If you have seen the movie or read the book "The worlds Fastest Indian". It's a true story about a young man, Burt Monro, growing up in the southern end of the south island of New Zealand. He is most famous for building a special racing motorcycle out of old Indian parts and making many of his own parts. Burt had no mechanical or engineering training, he grew up as a farm boy.
As he grew older he got the passion for motor cycles, he learned by fiddling and tinkering how to make them go faster, to the point where he began to win races among the local bikers in and around the town of Invercargill, at the very south end of the south island.
Eventually Burt decided that he wanted to build a record setting bike, aquiring an old Indian, he stripped it down and began rebuilding it with the aim of setting a world speed record.
Burt was able to use an old lathe owned by the local hardware shop. The lathe was a treadle powered lathe which he taught himself how to operate. On this lathe he did all the machining he needed, making new parts to his own design. He even made his own pistons out of his own alloy that he developed by melting down old car pistons and other bits of aluminium, then machining them on this treadle lathe.
He finally set a new world record on that bike on the salt flats in Utah. that record has never neen broken.
That old treadle powered lathe is on display alongside the actual indian motorcycle that Burt built and set the worlsd record on, they are in the center of the hardware shop in Invercargill NZ. Very worth seeing if you ever get in that neck of the woods.
