Inside The Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum's Restoration Shop

Unless you already know about it, the largest vintage motorcycle collection in the world probably isn’t where you think it is. It isn’t in Sturgis or Daytona, or even London. It’s just outside Birmingham, Alabama, the quiet Southern city best known for its long-defunct ironworks and its prominent place amid the tumult of the civil rights movement.

As museums go, the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum—which includes an adjacent track and proving grounds—is also one of the best. The displays are thoughtfully arranged, and the facility—purpose-built for museum duty—is stunning. The collection is extensive. It is, if you can imagine such a thing, the Metropolitan Museum of Art of the motorcycle world.

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But glistening display bikes aren’t the only way George Barber made a name for his facility. The annual vintage festival put the rubber to the road, so to speak. Nearly all the bikes in the museum run, but getting decades-old Britten, Matchless, and MV Agusta motorcycles out on the track takes diligent work by the staff in Barber’s on-site restoration shop.

As with every facet of the Barber, the restoration shop is a showpiece in and of itself. It’s the sort of workspace most gearheads dream about—spacious, well-lit by natural light, and tidy even when mechanics are elbows deep into several restorations. There are areas dedicated to race-car, streetbike, and racing-motorcycle restoration, as well as a handful of the sculptural pieces visitors to the museum will see peeking out of every nook and cranny on the complex. The machine shop looks more like a medical facility, with white walls encircling an array of Haas and Sunnen machine tools.

“I like to call it our lab,” says Lee Clark, the museum’s senior manager of restoration and conservation. “There are some race-team machine shops that are that pretty, but it’s not typical. Commercial shops have to keep up turnover, so it’s hard for them to ­dedicate time to presentation.”

Before a motorcycle ends up down here on the ground floor of Barber’s concrete and glass facility, a determination has to be made whether to preserve it, conserve it, or restore it. Clark says donations often show up at the shop’s back door (sans explanation or documentation in some cases), and museum staffers have to find out what they have. Sometimes, it’s best just to leave things alone.

“They’re only original once,” Clark observes.

Preservation is the least invasive means of keeping up a vintage bike. The paint is shined and the rubber checked. Oil and filters are changed. Conservation is a little more involved, and requires changing non-original parts or treating corrosion so that it won’t get any worse. Restoration is the most heavy-handed approach—the typical repaint, replate, rebuild that gets something non-original or in terrible shape presentable again. The shop is capable of it all.

Rolling a number of Barber’s most ear-splitting and interesting machines onto the track to hear them at full wail provided a little insight into the restoration shop’s process. The best examples of the preservation approach were the MTT Y2K and the Britten V1000. George Barber bought the hand-built Britten—one of only 10 of its kind—new, although Chuck Honeycutt, the museum’s lead restorer, says it’s one of the more difficult to maintain. Timing belts that have to be replaced after 45 minutes of run time and pistons that have to be swapped after five hours are part of a laundry list of short-lived parts on the high-strung bike.

“It’s such a unique and valuable piece, and because it’s homemade and high horsepower, you have to be very on top of the maintenance,” Honeycutt says. “There are things that can go wrong that can be catastrophic.”

Research is the bedrock of any preservation, conservation, or restoration effort, and that’s especially true at Barber. Few machines have been as challenging as the 1933 DKW SS250 Supercharger that the shop had prepared for a few runs around the track. Its supercharged two-stroke engine (a two-piston single some refer to as a “twingle,”) is an ingenious Rube Goldberg machine of the sort only a Teutonic mind could devise.

“When we got it, it had been pieced together with totally wrong parts,” Honeycutt says. “They only made about four of them, and the only information we could find was in a book with a lot of pictures in it. So I made a lot of the parts for it from the pictures.”

A Seeley-Kawasaki two-stroke presented a success story for a unique type of basket case. Honeycutt says a friend bought it new in the early ’70s, but opted for a street engine that didn’t work well with its race-tuned exhaust. He died without having ridden the bike, which was donated to Barber. Eventually, a correct H2R engine was sourced and installed, making Honeycutt the first to ride the brand-new old stock Kawi, more than 40 years after it was manufactured.

Honeycutt’s current restoration project is a pair of early-’60s Yamaha “yellow tankers,” with a late-’60s Kawasaki A1R in the works and chasing at their heels. Nearby, a less race-focused restoration, an early-20th-century Harley-Davidson, sits across a wide isle from a Lotus race car, waiting for the day when it too will be paraded around the track to the delight of vintage-motorcycling aficionados.