The Bike Shed's latest video is of the Ace Classics' Bud Ekins 63 Desert Sled replica Triumph. It was built from trawling the internet for references about Bud Ekins' 1963 Triumph TT Desert racer, and Kev and Ewan talk through what was done to create the machine and what went into a typical Ekins build... and why.
Bud Ekins was a professional stuntman, off-road motorcycle racer, pioneer of desert racing, and was friends of most of the movie stars of his day. He was one of the people who made Triumphs cool, along with his friends Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Clint Eastwood. It was Bud Ekins, on a Triumph TR6, who performed the motorcycle jump in the file The Great Escape.
His pioneering efforts in desert racing is what this machine is celebrating. The desert sled was a machine designed to race in the desert and Bud was one of the best at setting them up at the time. His record run across the Mexican Baja desert was the beginning of the Baja 1000 race. Ace Classics have done a lot of research into Bud Ekins and how he set up his Triumphs to produce this 1963 replica. Watch the video to find out more about this machine.
