BSA B31.......................................................
Is it a motorcycle or a piece of industrial archaeology? And will it start? Martin Gelder enters a whole new (old) world with a big Brit single built in Small Heath
Is it a motorcycle or a piece of industrial archaeology? And will it start? Martin Gelder enters a whole new (old) world with a big Brit single built in Small Heath
Iloosen the final tie-down strap and gingerly roll the BSA down the trailer’s ramp and onto the drive. I carefully flip down the sidestand, lean the bike onto it, and step back to take in its handsome Britishness. The way the exhaust pipe curves gracefully round the polished alloy timing chest, the way the sun glints enticingly off the brass rim of the Smiths speedometer, the way the whole motorcycle is slowly slipping further and further over as the sidestand loses its grip on the frame tube... Aaargh!
With the bike on its centrestand (bit of a struggle, but there’ll be more on that later), I resume my reverie. I’ve been around British bikes all my motorcycling life or, to be more accurate, they’ve been around me. Friends and acquaintances have bought and sold and sometimes even ridden them, we’ve all helped ‘fix’ them, but I’ve never actually owned one of my own. Until now.
This particular BSA B31/33 might seem familiar to the regular RealClassic reader. It passed through Paul Miles’s capacious and exotic shed a while back and there was something about it I found very attractive. Grey porridge it might be, but its lines have the classical simplicity found in every doodle I made of a generic motorbike in the margins of my school books, forty or more years ago.
The Cosmic Bike Co eventually did its stuff, and now here the BSA is in front of me. On the centrestand. Ahem. What follows is, I hope, an insight into owning and riding a British bike for the uninitiated, perhaps for those readers now of a certain age whose two-wheeled progression has been from sports mopeds and Japanese lightweights through to sundry European exotica and beyond, previously bypassing all things British. It’s a whole new world, believe me. Starting is the obvious place to begin. There’s no electric start, as you’d expect. There’s also no ignition key, which is a surprise. When the engine turns, the magneto spins and sparks are made; it’s that simple. Turning the engine over, less simple. This is a cooking 350cc single with a 500cc barrel and piston grafted on. It’s softly tuned, a gentle plodder, but it’ll still support the entire and substantial weight of a short fat bloke bouncing on the kickstart when that piston reaches the compression stroke. To turn it over fast enough requires the use of the exhaust valve lifter, one of the many artfully shaped chrome appendages adorning the handlebars. Pulling this allows the piston to sneak past compression, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The valve lifter hides below the clutch lever, above which sits the ignition advance lever, created to allow the hapless rider to do the job of the bob-weights fitted behind the points of later machines. This needs to be in roughly the right position for starting; enough advance to allow the spark to ignite the mixture at the right time, but not so much that it transforms piston and kickstart lever into a vertical take-off device for the rider. To avoid the right hand feeling left out, there is a choke lever next to the braking and throttling devices on the other end of the handlebars, but this plays a lesser part in the starting proceedings than the tickler hidden out of sight on the side of the carburettor, which forces the float down and the fuel level in the float bowl up, making sure the mixture will be extra rich. Like a 1960s Suffolk Colt lawnmower, in fact, the last engine I encountered that needed its carb tickling.
You will notice I’m waffling on, but that’s because I’m about to attempt my first solo start and I’ve heard all the stories of awkward to fire British singles, seen grown men reduced to quivering and sweaty shells by recalcitrant starters, and had friends who always parked at the top of hills. I am feeling slightly anxious. Here goes.
Back off the advance lever a little from fully tight, move the choke to about half way closed, turn the petrol on, tickle the carb until it dribbles, kick the engine over once with valve lifter pulled in, ease it up to compression then just past, let the valve lifter out, add a little touch of throttle, and KICK.
There’s a chuff and a cough but I’m not fired over the handlebars and into the bins. This is good. Ease the piston past compression once more, another kick (long and swinging is the way to go, the books say) and much to my surprise the BSA fires up and responds to the throttle. This is easy!
