YOUR BIKES, YOUR WAY
Sean Board took a whole 10 years to get this red hot FireBlade to a state he’s happy with. A decade of hard lessons, U-turns, extreme patience – and worth every minute
Odd, but strangely reassuring, how a minor disaster can often turn into a major blessing in disguise. So it was with Sean Board and his immaculate ’Blade 10 years ago on the South Coast of England.
“I’d been down to visit my parents and was on the way back to London when I noticed these kids in a little white car,” he says. “You know when you see things on the road and you think they’d be best avoided? Next thing I know they’ve hit me from behind at a roundabout. I’m on the deck and they drive off. Old Bill doesn’t want to know, and I’m left with a smashed-up bike.”
It was not the first time Sean had been left with a smashed-up bike. “I had an RRV before for a couple of years,” he says. “Then a wheelie went wrong on the way down, it went into a massive tankslapper and snapped the ’bars out of my hands for about five seconds… I hit the central reservation, and that was the end of that. So, the one that got smashed-up at the roundabout was a one-owner bike, a doctor had it, and the sad thing was it was absolutely mint.
“I parked the wreck in a mate’s railway arch garage, and he said ‘Just work on it when you want, all the tools are here, it’s not in the way’. Next thing some developers move in on the area, and he’s got to be out in one month when he’s been working there for the last 35 years. So, then I had to get a lock-up and I started tinkering with it. But honestly there were times when I just completely lost interest, like for two or three years at a time. Then I’d go in there and pull the covers off it and get going again.”
The gestation of this frankly standout special has been long. 10 years is a fair stretch by any standards. Sean’s levels of attainment are sky-high, which is one reason it’s taken him that long to get this machine to where he wants it to be.
The 58-year-old freelance TV props and scenery man also doubles as a floor-layer and furniture maker. He plainly understands the demarcation between making stuff look ‘real’ on screen (where it simply has to look OK on camera) and where things need to be dead accurate and totally authentic when a camera and clever lighting cannot lie.
“The first fairly major mod I did was a single-sided VFR750 swingarm conversion,” says Sean. “I thought to myself ‘Wow. That was almost easy, it looks brilliant, and I did it’. Then I was out with the bike at Box Hill and no one’s taking a blind bit of not
