Allen Millyard: The early years.
If you don’t know who Allen Millyard is, then let Pip Higham’s interview from 2016 enlighten you!
One thing I had to ask was: “Where did all this begin?” Allen tells me about his Dad. He designed and built large cranes, and would make mock-ups on the kitchen table when Allen was a lad, made out of cardboard and wood. He used these to observe how the various components twisted and distorted when presented with a bag of sugar to lift. The practical results from the experiments stuck in Allen’s mind; he was also taken under Mr Green’s wing at school.
From an early age Allen loved metalwork and Mr Green encouraged him in any way he could. It wasn’t long though, before Allen found an old Raleigh moped dumped in a hedge. The motor was toast, but within days he had appropriated a Suffolk general purpose engine that appeared to be surplus to requirements sitting in the shed. After fashioning a couple of brackets out of a length of old bed iron and persuading a pulley on to the end of the Suffolk crank, he had a moped that was capable of somewhat better performance than Mr Raleigh ever contemplated: how his dad went on when it came to cutting the grass is lost in time.
After this, Allen ‘found’ another engine, a bit bigger this time: it was out of a Mini! A great believer in using what was at hand, Allen had a Bantam frame and some Greeves forks. More bed iron fell under the Millyard hacksaw and by locking up one of the drive shafts where it exited the Mini diff and welding a sprocket on to the opposite side, quickly he converted several rather large pieces of dubious scrap into a living thing. A set of FS1-E wheels and an antique Honda 50 fuel tank completed the machine which Allen rode around the streets close to home.
More bikes followed, including a 500cc Matchless, an indication of what was to come hatched when Allen was about 17. Honda 90s were in plentiful supply as the frames rotted and repair became uneconomical, Allen amassed a few of them and set to on his dad’s Myford ML7 in an effort to build a V-twin out of a pair of C90s. The crankcases were fashioned out of a solid chunk of aluminium and the top-ends were mounted at 90 degrees in much the same way as the later SS100. An LE Velocette oil pump driven by the forward cylinder cam and a three-speed Francis Barnett gearbox somehow provided lubrication and forward propulsion, while the original Honda generator found refuge on the opposite side of the engine to where it had originally lived. Allen’s Malaguti Olympique donated its kidney and the first proper road-going and vaguely road legal Millyard special was born. And all this, at 17! Work, marriage and kids followed, with Allen zipping around on various bikes and even building a revolutionary downhill mountain bike for one of his lads. That bike – of course – became a world beater.
Allen Millyard, we salute you!
Pip Higham
So, as you’d expect most of the extra weight of the Super Six engine is on the front wheel, but it hasn’t harmed the bike’s behaviour at all; in fact the weight improves it. Apart from using marginally heavier damping oil, Allen hadn’t changed the springing of the front fork either. He says this is common to all of his Kawasaki specials with extra cylinders – up to five on the two-strokes – in that the additional weight keeps the front-end better planted. There’s still some fine tuning to be carried out. I found the carburation a bit woolly at just over idle and Allen says that a session with vacuum gauges will probably improve it. Even so the fuel consumption is meagre, he says. As with all of Allen’s bikes, the detailing on the engine is exquisite. You’d need forensic skills and intimate knowledge of Kawasaki fours to identify where the joins in the crankcases are located, mostly because the finish has been so well homogenised. The cover for the ignition on the offside is slimmer, but the opposite side’s generator cover is unchanged, although Allen considered removing the starter motor to save width – the engine is so easy to turn over on the kick lever it wouldn’t have been missed, Allen says. The gap under the starter’s cover has been filled with aluminium sheet so well you can barely see the difference.
Unlike many wild specials that shout their excesses, Allen’s Super Six follows many of his projects, being subtle and almost understated. His objective is again to produce a machine that onlookers will think came from the factory.
The Super Six is extra special though: it succeeds in that, and works better in our classic world than the Z1 it was derived from.
Thanks to
Boyer Bransden for the ignition system, to Steve Smith at Avon Tyres Motorsport for the tyres, and Tony Hutchinson at Hagon Shocks for the rear shocks.