FRANCIS-BARNETT TRIALS
After Odgie’s earlier and entirely unworthy misappropriation of a trials-trimmed BSA Bantam, he redeems himself by finding a delightful little Francis-Barnett greenlaner.And then he mends it.And then…
After Odgie’s earlier and entirely unworthy misappropriation of a trials-trimmed BSA Bantam, he redeems himself by finding a delightful little Francis-Barnett green-laner. And then he mends it. And then…
Regular readers may recall that back in issue RC153, I was so enraptured by a little trials Bantam I’d originally bought for a friend that I decided to keep it myself. It wasn’t a particularly wicked action. My friend didn’t even know I’d bought it until after I’d decided to keep it, so it was hardly snatched away from under her nose. Still, it meant the search did go on for a bike to suit her. If you remember the brief, I had been looking for something nice and light, preferably powered by a Villiers 8E engine.
Well, Fate must have been smiling on me – or at least been very forgiving of my previous misappropriation – for not long afterwards the gods of eBay sent me a nice little Francis-Barnett. I watched it for a while, as you do. It was a bit of a curate’s egg, the sort of restoration that’s only good in parts. On the one hand it was in vaguely green lane trim, and had been treated to a new front rim and spokes, new tyres, new mudguards, new crank seals, new coil, and a new stainless exhaust and silencer.
On the other it sported a toolbox mounted completely wrongly and which looked positively awful, an unfortunate foray into ungainly bracketry, a deeply disturbing chainguard, and a recent powder coating job that wasn’t only grubby-looking and matt, but sported more orange peel than a van full of Tango. And, er, it was fitted with indicators. Indicators!? However, it did, as they say, have potential.
As is my wont, I stuck on my highest bid plus a teensy bit extra for safety reasons, then left the universe to it. When I went back to check what had transpired, I’d won the bike. For £200 less than my highest offer. So far so fine and dandy. I trundled off down to Macclesfield, and had a nice chat with the vendor about his vintage Morris and old cars in general before we got around to the Fanny-B. It fired up easily, seemed to run OK, so I took it for a quick squirt up and down his street. Mmmm.
Let’s say the handling left a very great deal to be desired. It wouldn’t actually go in a straight line. It wasn’t just bad, it was too dangerous to go very far on (and I ride some pretty dangerous motorcycles, believe you me). Closer inspection revealed a kink in the front downtube, the end result of either an altercation with something large and immoveable, or an attempt to quicken the steering for trials use. I suspected the former, since
I reasoned no-one would go the trouble of tweaking a frame and still leave the footrests in the standard position. I also suspected that the decrease in rake wasn’t the only factor which meant the bike rode like a ruptured camel on a twisted tray on a wet Tuesday morning.
Discussions were held, I took the chap at his word that he didn’t know anything about it, since everything pointed towards a man who plays with old cars having a go at playing with old bikes and not quite getting it right. We reset the price to something agreeable to both of us, and the Fanny-B rolled into the van, up the M6, out of the van, and into the Shed of Destiny.
First task was the urgent removal of the chainguard and toolbox (so urgent I never even thought about taking photographs...). At least then you could rest your eyes on the bike without feeling poorly. Secondly was the repositioning of the footrests, the entire standard assembly being easily removed, consisting as it does of one long hexagonal through-bolt holding both footrests in position. I grabbed a pair of neat little folding footrests from stock, I think I gave three quid for them at the Garstang jumble one time, and with a bit of scrap steel bracketry and a dollop of welding, everything was moved back about eight inches. (A quick aside, I stuck the original footrests on eBay, thinking someone might give me a tenner for them. They went for sixtysix squids! I was in shock...)
The rear brake was re-engineered to suit, and I had to manufacture a new folding kickstart to clear everything. You can actually buy large clearance folding trials kickstarts especially for Villiers, but (a) they were a ridiculous 70 quid each, and (b) they only made them for the 9E and not the 8E anyway. So the solution involved buying one intended for a Suzuki, brand new (Gasp! Still a whacking 24 quid!) off
eBay, then cutting and bending and welding and finally attaching it to the original Villiers boss. Hurrah!
