STEIB SIDECAR
For more than forty years, Stuart Francis’ Steib sidecar has been subjected to just about every indignity a mechanical conveyance can withstand. And still… it thrives!
For more than forty years, Stuart Francis’ Steib sidecar has been subjected to just about every indignity a mechanical conveyance can withstand. And still… it thrives!
The story starts one evening in 1972 when I was returning home through some country lanes. I was doing a passable imitation of Phil Read on my Ariel Arrow until I missed a gear. The engine started running rough and cutting out on one cylinder: we limped home. The post-mortem revealed that one of the big ends had failed and the resulting debris had wrecked that side of the engine. I even found a broken big end roller imbedded in the top of the piston!
The urgent issue was what would replace it as I needed transport to get to work. My parents were dead against me getting another solo so, after some heated discussion, we finally agreed on a motorcycle and sidecar. Two weeks later, after obtaining my first bank loan, I bought a rather secondhand BSA A10 and Watsonian child-adult sidecar. Despite some initial teething problems (the camshaft had to be replaced) it became one of the best bikes I ever owned (965 LHU where are you now?).
After a few months of getting used to riding/driving an outfit I was becoming very confident… until I rear- ended a Cortina at a T-junction in the middle of Bath. The resulting impact demolished the car’s boot (the sidecar nose rode over the bumper) but appeared to do little damage to the sidecar. Two weeks later, riding along a very bumpy cobbled road in Bath, the sidecar door popped open and the whole roof sagged down by a foot. Temporary repairs were made by wrapping a tow rope around the body like a corset but it was clear its days were numbered.
I immediately started looking for a replacement and was eventually pointed towards an old grain barn in the hamlet of Holt where a character called Tucker wheeled
and dealed in secondhand bikes, spares and sidecars. I acquired a lifelong friend and a 1952 Steib TR500 sidecar. The Steib was not quite in the same condition as when it left the Nuremburg factory. There seemed to be a lot of filler around the nose from an encounter with a Ford Transit, and the distinctive mudguard had been replaced with one from a BSA. I undertook a quick cosmetic makeover with filler and Valspar paint and attached it to the A10. After resetting the sidecar connections three times (I learned to distrust swan necks and three point attachment), the A10 and Steib became a great combo, easily getting to 80mph.
The first real test was a visit to the Isle of Man for the 1972 Manx Grand Prix. A group of us left Holt on this great adventure with Tucker leading the way. Tucker’s route to Liverpool on A- and B-roads was great for solos but a challenge for an outfit carrying most of the luggage. After some adventures we got to the IoM and had a great time, although my attempts at emulating Helmut Fath didn’t quite work out…
The return trip was a going to be more difficult as I agreed to carry back a whole Norton ES2 that a friend had blown up and left in the Island the year before. The ES2 was broken down into big bits and stuffed into or tied onto the sidecar. Due to ferry problems I finished up on a later boat than the rest. Tucker gave me his telephone number in case of emergencies, and not having a pen or paper he scraped it into boot paintwork – the numbers were still visible when I later reconditioned the sidecar. The trip home was a real struggle. The overloaded outfit was a pig to control, not helped by the rear sidecar connection pulling out of the frame halfway home.
I took my motorcycle test on the outfit. I passed despite the examiner leaping into the sidecar and sitting down in the soaking wet seat. A little later I decided to use the A10 as
a solo and transferred the Steib to a 1955 AJS 18MS that I had acquired from Tucker. I used four points of attachment, making for a far stronger arrangement. The big problem with the AJS was the awful electrics, mainly down to dynamo problems, so I fitted a 12V car battery in the sidecar welded a car dynamo bracket onto the swan-neck. I attached a pulley to the end of the crankshaft, modified the primary chaincase and fitted a Lucas car dynamo and control box. The resulting lights were excellent, and in the winter I could warm my hands on the headlight sealed beam unit.
I did a few rallies on this outfit as it was ideal for winter riding, the most memorable being the 1974 Dragon Rally. We should have gone on a pal’s vintage HRD outfit but he rode 30 miles to my place before realising he had not turned on the oil. The outstanding memory of that trip was blasting flat out down the M6 motorway, lying flat on the tank with him huddled in the sidecar and the speedo hovering at 75mph.
The next incarnation of the Steib evolved when I attached it to a 1958 Triumph Thunderbird. Again its first real outing was a trip to the IoM, this time carrying a mate’s girlfriend in the sidecar. After the usual Island adventures one of the other bikes was sick and needed its load lightened, so I finished up with another young lady on the back. It soon became clear that she was very uncomfortable on the back so the two girls squeezed themselves into the sidecar.
