TALES FROMTHE SHED
Galloping along now. The B25ss looks almost like a motorcycle. How long before FW decides that he wants to hear it run- even to ride it?
Galloping along now. The B25SS looks almost like a motorcycle. How long before FW decides that he wants to hear it run – even to ride it?
Istared at the dangling left rear indicator. Had it been able, it would have stared right back. Insolent things, indicators. I looked at it more closely, observing that rather than being a 1971 Lucas original, it was in fact a 1996 or so pattern item. I sneered, of course I did. Modern rubbish. Everyone on the RC Facebook group grumbles about anything modern. They’re correct. Ha! All I’d done was fall against the stupid chromey plastic thing, grab it to prevent an embarrassing arse / concrete encounter, and it had come off. Stout Lucas indicators would certainly never have done that. Probably.
A dose of staring, then. There is a temptation at this point in a rebuild, when the motorcycle is recognisably a motorcycle, and that temptation is to rush ahead and finish the thing. This mysterious situation requires a wild burst of enthusiasm. I am indeed prone to these, often being described as wild and enthusiastic. But only by persons who’ve never actually met me. This is similar in principle to describing my rusty, leaky old ruins as ‘classic bikes’. They may be, but classicossity lies in the eye of the beholder. If not in his wallet, all too often, experience has shown. More than once.
The correct way to resolve the dangling winker scenario is to remove the entire rear light assembly and replace the broken indicator. I could do this. For my sins, I am a man with many indicators. Some of them are the correct type, possibly from the same factory on Zanzibar, or wherever, which produced the broken one. I even have a few original Lucas winkers, but fitting one of those would ruin the non-authenticity, the carefree lack of originality prejudice which makes my rebuilds so unremarkable. I could fit a pair of them of course, but where’s the fun in that? A guy whose B25SS already boasts black Renthal handlebars is a beast unleashed, plainly.
And while fitting replacement indicators, would it not be a great idea to actually refinish the bracket to which they mount, along with the rear light itself? Of course it would. It wouldn’t even take very long. Just a little wire woollery, some primer and a coat or six of grey paint. That is the correct course of action. No doubt about it.
So I mixed up a little epoxy resin and stuck the winker back onto its stem. It droops a little, but don’t we all? I can return to the rear end at some other point. 2025 or so seems about right, and I do not mean at nearly half past eight in the evening.
While making with the application of epoxy – an under-appreciated guest in the bodger’s toolbox – I smeared some around the selfdestructing speedo drive gearbox, a part of which somehow detached itself and now tries to rotate with the cable. That’s just silly. Of course I have a spare speedo gearbox, but…
Fitting the (black, did I mention that?) handlebars is a time for excitement. Because it’s now time to connect up the controls. More than that. It’s the logical time to fit the headlight and its own collection of unlovely pattern indicators. Ah… the headlight. As you will remember, BSA’s most excellent B25 range fitted the equally excellent Lucas MCH66 headlight. Being fine fellows, BSA also fitted that light to Triumph’s plainly inferior versions of the B25 (laughingly called the T25, but who was fooled by that?) as well as to those bigger twins from both marques which so entertainingly wrestled with sporting pretensions. Some TR5s, Firebird
Scramblers and the like. This means that there are loads of them around – and yes, it is now possible to buy new ones! The joys of the modern age, so forth.
Except … predictably, none of the vast pile of the things I’ve looked at, and none of the smaller pile of the things I’ve bought, has actually been the right one. I have said it before and I will say it again, because I am very boring that way, careful study of a part before you hand over the moolah saves a lot of time, effort and indeed moolah. The almost entirely exactly correct MCH66 replacement light I have, and have been entirely delighted with for several months, turns out to have had one of the warning light holes drilled over-size to accept a second lighting switch. I spotted that it had the extra switch (of course I did, d’you think I’m a blind idiot?) but had failed to notice that the hole had been drilled oversize. It’s not obvious how big a hole is when there’s a switch sitting in it. I swore only a little at this, mostly because when I actually lined the light up with the rusty original I understood that as well as the bigger small hole it also has two much bigger extra holes underneath.
I have no idea why. Maybe it came originally from a Triumph TR5T, a bike I have long coveted, but not for its own variant of the MCH66 headlamp shell.
I’ve long been a fan of the BSA Group’s brave new approach to production engineering as made manifest in the 1971 oily-frame range, and I have always admired their attempts to maintain separate identities for BSA and Triumph marques, but … how many versions of this headlight are there? And why? Time for a little more restorative profanity. Give up with the profanity, consider instead the headlight. I can fill the holes with grommets and can sleeve the warning light orifice, so on it goes. Then the interesting BSA headlamp harness, which takes the leads from everything electrical associated with the headlamp, collects and connects them into a single fat cable with a big rectangular connector on the end. That connector plugs into its opposite number in the electrics box mounted beneath the nose of the fuel tank. It is very neat. A great idea … if fairly purpose-free. It allows the rider to remove the headlamp assembly more easily than is usual. Why would you want to do that?