I made a pair of wider handlebars by taking bends from two different pairs and welding them together (and hid the joint under the racing tape that you thought was just to make the bike look faster). I replaced the modern enduro-style rear light with something more contemporary with the era, mounted on an alloy bracket I knocked up. The comparatively big and bulky Wassells trials seat came off, the cross-tube on the frame beneath it was cut away and lowered, and my good mate Cosmic George made me a neat little seat by covering the base I cut out of some scrap steel sheet with some nice brown Ambla. A pair of grey Wassells handlebar grips and the plot was looking groovy.
Groovy it may have looked, but it still didn’t steer worth a damn. Frankly. I set to with the grinder and welder and modified the frame back to an unmodified set-up, but the resurrection of the rake did exactly what I expected it to do – nothing. And no amount of fiddling with the head bearing adjustment made a blind bit of difference either. If you jacked up the bike, slackened off the head bearings, the forks would rock from lock to lock quite easily. But once you dropped the bike back on the ground and tried to ride it, it just felt so stiff on the steering, like an over- tightened damper. Clearly something was owree. Or even awry.
Now a slight aside. Francis-Barnett forks are a law unto themselves. Clearly there’s a reason why everybody else in the world has fork legs that slide through the yokes, and clearly there’s a reason why Francis-Barnett forks don’t, but that reasoning escapes me. So both yokes are welded to the fork legs. There are other frustrating little idiosyncrasies, such as the way the wheel spindle mounts to the fork sliders (particularly if someone has lost the original spacer and made a new one that looks the same but is ever so slightly shorter, so you spend ages having a jolly time trying to work out why the forks don’t go up and down properly), or the annoying way the front mudguard brackets clamp to the fork legs,
in that you have to clamp them first to get the mudguard stay on, but you can’t fit the clamping bolt until the mudguard stay is on (yes, you read that right).
But the real gobstopper is the steering head design. To remove the forks, you undo the top stem nut, then pull the stem down from underneath and remove it completely. You’re ahead of me aren’t you? What’s keeping everything in place now then? Well if you’re lucky, the one spare hand you have left. Then you need to support the fork assembly exactly in position with both hands, and then wiggle it while you use your third hand to remove the spacer between the top bearing and the top yoke. Simple. Then you can lower the assembly enough to clear the bottom bearing, and slide everything out, forks, yokes, Uncle Tom Cobley an’ all. At least I had the presence of mind to lay a large blanket on the floor first, so as all the little ball bearings fall out, they stay stuck to the fluff rather than pinging all over the shed never to be seen again.
Back to the plot. With the forks out, I could try putting the lower bearing cup in by hand. And here was the problem at least. It didn’t seem to sit correctly. There was no smooth rotating action. Again the FrancisBarnett Motorcycle Company revealed its quirky nature. The lower cone is actually more of a cup, it has an inner and outer edge, presumably to try and keep all the balls in place on reassembly (once you stray from good sensible practice, there are always knock-on consequences). And the outer edge of the inner cup was contacting the outer edge of the outer cup – basically, the two cups were making contact before the balls did. ’Twas but a moment with the angle-grinder to relieve the edge slightly, whereupon the whole thing sat nicely together and rotated in a manner most rewarding and pleasing.
Why did it happen? I suspect the ‘restoration’ had involved new ball bearings, but at 6mm rather than the original ¼ inch, the slight reduction in diameter being enough to lose clearance. ’Twas but a moment to refit the forks... Well, a very long, sweaty, sweary, frustrating moment, some 45 minutes of cursing and fiddling and cursing some more. No doubt with two men on a production line, the forks just flew in. One man in a shed was a different proposition. But in they eventually went, and I lived to tell the tale.
