Mille Project: the finale

W O R D S : B R U C E P I C S : G A R Y C H A P M A N

MILLE PROJECT: THE FINALE

It’s been three years in the making, with more twists, turns and excuses than we’d care to count, but Bruce’s Mille is finally finished.

There’s no easy way to hear that a best friend has died, but it must have been a hell of a lot harder for Clive’s wife, Debs, to make that call and say those words to me. For more than a decade he’d been a huge part of my life, and my wife’s and kids’ in turn. Be it on a road test, messing around with a project, or just chatting about anything and everything, he was that go-to guy for me… a proper mate who would give you all the time in the day. A proper happy bloke, ridiculously talented, and undoubtedly one of the most helpful and decent people I’ve ever met. A week before he passed we’d sat down and watched the Brand BSB season finale at his house, knowing that his time was up but enjoying those last moments, shouting at the TV like every racing fan does. It was special, and the perfect yet painful goodbye. But someone like Clive doesn’t just up and leave your life, as I’m sure many of you will relate to. Every day, nearly a year on, he’s in my thoughts, and so are all the awesome memories we made. At least 90% of the time there was a motorcycle involved, and our last shenanigans were no exception.

Above: No wonder it was cheap...

If in doubt, get the loppers out.

Piece by piece...

Griff’s face says it all.

Three years ago, at the back of 2019, my mate Rob Bean called and offered me an RSV Mille… in bits. Carrier bags, to be precise. That was the bad news. The good news was he wanted just £550, and at that kind of price I couldn’t turn it down... not just because he’d offered his help to get the thing up and running, but also because, having put in a call to Clive, he’d thrown his weight into the mix, too. With those guys on board, there was no doubt we’d get the bike back on its feet. But the plan was to do something more

Getting into the guts of the thing.

It’s come a long way.

than that, as those who’ve followed the project’s build in this mag over time will know. We got chatting, our brains started ticking, and the idea came to take this 2000-spec Aprilia and make it a tad tastier. Better brakes, better suspension, better styling and a paintjob to rival all paintjobs – this bike was going to be awesome! After not too long, we’d cobbled together enough parts to resemble something like a motorbike, but after Rob and I nearly set my garage on fire when we tried to start it, we came to the conclusion that it would be better and safer to potentially set someone else’s garage on fire.

Speak to anyone about Milles and chances are the name of Griff Woolley will come up. What that man and his awesome team at AP Workshops don’t know about RSVs really isn’t worth knowing. I gave him a call, arranged a playdate, and headed over to his base in Tamworth with arguably the ropiest-looking Aprilia he’d ever clapped eyes on. Rather than boot me straight back out the door, he got stuck in, got the bike running (fire-free), and tuned the motor there and then, balancing the cylinders on the analogue ECU, which seemed like witchcraft at the time. With a solid day done, tackling a whole multitude of other jobs, including dropping the engine out for good measure, my Mille got the green light… but this was a bike that needed a lot of TLC and an unholy amount of hours to see it right.

The good thing about being mechanically naïve is you don’t appreciate the magnitude of a task, so you just go for it. The only thing I knew about big V-twins is that I liked them and I now owned one… and, thanks to Griff, it ran. Leaving AP Workshops, the Mille went straight to Clive’s, where a load of graft got

Looking at all the pretty pictures.

It stayed like this for a year.

JP Wheels dipped and stripped the wheels...

underway. It’s no exaggeration when I say that most of the bike needed stripping, servicing, and rebuilding. And to keep us on our toes, this was the point when we threw a load of engineering challenges into the equation.

There’s nothing wrong with the look or shape of a Mille swingarm, but I figured this bike’s would be even better braced around the chain guide area... I just needed to find someone with one of those welding thingies to affix a plate to the stock unit. As it happened, Rob has a few mates up near Scarborough who live for this kind of thing – Rick, Jim and Bry. Between them, the unit got fabricated, blasted and polished, and came back looking pretty special. We’d even made great progress at the front end of the bike, discovering that some GSX-R forks I’d got to use on a failed Moto3 project would be perfect for the Mille.

Covid-19 hit, my dad died, and the rest, as you all know, is history. For nearly a year the Aprilia stood on a ramp, slowly collecting dust, but otherwise going unchanged. Then, with the relaxing of rules and renewed enthusiasm, Clive and I got at the RSV once again, picking up where we’d left off. The swingarm joined the party, some newershape Mille fairings were added to the mix, and the wheels were blasted and sprayed, ready for fresh EBC discs to go with the radial HEL calipers we’d added up front. Rob even had a set of custom off-set yokes to grip the GSX-R forks and Clive’s mate stepped up to machine a new spindle for the front wheel. The Mille was looking really quite decent, with the finish line in sight… but then everything changed.

