The Sunbeam is a recent acquisition - my first pre-war bike, first with hand change although I've had old Brits of various types for 40-odd years. I had it from Andy Tiernan in Suffolk as a part-ex with a Triumph 500 unit twin. It's a 1931 Model 10 350, which was supposed to be a cheap bike for the depression era but apparently wasn't popular so was only made for 2 years - which means spares aren't exactly readily available so the lathe is coming into operation quite a lot.
It amazes me that Sunbeam, which were struggling financially at the time, must have sunk a huge amount into tooling and design. After the Model 10's demise, it was replaced by a resuscitated pre-1930 Model 8 350. I bought the bike sight unseen on the basis of a report from Tiernan but have to say it's not quite as good as described - for example the clutch was slipping so badly it could never have started but was reported as running well...... There's a lot of work still to do but I should be on course for getting it on the road in Spring.
The chroming was very quickly turned round - around 3 weeks or so from taking the bits in to collecting them. It was a bit like going back 50 years - huge steaming vats of noxious looking chemicals and a horrible smell, but turning out very nice work.