No worries, now the bike steered like Mr Francis and Mr Barnett intended. In fact, it steered so well that I gave it a coat of paint. A bit of internet research turned up an approximate RAL number for the fetching shade of green of the rather unfetching powder coating, and a litre of corresponding Tekaloid winged its way shedwards. Painting a whole motorcycle with a 3/8” brush is a time consuming endeavour, but it was the only suitable soft brush I had, and if you break it up into sections at a time, the hours just fly by...
While I was at it, I cut away most of the back of the toolbox and made it into a much slimmer one, so it could be fitted into the rear loop yet not intrude too much on the rider’s leg when standing on the footrests. A couple of stickers from the delightfully named‘I Say, Ding Dong’sticker company and we were in the office and open for business.
Out on the road the bike finally steered in a straight line. It went well too, the little 197cc motor quite happy cruising along at 45mph. It was too tall geared for trials use though, so I ordered up the largest rear sprocket I could find. A word of caution here: like Bantams, and indeed other small two-strokes of the time, the Fanny-B uses a Renold 110044 chain. This looks remarkably like a modern 420, but actually isn’t, the roller diameter is ever so slightly different. You can buy 420 sprockets to do the conversion in many cases, but you can’t fit a cheap 420 chain on original sprockets. Many people replace the lot, as it means cheaper
chains for life and easier to obtain split links, but since I wasn’t stripping the engine down and the front sprocket was good, I opted for a 428 rear sprocket with 70 teeth – the biggest you can buy. 428 chain uses the same roller size as 110044, but is 5/16” wide rather than 3/16”, and seeing as how I needed to machine out the middle to suit the FB hub anyway, I was also able to skim it down to the correct width while it was in the lathe. Job done.
Surprisingly, even with such a huge sprocket, the gearing wasn’t as low as I would have liked. But the first trial beckoned, so away we went. And the truth is, the bike did rather well. I did the morning five laps for just one mark lost, the taller gearing proved ideal for finding grip, while the short wheelbase suited the tight turns between trees. The forks were as useless as I’d imagined they’d be. Luckily there were no big rocks, but on one steep drop over exposed tree roots, I had to clamp my teeth together beforehand to stop them rattling away inside my skull.
My one mistake in the build was something I’d never even considered, though. I’d used the standard rear brake pedal, where the original cross-hatching in the metal had worn smooth, as they always do. Fine for testing around the yard in rubber-soled work boots, not so good when everything’s wet in trials boots. Coming round a steep bank between trees my foot slipped clean off the pedal, and although I found it again within a split second, the momentary loss of braking was enough to make me crash into the tree rather than go around it. Damn. The resultant five marks lost
slipped me down the results, but I still ended the day on seven marks lost for ten laps, so it was a respectable first outing. Needless to say, the very first job when I was back in the shed was to weld some serrations on the edge of the brake pedal...
The second outing was a different affair, lots of deep slippery mudholes mixed in with the usual tight turns and wooded banks. I was down with a bad cold and nearly didn’t ride, but I’m a glutton for it really so away we went. Fourth place on what is not much more than a converted road bike against Spanish and Italian Twin-Shocks and pukka pre-65 swag wasn’t to be sniffed at. Result.
And with that under my belt, I entered unchartered waters. Well at least, I entered a much harder trial, with underwater rocks. I pretty much knew lots of rocky streams weren’t
going to be the bike’s forte, with barely two inches of suspension movement at each end, but hey, what’s life without a challenge? Well, simpler and easier is the short answer. The going was rough, the streams were indeed rocky, and the other bikes were all trick, with sections laid out to suit. If I tell you Mick Grant dropped 16 marks you’ll get the picture. I’d nearly completed the four laps and then I broke it. The bike that is.
Clatter clatter clatter graunch stop. That would be an uphill push back to the start then. Subsequent inspection revealed a large rock had bent the big brass flywheel, which in turn had clouted one end of the lighting coil, which in turn had broken off and jammed against the points mechanism. There is an argument that if you don’t want to break your old bike, don’t do stupid things with it.
It’s not one I subscribe to in the slightest though. Obviously.