PIP HIGHAM
Look at his massive conkers!
“Hey luv, ’ave you seen my conkers?” My inter-rogative request fell on deaf ears, but the little beauties I’d foraged that very morning on our stroll through Clifton Country Park re-lit yet another memory trail. Have you noticed that kids aren’t interested in conkers these days? Or catapults, pea guns, Meccano? Or digging holes, or lighting fires, climbing trees or takin’ stuff to bits. When me and our kid were (well, kids) we made bats out of branches and bits of inner tube, then pea-guns, then pea-rifles in our shed. They started off RAF (rough as….), but rapidly improved in every respect. They looked better, worked better and we could hit a cocoa tin at 10 yards. From there we went on to make crossbows (oiks!) and then via Bako, Meccano and push bikes we started systematically dismantling, and occasionally fixing, anything with a piston.
Although I’m sure that our interest with weapons-based devices would comfortably occupy a van full of psychiatrists for a wet weekend or two, we needed every nut, bolt and spring link of that whole period to get our act together. This pre-occupation with noisy, dirty, smelly bikes served us both well in later years; we both served time (not in a ‘locked up’ sense) below decks in the Merchant Navy before settling into jobs fixing bikes (me) and outboards (Bill). Our passion was to fix the unfixable, and the more unfixable the better! We both loved our bikes, and fixing them, regardless of the pain it caused, was always the challenge. We realised very early on that we needed a few quid to buy bits, and more to the point, tools. Tool catalogues were preferred reading, but with a minimal budget a tool that could multi-task was essential; it needed to bend brackets, twist screwdrivers and undo mangled nuts of various sizes.
We located our weapon of choice in Hammond and Walkers, our local tool emporium. A set of 10-inch ‘Mole’ grips. What a weapon! I still have them to this day and the abuse that they’ve received. They’ve held mudguards on, clamped stuff together before, during and after welding, they’ve stood in for a missing presumed lost gear-lever and they’ve undone stuff way beyond their pay grade. Me and Morris T Mole have shared quite a lot; we’ve been to the mountain top on many occasions, when times woz ’ard we’ve cranked studs out of a Matchless crankcase in a muddy field in Wales, heaved rusty cut Brads out of roof trusses older than my Grandad, but they’ve also teased together slender alloy sections of an old Cessna instrument binnacle while I persuaded a couple of Kwik Loks (also known as ‘Clecos’ or ‘Skin Pins’) into position prior to installing pop rivets.
Like most people in my fairly advanced state of development I’ve got a few other favourites in my toolbox; a very well-worn Snap-on 10mm combi that has seen action from Sweden to Sudan, and possibly my favourite, my 10-inch Bahco shifter that’s pulled up bilge pump glands in the depths of The Southern Cross in temperatures that would send your average H&S operative into apoplectic meltdown, and more recently pulling up spindle nuts on my little Kosman race bike.
The whole spanner issue has long been a thorn in the tool-bag for many a bloke in a shed. In the time before metric-ness there were several different, some might say confusing, fastener designations. Early Britishers used cycle thread fasteners with a fine thread (26 tpi generally). Confusingly, (and there’s more believe me) the spanner sizes used to twist these were designated BSW or BSF – that’s British Standard Fine or
British Standard Whitworth, the latter being invented in the mid 19th century by a grand Manchester lad, Joseph Whitworth. Joe revolutionised the fasteners that enabled mass production to succeed by establishing standards that, when repeated in engineering facilities far and wide, allowed components to fit together with strength and precision.
No prizes for guessing that as with so many engineering ‘firsts’ it was the military that took advantage of this innovation. Interesting to note that whilst Joe grew up without tuppence in the back streets of Manchester, he ended his days in Monte Carlo with 84 years under his belt; it’s possible that his inventive mind turned a productive shilling or two. Post BSW/BSF and our American cousins throw yet another spanner into the works. AF, or across flats, sometimes incorrectly referred to as American Fine, became the weapon of choice in the British automotive industry. To add a final insult to this whole debacle, Triumph and BSA used, for a short time, a mixture of Cycle, BSF and UNF threaded fasteners with correspondingly obtuse spanner sizes. I think Whitworth might have had something to say on this matter: he created unity, those that followed appeared to dismantle itt and chuck it in the hedge. g