By now I was running “Desperates, and needed a bike to advertise the shop, so “Mad Dog” was built. Once again NSU powered, this one had a 1200TT motor in it. The best version of this engine NSU ever made, and extremely rare. Oh…and I

fitted a Supercharger while I was at it. Everything on it was square. Frame, exhaust, bars, manifolds. The exhaust was cut from a sheet of 16 guage steel in flat sections, with each bend having to be fabricated in four sections, welded and sanded. It took 96ft of welding to build it, and days of sanding to get rid of the welds. The rear mudguard profiles were all cut out with a jigsaw and filed to shape, and the

“Dog-Head” on the rear mudguard was made from body filler over a cardboard mockup. The eyes lit up. Once again, it wore the OOM 89 number.

This bike was built purely as a show bike, and never intended for the road. I actually had a notice to that effect next to it at the big indoor shows I campaigned it around, and boy was it successful. At the Bristol Bike Show, it won “Best Weird and Wonderful”, “Best Engineering”, “Best Radical”, “Visitor’s Choice” and “Best of Show”, all in one go, and appeared on the front page of Motorcycle News. It was also featured on local TV.

I used to get a lot of flack from competitors at bike shows, even though it was relegated to the “SuperShow” class. Snide remarks such as “When’s its next service due”. At Doncaster, the show had finished. It had won “Supershow”, but the wisecracks continued. I put the key in the ignition and fired it up. They leaped back about ten feet, holding their ears, as I rode it out. It sounded like a Fomula One Racecar, with its open pipes and screaming Supercharger. That shut them up, as some of the bikes in “SuperShow” never even had cranks in them.

All the work on these two bikes was done by myself. The only thing I farmed out was the chrome. Mad Dog was also brass-plated. It went the same way as Nasty, cut up to provide parts for other projects.