Surprisingly, the bike soon settles into a steady, even tickover. Or maybe not so surprisingly. The B31 and B33 were workaday motorcycles – workaday transport, in fact – designed to be used every day for everyday life. If Ernie who worked in the stores at the saucepan factory couldn’t start his B31 on a cold wet Monday morning, his wages would be docked and there’d be hell to pay.
The BSA chuffs on while I find a helmet and some gloves and gird my loins for the first ride. I’m so new to the whole British bike thing I’m not even sure what girding loins involves, but I think it’s something to do with remembering that the gear lever is not only on the wrong side, but works in the wrong direction. The clutch is light and smooth, the gearchange is precise but designed for Ernie in the stores’ hobnail boots rather than dainty Italian race-wear. Up into first and we’re off.
Light steering, low centre of gravity, the feeling of big wheels rolling... And something odd going on under my seat. Under the bike’s seat. Plunger rear suspension was a feature of the BSA singles in the early 1950s, the name presumably coming not from any smooth, controlled motion conferred on the rear of the machine by the two pairs of opposed springs holding the rear wheel in place, but by the similarity of the resulting movement to the action of a plumber frantically trying to unblock an overflowing sink.
Those springs allow the back wheel maybe an inch of choppy vertical movement, which would be an improvement on a totally rigid rear end… were it not for the action of the sprung saddle which adds another two or three inches of undamped vertical movement
for the rider, along with a fair amount of sideto-side rolling. These two systems sometimes combine to give a ride that is comfortable if not composed, unless the road is anything other than billiard table smooth. At other times the plunger and saddle springs fall out of love with each other and start a fight that leaves me bouncing long after the bumps have passed.
Onwards and upwards – or rather downwards – into second gear, with a long but positive and accurate movement of the gear lever. That combination of a small carb and big flywheel give an unstoppable feel to the motor with quite crisp response to the throttle. The performance isn’t startling by any means, but you can feel when a motor is working well, and this one does. Except when it doesn’t, but there’ll be more on that later.
If the first to second change is positive, the move from second to third is a little less convincing. It feels like there’s a part missing in the gearbox and, combined with the b-i-g difference in speed between these two ratios, second to third is a change that requires a bit of forward planning and some hanging onto a gear slightly longer than you might expect.
Third and fourth are close, first and second are close, but changing from second to third requires thought.
More so on the way back down, but by then you’re only thinking about the brakes. The back brake is very good, with a smooth and predictable action that slows the bike in a controlled manner while you try and remember which way your other foot needs to move to change down through the gears.
The front brake? Can we talk about the lights now?
The front brake is powerful enough to dip the forks, but that’s about it. It needs a healthy squeeze and even then is only really a supplement to the braking done by the back wheel. Seriously, it’s rubbish. Braking with front brake only means you end up further down the road than you expect while still travelling faster than you’d hoped, which can be... exciting. With both brakes used together it’s not an issue, but beware those instinctive reactions.
I spend the next half hour or so chuffing sedately from village to village, lost in a time warp. On the right roads, this is perhaps the most charming bike I have ever ridden. With little other traffic to contend with the BSA comes into its own. And in that fact lies the point, which I will now, finally, attempt to make.
When it was new, shortly after WW2 (although you could argue that it’s largely a pre-war design), BSA’s B31 was designed to transport our Ernie backwards and forwards to the saucepan factory, come rain or shine, on roads where two-wheeled transport was commonplace and four-wheeled traffic relatively scarce. People walked to work, or got the bus. The doctor had a car but the district nurse travelled by bicycle. In this world, a solid, dependable, fundamental motorcycle was just the job. Saturday morning maintenance was a given, but on Sunday the cheery B31 could slip into the other aspect of its double life, to quote a BSA advertisement of the time:
‘If your mount must double as spare-time playmate and as a work-a-day means of transport, then more than ever you need a BSA. For BSAs revel in a double life. They combine the liveliness and lightness you want when riding for pleasure with the more prosaic but equally important virtues of economy and absolute reliability.’
