Saturday 8 June 2013

The Bob Meissner collection

This blog is partly informative and partly a public apology.

I love BSA motorcycle and have a particular interest in the bikes BSA made for the US market. I learned a long time ago that this puts me in niche in the UK, but it's one I've been happy to fill and I've met a lot of enthusiasts in the US along the road.

A lot of these have been 'met' only in email, but lengthy correspondence and swapping BSA stuff means that with some of these people, I honestly feel I have a sense of comradeship and in some cases, genuine friends.

One of my acquaintances is Bob Meissner, who I first started corresponding with in 2006

 Bob got in-touch in response to one of my websites and mentioned that he had a collection of BSA catalogues, brochures and ads going back to the 1930s and would I be interested in copies that I could post on my website?

Enthusiastically, I was and there followed a tidal wave of scanned photos emailed to me over a period of a month or two for me to add to the website.  But I never did.




Pressure of work, website authoring inability, pressure of home life all resulted in no demonstrable activity for, well quite a long time and after all the work Bob had put into this, I felt I'd let Bob down pretty badly.


What followed after that was a hard drive failure that I thought had destroyed all the emails, scanned pics and Bob's email address.

However, now several years later in an idle moment while clearing out old PC equipment I came across the disk and wondered as a last chance if I could use some data reclamation tools to retrieve anything from the disk, and... bingo!


I've managed now to reclaim almost everything including Bob's contact details, with which I got in-touch, apologised, and started loading dealer and catalogue pics on my Facebook page because the image upload tools are very easy to use.

But as a taster - or until I find out if / how it's possible to link Facebook photo albums and my blog. here are some of Bob's collection which goes from 1939 right up to the early 70s and is immense - catalogues, brochures, ads, dealer handouts, export, US East and West coast editions... fabulous!

I don't think there's anything else like this on the web... enjoy!

Bob - thanks. Loads!

Armoury Road - the Beezagent on Facebook

It's unavoidable.

If you want to take your message to the masses, go where the masses go, so I'm on Facebook - look for Armoury Road.

Facebook is a tool best used for bringing people together and pointing them at information - it's not really a great place to store, archive and retrieve information.

A blog is tool best used for storing, retrieving and archiving information - it's not as good at bringing people together and pointing them at information.

Because of this, I'm not sure what information will go where, but as long as both are connected I hope people will find stuff of interest on one or the other.


https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003623770703&ref=tn_tnmn

Back after a long break

I'm back after a long break of almost two years spent fixing and riding motorcycles, rather than writing about them.

But now I'm back and I won't be away for such a long time again.