All in good time...
I spent the other day making a brake rod. No ordinary brake rod – it was one of the final missing pieces for Perry Barwick’s 1925 BSA project. We are finally near the end of the rebuild; Perry has been very patient over the years, but this brake rod seemed to me to sum up the reason it has taken so long. Brake rods on post-war bikes are usually just a piece of steel rod threaded for about three inches at one end and at the other, bent at a right angle and drilled for a split pin.
On the BSA, there is a clevis threaded onto either end. You can’t buy these; I had to machine them from square bar. In the middle there is a threaded adjuster, a ‘turnbuckle’; one end is a right-hand thread, the other a left, so turning it one way shortens the rod, turning it the other lengthens it, obviously I had to make that and then the two brake rods. Finally there are locknuts, one being left-hand thread; I had to make them too – that’s seven scratch-made items.
One reason I love 1920s bikes is that they were made on manual machines, so if you have access to machine tools you can play at being BSA and make your own parts. It’s fun, but time-consuming. With a vintage bike, the odds are that any parts missing will have to be made. As a youngster, I used to envy the older guys who nonchalantly knocked out parts from well-equipped garden workshops. I’d think: ‘If only I had their knowledge and equipment...’ Well, the years have been kind and I now have some of that knowledge and a fair bit of equipment – but what I didn’t notice slipping away was the time...