Craigslist Find: A Matchless Fixer Upper

California is often praised as motorcycling heaven, with good roads and good weather spawning a huge culture of two-wheeled activity from chopper shops to dirt bikes in the dunes. It can be easy to forget that this is not a new phenomenon. Not only is California a great place to ride right now, but it's steeped in motorcycling history. (Heck, Motorcyclist itself started out as Pacific Moto-cycling back in 1912.)

Sure, this vintage British thumper could just as easily been found in Pennsylvania or Alabama, but it makes sense that it turned up on the west coast. I like to think whomever bought this bike new used it to cruise up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, thundering past station wagons full of beach-going families. Maybe the history isn’t that interesting, but that’s the cool thing about vintage bikes—each one has a story, and if you buy it you become part of that story.

So, any takers? Just three grand for what appears to be a pretty complete slice of motorcycling history. It looks to me like a Matchless G80 (or perhaps an AJS Model 18), but something tells me there's a Motorcyclist reader out there who can tell us part of that story...