Clive is one of the bravest blokes I’ve ever met. But as brave as he was, his battle with cancer was unwinnable. Around mid-2021 he started struggling with his health again and the last thing I wanted to do was add the pressure of the project, so I parked it. A few months later, I joined hundreds of people to send Clive off on his final journey. My heart was broken and the Mille meant nothing. We’d started the job together and just looking at it caused me pain. I threw a cover over it and placed it deep at the back of my mind.

It probably would have stayed that way for years if it weren’t for a natter with Johnny Mac. He is the heart and soul of an event called the Longest Day Challenge, a ride from Land’s End to John ‘O Groats that raises tens of thousands annually for Cancer Research. I had to be on it, with my Mille, for Clive. The problem was, as I eluded to earlier, I’m not bad at changing a set of brake pads, but anything more than that and I need adult supervision.

Alonze Customs braced the swingarm…

Rob’s mate Craig altered and polished the yokes...

There was only one thing for it… to call Griff. Any sane person would’ve hung up the phone, but luckily Griff’s not your typical bloke. “Get it over here,” he said. “We’ll figure it out, we’ll get you up and running, and get you on that ride”.

Sure enough, in about February time, that’s exactly what happened. The Aprilia was maybe 80% there, but it hadn’t run in a year, and one of the last jobs Clive did was to replace the clutch diaphragm, having had the crank case covers off to paint them. As a consequence, the bike had no oil in it, nor coolant… and don’t even get me started on all the bodged wiring we found. On top of this, the brake lines needed fitting, the Venhill clutch cable, too, along with stuff like the clip-ons, front subframe and battery. There were also a load of bits missing. Stuff like mirrors, indicators, a seat pad, and a number plate holder. They might seem trivial on face value, but when you’re dealing with a bike that’s more than 20 years old, these parts become harder to find than a chocolate bar at a Slimming World meeting.

That being the case, Griff just took it all in his stride, regularly updating me on progress and what parts he’d mustered up. It really looked like we’d meet the deadline of June 21, when the big ride was set to take place – but there was one massive task left to topple.

For those that don’t know, Clive was a painter… and an amazing one at that. From lids to full factory finishes, he could do the lot, to a higher standard than anyone else I’ve ever known. Way back, we’d talked over what we were going to do with the Mille’s bodywork, which he’d set to repairing and priming, ready for a top coat. The plan had been to do some wild take on the colours Loris Reggiani sported in the mid-1990s on his RS250, which had also adorned my first bike… a 1998 RS50 Aprilia (Rossi Rep). Unfortunately we never got that far, but I know whatever Clive did would have looked amazing, original, and befitting of the bike. However little I know about motorcycle mechanics, I know even less about painting.

I decided there and then to keep things simple, working to a standard paint scheme and graphics, with the next challenges being to first find a sticker set and then a painter to make the dream happen. The answer to the former came through the AP Workshops forum, www.RSVR.net, on which I found suggestions for a firm called The Image Works that not only did replica kits, but said it could alter the graphics to have Clive’s initials on them. Kits cost about £120 a set, which worked for me, so I made my selection and ticked that job off. As for finding a painter, that bit was a lot trickier.

Fresh 330mm EBC discs were added to the mix. One of Clive’s last jobs was painting the cases. Ready to head off to AP Workshops. The home of everything RSV… welcome to AP Workshops!

Griff was on hand throughout.

Time for the big unveiling!

Technically speaking, my infant daughters are painters, but I wouldn’t let them anywhere near the Mille. Likewise, I wasn’t about to trust just anyone with spraying my bike. Through a friend of a friend, I came to hear of a bloke called Paul from The Project-X-Channel and the rest is history. He’s a top bloke who understood the urgency and significance of the task, which he fired into without any hesitation. Having got all my bodywork to him, he worked his magic and a few weeks later (with several very late nights under his belt), he called to say it was finished (we’ll cover his paintwork more in a future Fast Bikes). Throughout the process he’d been sending videos and updates, so I had a rough idea of what the end product would look like, but nothing can compare to seeing the finished article for the first time. With the help of my mate Andy, who’d been running the bike around from one place to another throughout the build process, the fairings had been delivered at Griff’s, who pulled all-nighters with his colleague Amber to get the fairings fitted and the last few jobs ticked off. The Longest Day Challenge was just three days away when the call came to say the bike was done. I needed no second invitation to get over to AP Workshops, where Griff and Paul were waiting.

