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Photos: Andy Lloyd

SPENT: What is it?

Jonathan Jackson: The bike was made from scrap parts. As kids we loved cycling and building ramps, jumps and trying to go fast over rough ground. I was about 13/14 years old and decided that bikes needed suspension to achieve what we were trying to do in terms of going quickly over jumps and stuff. We had no money, so my regular place for getting parts was the scrapyard. I found a mid-sized bike frame and a pair of front forks from a Dutch moped, a Batavus I think. A friend had given me a Raleigh Grifter back wheel and so I had the bones of parts that I thought I needed.

S:Who made it?

JJ: Well, that was me. I was lucky to have a wonderful dad who taught me everything he could about mending anything mechanical. He was the village mechanic (in the Yorkshire Dales) and my primary school was next to his garage, so every lunch time from five years old I was over there learning how to mend cars, lawn mowers and bikes. He was also visionary in that he bought me an arc welder for my tenth birthday – a major purchase for us as money was tight. I taught myself to weld and that’s where things started to happen for the bike a few years later.

So, I had these parts, and I also a few piles of bits that would become motorbikes. One of the motorbikes had spare shock absorbers and so I chose one to be the ‘mono-shock’ for my suspension bike. Much filing, hacksawing and welding later, I had the basic frame. The shock absorber struts were bits of chromed steel from an old TV stand and several gusset sections were made from furniture brackets – very Heath Robinson. I then grafted the moped forks on and made a chain tensioner from a piece of steel strip and an old derailleur jockey wheel and the spring from an old bike saddle. The tensioner has disappeared, don’t know what happened to that. So, the bike now moved under its own steam; we had something to ride. This work was done in 1979/1980 when I was 13/14 years old.

S: Where have you ridden it?

JJ: Nowhere you would know most likely. We lived in a village called Bentham on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales and I rode it where I could off road, doing stuff that now would be called mountain biking and downhill. We built jumps and learned how to get air, we went into the fields, the steeper the better, and rode fast and hard down anything we could. It was brilliant fun.

There was a craft competition at school and so I entered the bike as an exhibit. It got a commendation for the welding and fabrication, but everyone said I was nuts and that suspension on a bicycle would never catch on. The moral of that story is that you should always listen to advice, but you don’t have to take it! I got into trouble later that day – to prove the bike’s worth I rode it down a huge set of outside steps at school, and the headmaster was rather nonplussed!

The rear suspension worked really well, still does to this day (I got some air off a banking whilst doing the photos), but the front wasn’t great. If I could have continued to develop the bike, mostly the front forks, then I could well have been on to something. The key issue was weight as access to low-weight materials wasn’t easy and money was always an issue.

Really happy memories though and thanks so much for showing interest, it’s great to have the excuse to talk about it. The fact that I still have the bike some 43 years later is again testament to my dad. He passed away in 2015 and in clearing out his garage I found the bike stashed in the back corner. It has come home with me and sits in my office (next door to GeoMetron Bikes, which is happy coincidence). I will keep it as it is because it is rough and crude, but the patina is great, that’s how it should stay.

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