Life on the chain-gang
We were intrigued by Paul Berryman’s tale of his DR600’S cam-chain woes that we asked him to find out more about the mysteries of cam-chains and the man himself: Tony Galea.
Tony Galea started his specialist in-frame cam-chain replacement business 31 years ago, in the heyday of London couriers, and has been at it ever since. Make no bones about it – Tony knows his subject inside out. Tony’s dad got him twiddling spanners with a purpose when they did up pushbikes together for a little extra money as Tony grew up in the East end of London during the 1960s. Although his dad sadly succumbed to cancer when Tony was just 14, his legacy was that Tony found himself happy working on his own motorbikes when he turned 16. First up, an FS1-E he hammered around Bethnal Green and even Tony admits this was a great first bike as it was as near to a pushbike as a motorbike can be! From then on there were spells at a timber drying plant and a motorcycle courier before he started in a local bike dealer’s workshop and it’s from here that the germ of an idea came to him. Tony explains: “I kept having to take perfectly good engines apart on CB250S to change the cam-chain. What annoyed me was there was nothing wrong with the cam-chain itself, or even the function of the tensioner. The only problem was the tensioner ran out of adjustment long before the chain was knackered.” From this seed of dissatisfaction grew the
idea to offer something different that would come to dominate his life from then until now. By 1985 (and a spell in R&D at Motad exhausts) he decided it was time to set up his own business. Specialising in quicker, cheaper cam-chain repairs from the off, Galea Camchain Services had a very clear idea about what it was going to do – in-frame cam-chain replacement using the often frowned upon split chains and rivet links. To start with he spent as much time convincing potential customers that split link cam-chain repairs were possible as actually doing them, but after he’d done enough guaranteed jobs to prove what he was
saying was true, the business grew quickly. While he started as a mobile service it wasn’t long before he needed his own premises. He had a captive market in London’s couriers and made hay for the next 20 years.
Endless vs split – and why cheaper can also be better
‘Why does the perceived wisdom around cam-chain replacement suggest that a split chain and rivet isn’t as good as an OE endless chain would be?’ I reckoned immediately that I’d asked the right question. I could see this was going to be good. “Listen,” starts Tony. “There are a few things about this that need setting straight – firstly, let’s say that every chain in the world from a necklace to a drive chain to a cam-chain – none of them were made endless! At some point all of them were joined. The difference between an OE ‘endless’ chain and a split chain and rivet is only where and how the end links become joined. The poor perception of using split chains and rivet links comes from many cases where the join has been done so badly that it fails; usually that has less to do with the link being loose and the chain coming undone, and everything to do with the joining link being overriveted, over-tight and causing a point of failure as it’s not been done right!