Hello all,
I am looking at a 1936 Empire Star for sale in Spain , price seems high at €5,500 as it needs a lot to put it right.
What is the availability of parts ? As you can see by the photos for starters i would need a girder front end and convert the rear back to rigid. The oldest BSA i've owned was a 1949 rigid B33, not sure if you can use later A,B & M parts on these as i imagine it would be difficult and costly to put it back to 100% original. The Empire Star has always caught my attention but they seem thin on the ground these days. As with most restorations it's easy to exceed the value so not sure if this one is worth the trouble, the main advantage for me is that i live in Spain so easy to register it and no import charges ect...
Out of curiosity what is the preferred engine, this early type or the later that looks like a B33.
Cheers
Well, at that price I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole (as we say here in the UK)!
As far as I'm aware, very few parts from the later Val Page designed machines (M and B series machines) are interchangeable with this machine.
I'd hang on until a decent example comes up.
Something like this would be much better: http://www.petesbikes.co.uk/products/1938-empire-star/
or even this: http://www.verralls.com/post-vintage-motorcycles/562.html - note this has an M23 Empire Star engine fitted.
Hi Milo.
To me this bike has been assembled from parts of many other bikes, the engine looks more 'Blue-Star' than 'Empire-Star' the forks and plungers all from a later bike.
It would be a good idea to obtain the engine and frame numbers including prefixes as a starting point. Post any info you can obtain on here as there is a huge amount of knowledge that you can tap into.
Thanks for the links David. Price will probably start dropping after a few months , they always tend to start ridiculously high here but will have to be cheap for anyone to attempt restoring it, god knows what the plunger rear is off but doesn't look like BSA.
After some research i thought it was maybe Blue Star then i read somewhere that Empire Star has a alloy chain case and the Blue star a steel one so that perked my interest in it, i am new to pre war BSA's but seems there is not as much info as you can find on post war bikes.
Was looking at the M22 Sport in the link sent so what is the difference between M22 and M23 ? The engines look pretty much the same.
Will try and get the numbers of the seller to see what the engine and frame are.
Hi Milo.
The rear plunger set-up looks like the frame has been made up, only bent tube, no forgings etc. Possible a home build or an engineering company possibly to make the bike more useable, this has probably destroyed the original rear frame section beyond re-use.
The M22 and M23's were very similar, the M22 engine being in a softer 'semi sport' tune where the M23 was a higher output 'full sports' version.
Lets see what the numbers reveal.