Let’s face it—if people know you are into old vehicles, you’ll be the first to know when friends and acquaintances hear about old cars and bikes. This scenario played out recently when a friend of Michael DePalo’s, Rob Engle, stopped by his shop and told him about a woman he worked with.
People know DePalo is into both cars and bikes. He has an incredibly restored American Motors AMX in his home garage and has restored a number of very cool old trucks.
And by being one of Long Island’s Royal Enfield motorcycle dealers, DePalo sometimes hears about bike finds as well. One of his best Royal Enfield customers, in fact, is his friend and music legend, Billy Joel.
“This woman had an old motorcycle in her carriage house that she wanted to get rid of so she could do some remodeling,” Engle told DePalo, who lives in Bayport, New York. “The bike had been sitting for so long that the wheels were frozen up and wouldn’t roll.”
So DePalo called the woman, Janet, who asked him to come over to see if he would be interested in the bike. She gave him directions to her Deer Park home, but mistakenly told him to go north when she meant south.
“My son, Zack, and I were driving and driving,” DePalo says. “It was like we were on one of those barn-find television shows where the guys get lost. So I called Janet and she finally gave me the correct directions.”
Longer Islander Michael DePalo was asked to look at an old motorcycle in a woman’s carriage house. It turned out to be a low-mileage Norton in restorable condition. MICHAEL DEPALO
When the DePalos arrived, Janet showed him and his son the bike and told them the story. Janet’s husband had owned the bike, a 1975 Norton Commando MK III Electric Start. He had purchased the bike in the late 1970s from Ghost Motorcycle in Port Washington, New York.
The bike only had 5,800 miles on the odometer, and the last inspection sticker was issued in 1977. Janet’s husband was in the process of repairing the bike, because the side cover was removed and the transmission was partly disassembled. When he died in 1983, all work on the bike stopped. When their son didn’t express interest in the bike, it just sat on the dirt floor from 1983 until DePalo hauled it out 30 years later.
“It was pretty much all there,” he says. “There was a small bag of parts, but the kick starter was missing. So we started digging in the dirt, and there it was! The brakes were frozen; probably just the disc pucks frozen to the rotor. So I just sprayed some penetrating oil between the caliper and the rotor, and they loosened right up.”
DePalo says all the paint is checked and peeling, but the inside of the gas tank was dry and rust-free. “I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with the bike yet, but my 14-year-old son, Zack, is pretty excited about it. It might be a good first bike for him.”
And maybe he, too, will catch the barn-find bug.