When I was transferred to Portsmouth dockyard I used the outfit to commute the 160 miles at the weekends in all winds and weather so my mum could have the privilege of doing my laundry. One of the worst rides I ever had was going across Salisbury Plain in the snow tracks of other vehicles while the bottom sidecar connection acted as a snowplough, spraying ice, salt and snow all over me.
My parents gradually applied the thumbscrews to get their garage back, which for some time had been my workshop (how unreasonable). I was able to move most of my bikes to Portsmouth but the sidecar wouldn’t easily fit through the front door of my terraced house, so it went for a holiday at Tucker’s market garden.
The next incarnation of the sidecar was when my first wife broke her leg in a motorcycle accident. She needed transport, so she told me to build her an outfit. I found a butchered 650 Dneiper (a chopper project!) which I resurrected and attached to the Steib. The sidecar was now looking rather shabby with a rather rusty bottom and cracked filler. The next challenge was teaching Jean how to ride an outfit. The high point of this process came when she put the sidecar wheel on the pavement of the housing estate and left it there for a quarter mile. I was in the sidecar trying to give instructions. The poor old Steib’s rusty body couldn’t stand up to this punishment for too long. The floor gave way and started dragging along the road while I
was rather stuck in the sidecar trying to get Jean to stop.
I did make a temporary floor out of an Austin Maxi bonnet, but it didn’t really work so the body was taken off and a couple of planks and a concrete block were lashed to the chassis. It was about this time that I noticed the sidecar wheel hub was going furry and developing what looked like little cauliflower florets: terminal corrosion. By a stroke of luck I found that a BSA conical hub front wheel fitted perfectly.
Jean discovered that she could get to 75mph on the downhill stretch of the motorway towards Portsmouth; the Dneiper stood this for nine months until a piston gave way, taking a big end with it. The Steib was then hidden away in the back of the garage for the next 25 years. A few years later while clearing out a friend’s garage I found a proper Steib mudguard and wheel, both had seen better days but were good raw material.
In 2007 I collided with a tractor, which left me and my old AJS rather bent. We both got rebuilt but we both suffered from permanent damage; bent frames. I thought the best thing was to put the Steib back on the AJS. The first challenge was refurbishing the chassis and wheel. Trying to get apart very rusty 60 year-old nuts, bolts and seized pivot pins can be fun at the best of time but most of them had been soaked in a mixture of water and road salt and left to cook. A combination of an oxyacetylene torch, half a litre of WD40, an air gun and a short scaffolding pole got them all to move eventually. After cleaning up some dreadful welding I did 30 years ago, and making a new front sidecar connection, the whole chassis was epoxy powder-coated. The bearings in the sidecar wheel and swinging arm were replaced.
It was in this state that the Steib was put into a shipping container with all my other goods and chattels and shipped to NZ. I well remember my mate’s caustic comments about transporting this rusty pile of rubbish (the sidecar body), to NZ and having to put it into the container. The Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food inspector didn’t like state of the mudguard (I forgot to clean it) so it was quarantined and steam cleaned. The sidecar body got put to the back of the queue as my first priority was getting all of the roadworthy bikes approved and registered for NZ.
The first part of the restoration was stripping most of the body back to bare metal, chiselling and cutting off all the filler; the thickest piece of filler was about 6cm deep. The whole left hand side of the nose was very badly crumpled with awful welding.
The only option was to cut half of the nose away and replace it with new metal, not the easiest thing to do with compound curves and a swage line to match. The temporary floor was removed and about 10cm of the sidepanels cut away to get back to clean metal. A new floor and patches for the sidepanels were welded into place. All the rest of the many rust holes, damaged and dented panels were attended to and this seemed to go on for ages.
The next stage was filling and rubbing back, trying to get the shape right. As usual, once one bit looked right it just emphasised how bad some of the other bits were. The final part was painting. A litre of anti-rust primer and a combination of spray cans and brushwork finally produced a fair result. The body was lined with varnished plywood.
The mudguard, when blasted clean, resembled a lace doily. Several hours of welding and filling finally produced something that looked like a mudguard again. The wheel rim was very rusty but sound so it was blasted and painted. The sidecar chassis was attached to the AJS, and the body finally reunited with the chassis after nearly 35 years apart.
A quick test ride proved I had far too much lean out and there were a couple of small problems with the bike. Once these were fixed the outfit was inspected and registered at the local testing station. It felt strange but great to be back on the road with a combination I last rode nearly 35 years ago. It brought back so many memories. Having ridden an outfit with leading link forks, disc brakes and a sidecar brake for the last 12 years, the Steib and AJS feels very old-school but great fun.
The local upholster did a great job covering the seat frame after I rebuilt it, and the ride in the sidecar is very comfortable with two lots of suspension. The only jobs left to do are building a windscreen, and finding a proper Steib sidecar light, but these can be done in slow time. It’s not like there’s any rush…