offence, and that we haven't ridden any of the numerous non functional motorcycles we posses. Which raises not a penny of the mythical "lost revenue" that the DVLA has harped on about for years.

I would imagine that the DVLA could quite probably stop losing quite so much of the taxpayer's money, were they to put their hand in the air, admit that they'd been quite a bunch of asshats, and abolish the entire SORN thing.

But, enough of that, back to the BMW. I thought it would make a change to leave the frame relatively unmolested, and my initial thought of adding an extra wheel and triking it, was dashed by the realisation that I'm not mad about trikes, and I have two on the go already.

I don't really see a BMW making a good basis for a pseudo flat tracker, the cylinders would tend to get in the way of flat tracking one I would have thought, which left that other pseudo racing motorcycle style, the café racer.

Something needs doing to it before it's declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest and hordes of hippies set up camp to preserve the varied fauna and flora that have set up house keeping in and around the motorcycle.

With that in mind, I dragged it out into the sunshine and unbolted some of the less useful parts.

Including the wooden handlebars.

With most of the entirely useless stuff removed, and a temporary set of Ace bars installed, the thing doesn't look entirely without hope.

Less exhaust, and less intrumentation are on the agenda, but not as far up the agenda as finding out if it runs.

Since there's supposed to be something amiss with the gearbox, it would make sense to find out what that's going to cost to fix before spending too much time on it...