1958 Dominator cafe racer

This is a 600 Dommie in a wideline Featherbed frame with traditional cafe racer looks. It was also having traditional reliability problems. Owner Jono’s brief was to banish the tatty wiring and make the bike 100% dependable. To help, he provided a Goffy reg rec, modern Smiths tacho and Boyer electronic ignition. We also decided to add a few fuses to the loom. It seems only sensible on a vibey old British twin.

Before the looming could start, I mounted the two 6V coils on the head steady, and the reg rec out of sight on one of the gearbox plates. Meanwhile Scott the fabricator made a battery box to sit between the swing arm pivot and the gearbox. It wrapped around a slimline lead-acid battery and used existing holes to mount securely in place. The location camouflages the battery leads – not an easy task on a Featherbed where there’s no room to hide most of the cables (unless you spend the time and money to run them through the tubes – I must try that one day).

Boyer don’t do a straightforward bolt-on ignition for the Dommie. Instead they recommend Alan Osborn’s AO Services kit which uses their parts. It comes with everything you need, either to plug it into an existing bike or start from scratch as we did. The source coils and rotor sit inside the distributor housing instead of the points and advance/retard bobweights. You can get an aluminium cover to finish it off but they were out of stock when I took the pics.

Jono was delighted when the bike started easily and ran smoothly at low revs. Another happy customer.