Miracle Worker

Owner Mark Brown swings open the door of the first. The smell of petrol fumes is so overwhelming you have to step back, but your eyes stay locked on the gorgeous machines revealed inside. Shield badges glint in the long shafts of sunlight. Ducati, Triumph, Velocette – a dozen rare and beautiful creatures, all of them lovingly restored.

You could call Brown the ultimate backyard mechanic, but he’s really a resurrectionist. He takes a rusty hulk from a rubbish dump or a gloopy farmland swamp and, over months, sometimes years, he breathes life back into it.

His second container is like the ‘before’ shot in that process, full of remains which, if you hadn’t already seen what Brown’s capable of, you’d have thought were beyond saving.

There are 18 scooters in various states of repair on Brown’s property.

A few years back, he had 44. 

“I’ve come to realise that what was once a hobby has become a bit of an obsession. Other people tell me I’m a legend and that I’ll get my own padded cell eventually.”

He laughs, takes another swig of first-of-the-day coffee from a cup decorated with the Vespa insignia. Despite appearances, however, it’s not only scooters that interest Brown. He’s what you might call an equal opportunities vintage nut, with several Fiats and Citroens in his garage. And for years it was British motorbikes that had him hooked.

“But then one day I did a job for someone and, as part payment, he gave me this wreck of an old Triumph Tigress. Well, I hadn’t known that Triumph made scooters. I bought a book on classic scooters and discovered there was this whole world I hadn’t known about. It all started from there.”

Brown says his mechanical knowledge was aquired the hard way. “I’ve had scooters catch on fire after I’ve restored them. I was living in a disused scout hall when one of them went up. I pushed the flaming scooter out the doors and left it in the grass in disgust. Any backyard mechanic will tell you about the disasters. We’ve all learned by trial and error.”

As we pick our way through the containers, Brown explains the pedigree of each scooter.

Is it their rarity that has him hooked? Brown says it’s not, that it’s the combination of style, performance and reliability that gets him, but his eyes light up when he talks about how he acquired some of his collection. His Ducati Cruiser, for instance, of which only a dozen are believed to exist.

“I was pretty certain none had ever come to New Zealand. Someone rang me and said ‘I know where there’s one for sale’ … I rang the number and my heart was beating so hard I could almost feel it coming through my chest. I couldn’t believe it could be a Cruiser. But the lady said ‘Yes, it was my dad’s and it has the Cruiser badge’. I almost had a heart attack when she said that. The thing could have been run over by a roller and I would have restored it.”

Favourites? It’s like picking between children. The Ducati’s up there. And when he talks about his rare electric-start Tigress, Brown actually rubs his hands together. But it’s the Velocette Viceroy that makes him weep. It’s stylish, of course, and powerful, a motorbike in scooter’s clothing.

“But it also has these really interesting harmonics. Down low it has an interesting little burble, but when you wind the throttle it starts to sound like more of a howl.”

The harmonics of a scooter engine. It’s another language he is speaking now, the tongue of the fanatic.