Whatever. Everything connects, eventually. Then of course it’s time to connect the whole lot up to a battery – again. Again? Yep, this is as far as I’d got the last time I mentioned the headlamp craziness a couple of issues ago. Do keep up. That time, switching on the ignition resulted only in the rear light illuminating. Nothing else. Unedifying. In the meanwhile, I had of course reasoned (a polite word for prayed) that maybe the unhappy electrical situation would resolve itself once all the other bits had been connected. This may be referred to as blind faith, but a little hope never hurts, as all Norton rotary riders know full well. And this time when I switched on the ignition…
…there was a spark. At the spark plug. The
rear lamp did not light. Remember at this point that I’d done nothing else apart from connect up the front end of the electrical system. So it’s impossible to have affected all the rest of the wiring, right? Correct. Or… not.
More than a spark; the bike also had lights. No pilot, for reasons as yet opaque but worry not, the pilot light is not an MoT fail. Both headlamp beams, main and dip. And even the main beam repeater light lit. Astonishing. This must be the true power of prayer.
The horn was a little mysterious, in that it had but a single connector, plainly expecting those magic electrons to return to earth via metal-to-metal contacts between the horn, its bracket and the main frame. As the bracket and the frame boasted a new and deep plastic coating, which I was reluctant to cut away so soon, I ran an earth lead to one of the horn’s mounting bolts instead. The horn now works. The headlamp flasher button flashes the headlamp. Remarkable. Whatever next? A brake light switch? Yep, that works, as does the rear light at the right time. Well, the rear brake light switch works, the front brake has a switch built into its cable, and I don’t think I’ve ever known one of those to actually do its job – and this is no exception. Indicators? Ah…
The right hand indicators light when the switch is switched. The left … not so’s you’d notice. I took all the connectors apart and I put them all back together again. This always works. Except this time. I ran current direct to the non-lighting lights. They lit. I checked out the handlebar switch’s many little connections, cleaned them all and sprayed them with magical switch cleaner. They work perfectly. But I was unfooled. I have a spare switch cluster and I substituted it. This always works. Except this time. There may have been a little bad language here. Plainly, it was time to replace the indicator flasher unit, very cheap and easily accessible on all British bikes. Except those with the marvellous electrics box. On the B25SS the flasher unit is buried deep within the box.
I swore some more, sank a lot of powerful coffee, and removed the electrics box. It sounds so easy when you read it. It is easy. It’s just irritating to take it all apart after spending an entire age assembling and fitting it in the first place. I replaced the flasher unit and replaced the box, connecting everything up again. The indicators now work properly. I am a genius with electrics. Electrics? They hold no fears for this guy.
Next… Next… Well it’s like this. The bike should now run, should it not? Of course it should. It has sparks, I can rig up a fuel tank. It has a new carb … well, the carb was new in 1996 or so and has covered almost zero miles since. So it should all work, right? Did it not start easily and run well before I stripped it so that Kenny at Ace Mosickles could rebuild the gearbox selectors? It did. Yes it did. It always ran well, apart from not being inclined to select first gear, which is why the poor bike found itself shoved to the very back of earlier iterations of The Shed twenty years ago.
Right. Unearth the fuel tank. It still has twenty year-old fuel in it, which was fine most of a year ago when I first wondered whether the grubby beast would run, which it did. However, I know full well that fuels can lose their volatiles if left standing in a hot shed through many, many baking Cornish summers, so I sloshed in most of a gallon of brand new fuel to refresh it. Shook it up a little. It did smell a little better than it had, which I am certain is a good thing.
Tickle carb. Carb floods. Release tickler. Flood stops. Kick engine several times with the ignition switched off. Consider that these BSA singles have no choke fitted. Why is that? An reader asked me that very question recently and I have no sensible answer. Does anybody actually know?
The moment, then. Deep breath. Press horn button. Horn sounds – battery happy, then. Find compression, pass through it – this is only a 250, not a Venom Thruxton, I remind myself. Kick.
Instant ignition. Just like that. Max wows, as younger fools than I might exclaim at this point. The engine sounds really well, as it should. The fresh black paint on the big fat lozenge silencer smokes a little as it bakes and basks happily in the passage of hot gasses. Fans of curries will know the feeling. The exhaust gas itself contains no smoke, however. This is a good thing. The engine sounds well still, so it’s off with the oil filler to check that oil is returning. There’s no sign that it is. Which isn’t much of
a surprise because it’s dark in there and the oil is a long way down in that darkness. There is no tickover yet, so I can’t leave the engine running while I go get a torch. I stick an exploratory finger into the hole to see whether I can feel returning oil. Of course I can’t. But the engine sounds really good … for a BSA single.
Then it stalls. Phut and a small cloud of smoke from the carb. No problem. I’ll get a torch and fire it up again, unrecognised genius that I am. Find torch, switch back on, kick kick kick kick… The clutch suddenly slips and I crack my shin against the footrest. Kickslip. Again and again and again and… Decide to leave it alone to stew in its own juice while I take the Better Third for a well deserved curree. It’ll be fine in the morning.
In the morning there is a big fat spark. In the morning there is fuel. In the morning the carb floods like a toilet flushing and the clutch slips like it has Teflon inserts… I kick and I kick and I kick and…