Everyone had trackers at my school in Coventry in the early 80's. We used to spend most of our free time bodging them together - to varying standards of quality.
Most important was to have straight blade forks, so straightening the original forks was essential, as this made them stronger apparently!

...hilariously bad (wiggly) jobs were commonplace.
I broke my forks doing jumps so replaced them with 'proper' cycle-speedway ones from Stokes cycles in Cov. Cycle speedway knobblies were the ubiquitous tyres of choice.
The toughest rims were Westwood/Westrick (?), the modern derivative of the old rod-brake rim. They weighed a ton and when I cut one in half once it was reinforced with wood! We used to wire the spokes together, for 'strength'..
If you were really upmarket, alloy speedway rims were available from Stokes in a variety of colours, but I only knew one lad with those. Cotterless speedway cranks were the rich kids choice too, but everyone else just used whatever they had with the biggest single sprocket on the back. Cowhorn bars defined the breed as much as 26'' knobblies + straight blade forks.
Top kid at school on a tracker was Darren Atkins who used to thrash the local fields jumping brooks', sometimes with a string of young pretenders in tow. I used to think that he'd have made a great MTBer - turns out he wasn't a bad CX rider, a few years later!
I think Darren now runs Coventry Cycle Centre; back in the 80's when it was John Atkins, trackers were so popular in Cov' that the shop sold new, custom bikes complete with anodised cycle speedway rims etc.. I only knew of two kids who had one though and one was 'Akky' himself. A bit too posh and expensive for anybody I knew and not really in the bodging spirit of trackers - but man, I fancied one.