At the back of the workshop, under a pukka Mille bike cover, was my very own RSV. Complete. MoT’d. Road-tested. It was an emotional moment, not only because I never thought I’d see this day, but also because so many people – some who I’m never even met – had got stuck in and made my dream a reality… people like Griff’s mates Stuart and Andy, who’d travelled 100 miles from Catterick to help him with a dry build. They owed me nothing, yet they still did it, and it’s for reasons like that, when Griff whipped the cover back, that I had to fight hard to hold back the waterworks. There it was, glistening and looking like it’d just rolled off the production line. It was a thing of beauty and I only wish that Clive had of been there to take in the moment with me.

When I think back now to how this all came about, what we had to start off with, and what’s happened along the way, it’s nothing short of mind-blowing. The stress, the pleasure, the unknowns… I’ve come to realise that project bikes are a rollercoastertype experience, and without the right mates at hand, they’re not just hard work – they’re pretty much impossible.

Having spent a good hour goggling the bike over and having gathered up my giddiness, I caught Griff to ask him why he’d agreed to help like he had. God knows he didn’t need the added pressure of my bike, considering he and his team are flat-out 24/7. “I could just hear what this meant,” he said. “I could hear the hurt in your voice. I knew there and then that this was a righteous thing to do. Sometimes you just have to step up, whether or not it’s convenient, and this was one of those times.

Clive wasn’t just an awesome sprayer… he was next-level with project builds, too.

Paul stepped up to the challenge of painting the Mille...

“I’ll be honest, when I said yes, I wasn’t expecting the bike to be such a long way off as it was. In typical special build style, the big bits were fine, but there were so many small jobs that needed sorting – stuff like fixing and routing the loom, or the front spindle that just needed a little more machining. And if it hadn’t been for your mates Rob and Craig, machining down the top yoke so the tank could fit, that probably would have meant game over… or a big rethink at least.

“We threw some serious hours at the bike, about 60 in total, working late nights and the occasional weekend. At one stage, I even ripped a set of bodywork off another bike I had in the shop just so we could get it up and running. But that’s the thing… once it was running, it suddenly felt worth it – we were all buzzing. I’ve known this bike from the very start, when you wheeled it in and it refused to run. There’s no better kick than seeing a job through… besides, I made you a promise and I wasn’t about to break it.”

As for me, I did break a promise to myself. Griff, Paul, Amber, Andy, Rob and so many others grafted their nuts off to get this bike ready for the Longest Day Challenge. And I thought I was ready too, especially by the time I’d got the bike back to my house and nipped out the next day to test it. The ride was now two days away, I’d booked the time off, and my wife knew I was off on a big trip… which is not much more than I knew myself. I’d been so wrapped up in the magazine, launches, and a whole load of other stuff that I’d not really put any time into the prep for the LDC. Johnny gave me a call and said it wasn’t a good idea going, which took a bit of accepting, but he was right. To take a 20-year-old bike that I’d not really ridden 400 miles down to the start line at Land’s End was one thing, but tackling a 1000-mile, 20-24hour ride the very next day on it was ludicrous. I’m not one for failing, so the compromise was to accept that I’d skip this year and gear up for the next, and in the meantime I’m going to clock some serious miles on the Mille, which I’ve already begun to do… and it’s epic. I’m not about to let the cat out of the bag just yet because I’ve got something pretty awesome lined up for this bike in the next few months, so you’ll be seeing plenty more of it and I’ll have chance to fill in a few more of the blanks about the spec and how it rides. For now, I just want to reflect on this journey.

I honestly hadn’t a clue what I was undertaking when this opportunity came about, as regular readers would’ve picked up on along the way. I daresay it would have been cheaper and easier to have bought a complete Mille rather than to go down this path, but where’s the fun in that? Besides, building this project has opened my eyes to the RSV in a way they simply wouldn’t have been if I’d just bought one over the counter. It’s been a challenge, but it’s also been one hell of an experience, and I’ve ended up with a bike that’s not just unique but truly special. It’s a keeper that will forever mean so much for lots of different reasons... not least because it gave me the chance to work with some truly epic people to whom I’d like to dish out a heartfelt thanks. However big or small the input, you’re all legends… just like Clive.

None of it would have been possible without this man. Cheers, Clive.