Resurrected From A Tiny Cardboard Box. The Wardill 4
ALL PROJECTS HAVE THEIR BEGINNINGS. IN THE case of the Wardill 4 it was a small, cardboard Kodak box. Mark Wardill had seen this box as a child and knew it was important to his family, but it was only as an adult that he found it contained a small collection of glass photographic negative plates – and when developed those plates were found to contain a number of photographs of his great-grandfather, Percy Wardill, in the early 1920s; a discovery that uncovered tales of a mysterious motorcycle with the family name on the tank.
Research ensued, with ancient and crumbling copies of The Motor Cycle realising some of the scant information about the Wardill. It was enough to encourage Mark, who was at the time more of a custom car petrolhead, to investigate getting the original ‘supercharged’ two-stroke engine built again.
“What I wanted to do was make sure that whatever bike I created was, for all intents and purposes, my grandfather’s bike. The same wheelbase, wheels, etc.”
Recreating the engine turned out to be a lot trickier than he initially anticipated. “It sounded simple in theory, but it would have cost a fortune. And getting a two-stroke through the emissions regulations was going to be hard,” said Mark.
Undeterred, he had a think about whether there was another way to recreate the Wardill. “I decided to look at building a bike with an off-the-shelf modern engine, try to make some for sale, and use the money from those sales to pay to have the original engine made.”
Finding a suitable engine
