Viewed with a modern eye, the Indian fair bristles with intimidating oddity. You may have noticed a distinct lack of control cables - nothing so flim-flam for Oscar Hedstrom. Instead the action of the twistgrips is carried, inside the bars to start with, by slim control rods that turn corners with universal and slip-over joints. 'Am I OK to turn the bars to full lock?' I asked Steve, worrying more about the bike's stability on its stand. 'Oh yes' he grinned back. 'It won't go over ... but the rods fall apart at full stretch!' How ... characterful.
When you grasp the enormously long handlebars, you're introduced to another unusual feature - the Town and Country grips. For town riding on level roads, you'd hold the twistgrip at its tapered end nearest to the front of the bike. It feels much like a normal twistgrip. But once you're out of town and maintaining a steady speed on rough ground, well, then you slide your hand further back along the grip until you're holding an entirely rubber bulge which insulates the wrist and arm from the continual jolting and jarring. How neat is that?
It's missing now, but when new this model would also have been equipped with a Town and Country silencer - a muffler which you could kick down to dampen its aural enthusiasm as you neared a built-up area. My word; those guys thought of nearly everything!
We were joined by Chris Holland, a fellow vintage Indian owner. Chris has spent many hours working on Steve's bike and knows most of its foibles. The pair of them cheerfully admit that a 1000cc machine which was built for open American roads can be more than a handful in modern Britain. Getting going is one problem ('I've gone into a few hedges!') and stopping can be just as tricky ('when one fella stepped off the pavement and into my path there was nothing to do apart from hit him!'). But the Indian does benefit from a dual rear brake - if you're not stopping fast enough then you can always try pedalling backwards ...
After that first, frantic Brighton Run, the Indian needed a fair bit of fettling. 'It just about finished the Run,' explained Steve, 'but it was falling apart! The rack fell off, the carb was resting on my foot and the clutch was burning' so he had plenty of work to do to get it back up to scratch for the next run. By the mid-1990s it was just about right - and then on one Banbury Run all that hard work went up in smoke. The carb wasn't quite right and when a stray spark took advantage of the overflow fuel, Steve lost many of the combustible bits, like the pedal rubbers, the saddle cover, and the tyres. The copper braze on the petrol tank melted -- the Indian needed rebuilding all over again.
Chris Holland carried out most of the renovation, and he did his utmost to re-use the original parts wherever he could. 'That's a new saddle cover, from Austin, Texas, but the saddle underneath is still the original. The bottom end has never been touched, but that's a replacement carb ... ' Steve rummaged around and came out with the Hedstrom original ' ... while we figure out how to get this one to work properly.'
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