3. Tooling up 4. The yokes on you 5. Get protected

There’s just something magical about tools, they hint at numerous possibilities, action about to be undertaken and there can never be enough in the toolbox.

Our ongoing IT465 project has required a few more spanners than have been in the tool kit of late, so we went with quality items from Sealey Tools.

It is false economy to buy poor quality or cheap tools as they will cause more damage by rounding off hexagons or barking knuckles when they slip off.

Also while kits of sockets and spanners are all well and good I’ve a full socket set bought as a present 40 years ago and some of the sockets have never been used while others are the third incarnation of the slot in the case.

It is far better to buy just the sizes you need and build up a dedicated kit. You could even go as far as having a kit for each bike…

So, go peruse the Sealey Tools catalogue and see what goodies you can get hold of for your toolbox. Yokes by REH Forks are now available after a year of development. Mirroring the original REH yokes in profile, they retain a classic pre-65 style while being produced in much higher grade aircraft aluminium. They are claimed to be the strongest, stiffest yokes on the pre-65 market.

Says Duncan Macdonald, REH Forks: “This has a higher ultimate tensile strength and yield than standard yoke material.”

Naturally R.E.H Yokes are designed to work with R.E.H Forks – featured last issue – and they will fit all classic trials bikes with 35mm stanchions. Duncan advises Triumph Tiger Cub owners should use the 1.5 degree offset yokes from Armac Design (www. armac-design.com) rather than the 40mm parallel off-set of the REH yokes.

The yokes have a purposely long stem which can be easily modified to suit almost all pre-65 frames, have more depth on the stanchion clamping area, use a bigger bearing and have a choice of 7⁄8th in or 22mm ‘fatbar’ clamping. They’re Pre-65 Scottish eligible and have a taper roller bearing option. Off-road bikes work in a harsh environment – when it’s wet it’s muddy, when the sun shines it’s dusty, so is it any wonder they start to look second-hand in short order?

Even power washing or steam cleaning only gets the muck off. In the good old days power washers were a bit of copper tube with the end flattened, cleaner was a bucket of soapy water, some hard work later and the muck was gone; running up the engine warmed the motor and water evaporated, then a light oil was squirted all over the bike.

Nowadays squirting oil over your bike is environmentally naughty but you still want it to look good. Power washers are fourpence a dozen at DIY superstores, bike cleaners are all over the place and light oil has been replaced with TMX 365 from Scottoiler, an environmentally friendly post wash prep. It displaces water after a wash, will build up a protective coating through repeated use and help keep your bike pristine.

Our IT465 – sometimes the engine would turn over, sometimes not, and the problem became clear when a look in the casing showed a lack of teeth on the kick-start gear and its idler pinion. A word or two with spares sources brought the comment “465 kick-start gears… best of luck finding new ones”.

As it happens a friend turned up a good used main gear and we found probably the last new idler pinion on the CMS website in Holland, but if we’d been unable to source these the project would have been sunk… or would it? Not if Nova Racing Transmissions can help it. Its top lad Sean Whittaker took a look at the gears I presented, thought for a moment and said, “Yes, we can sort these”. To backtrack a little I’d been photographing an ex-works development Suzuki Mxer that had arrived at its owners with little in the way of gears in the box and they were told that Nova Racing designed and made the cluster from the scant information given to them.

Talking to Nova it became clear that there were few gear problems they couldn’t sort and they stressed that if you have a problem, you should pick the phone up or send an email and talk to them. Undoubtedly, the cheapest option would always be to find new or good used gears, but if they are unobtainium then Nova are your people. My guide for the day, Mick Dearlove, talked me through what Nova does and how to get the best possible service. Put simply, Nova designs and manufactures gearboxes for classic and modern, off-road, road and race motorcycles. There’s generally a full spares back-up with their products, but some things sell faster than others. It isn’t always a good idea to just send in one gear, as it has to work in a pair and in a cluster, so Nova often asks for the shafts and adjacent gears too, sometimes even the cases they go into as its manufacturing process is slightly different to mass production. Mick tells me the deciding factor is often costs – a one-off is dear but a batch brings the costs down: “We’ll do one-offs, but if the customer can assemble a batch of, say five, then the costs drop dramatically. We do keep a note of requests and if sometimes a batch will emerge. In any case, pick the phone up and talk to us.”