This is the first in a series of features that will look at progress with the bike restorations.

Currently the bikes are at sub-project level, ie. engines, gearbox and wheels being built, parts at the plater or frames being welded before painting.

Since none of this is particularly photogenic we thought we'd start the series by explaining why it will have taken us almost 3 years to complete the bikes once we have.

54 Gold Star in 'hung-together' stage to check alignment of frame and engine plates before restoration started.

Although Daytona racers were based on standard production bikes - which should have made restoration easy - we've had some unusual difficulties to overcome.

Challenge number one has been restoration work based in the US but with most of the research and some fabrication work taking place in the UK. We've used web- based archive and project management tools to help us - a first in classic motorcycle restoration, we think - but even so, this isn't the quickest way to get things done!

Challenge number two has been that our starting point with both bikes has not been a couple of well-worn but complete bikes. We started with a collection of big lumps - see the pictures on the left - for which we've had to find or fabricate the missing pieces.

Another view of our 54 Gold Star before restoration started.

Challenge number three has been the biggest one. Many of the missing pieces have after research, turned out not to be the same as the standard items. Had we been dealing with pukka works racers like a Manx Norton we would have had a documented specification and lots of surviving examples as reference points but we haven't and have needed to rely more than most restorers on original photographs.

We have also depended on the memories of people who were there but this is now 50 years after the event. This has cost us a colossal amount of time spent identifying and examining photos and spent in transatlantic phone calls about have often been relatively small things like brackets.

54 Shooting Star. Note the sun - restoration really is taking place in Florida!

Many of these 'missing piece' issues have been big enough to turn into small research or fabrication projects in their own right and details about these appear on the left side of this page.

Why were the bikes so different from the road bikes?  AMA regulations provided for a degree of latitude to make many modifications to the standard bikes and BSA took full advantage.

This was BSA's first fully works supported effort to build a road racer since the 1921 TT debacle and development engineer Roland Pike was given a green light to do the best they could. Using the characteristic rigid Nicholson inspired frame and many lightened parts of his own design he made two prototypes - a Gold Star and Shooting Star.

54 Shooting Star and a good view of the special Daytona alloy top yoke.

After satisfactory testing Pike gave these bikes to the experimental and production departments with the instructions to "make some more of these, please!". BSA used a small army of apprentices to build these bikes and some pragmatic modifications were made on the way like adding a strengthening tube to the rear frame loop after these had been manufactured.

The important blueprinting work done on the engines, particularly the twins relied on the skill of the individual fitter and was not documented. At least one of the Gold Star engines contained internals that bore more resemblance to one of Pike's own projects than the standard roadster. And once the bikes were shipped to the US, additional modifications were made to machines to suit individual riders. Knowing this and working from an imperfect audit trail of photographs we have made enough sense of it all to restore two of the original bikes!

The one-off nature of these bikes means that this has at times been more like archaeology than restoration.