The early 50s B31 is everyman’s motorcycle. ‘Lively’ and ‘light’ wouldn’t be the first words I’d use to describe it, but ride it with a nod to Ernie from the stores and the times he inhabited, and you can see what BSA’s ad men were on about. There he is, in the picture hereabouts, with his cravat tucked into his V-necked jumper off to meet a young lady friend for a sedate canter around the hop fields of Kent, and in the background there’s the saucepan factory to which he’ll return on Monday morning.
Taking a closer look at the way the B31 has been made, you can lay odds that if anything broke on it, there’d be someone at the saucepan works who could fix it, one way or another. It’s not crude, but it’s basic. Round tubes are flattened at their ends to make mounting points. Metal is thick and strong, and the bike’s design is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Everything on it is practical if basic, but it all works and it’s all there for a reason. Apart from that slipping sidestand, which is at best an afterthought.
Ernie was probably quietly proud of owning his BSA B31, not because he owned a BSA B31, but because he owned a motorcycle. Grey porridge? No. Bread and
butter, certainly, but there’s nothing wrong with that. He probably rode it to work and back for many years, maybe later with a sidecar attached for trips to the Kent coast with the now Mrs Ernie and the Ernie juniors. Simpler times.
This particular BSA B31 – now a 500cc B33 – has had six owners since September 1952. I already know two of those, who each owned it for less than a year, which leaves four more Ernies spread over 60 years. One of those owners has done some restoration on it, with sensible modifications (there’s an SRM clutch pressure plate fitted, and an oil filter nestled in the tool box) and a sprinkling of chrome to add sparkle if not originality. And one of those owners also refitted the carburettor’s needle clip in the wrong notch, leading to the only reliability issue I’ve had.
At town speeds the bike ran crisply and eagerly, but once above 40mph or so it would begin to misfire under load. My first thought was the very loose plug cap losing touch with the top of the plug at ‘speed’, and while a replacement helped it didn’t cure the problem. The plug itself was getting increasingly sooty which pointed at a jetting or needle problem, and after working out that the carb on the bike wasn’t the carb that it originally came with, and that my imperial spanners didn’t fit the BSA’s Whitworth fasteners, I found out the needle clip was in the wrong groove.
After being slightly daunted by working on something so old and unfamiliar, it was a joy to find that bits came apart easily enough, and even went back together the same way. My only mistake was not replacing the now very sooty plug, which led to progressively worse cold starting until I realised what was going on and fitted a nice shiny NGK one. Since then it’s generally been a second kick starter no matter how long it’s left, although I
am touching wood while typing this. Ahem. My starting technique has improved with practice – the magneto seems to like to be spinning with a bit of speed to generate a good spark – but for cold starts I need the bike to be on its awkward-to-use centrestand. The sidestand won’t reliably support the bike’s weight, let alone me jumping acrobatically up and down on its kickstart. I’m sure there’s a knack I just haven’t got yet.
The only other change I’ve made is to fit a petrol tap with a reserve, purely for peace of mind. Fuel consumption seems to be around 60mpg, cruising at a comfortable 50mph or so. I think it’s still on B31 gearing and it feels like it would pull a more relaxed top gear now that there’s a 500cc piston whumping up and down in the engine; I’ve seen 70mph on the speedo once but mechanical sympathy had me slowing down again pretty quickly.
Owning a bike of this age isn’t about the numbers, though, unless they’re the long ones marking the passage of time. This isn’t a bike I lusted after in my youth, and isn’t even an example of what my generation rode when starting out on two wheels. As you may have seen last month, my dad worked at BSA in the 1960s, but this B31 pre-dates that era too. Riding it is about being carried back – at a gentle 40 to 50mph, steep hills notwithstanding – to an earlier time. It’s a piece of industrial archaeology that transcends motorcycling as a means of transport, excitement or image-creation. And riding it is a little like working in a living museum; you have to be ready to talk about the bike and its history when you return to where you left it parked, and just seeing it ride past will often bring pedestrians out in smiles.
Owning and riding this BSA has opened up a whole new world of motorcycling for me, one that’s taken me on a journey back in time beyond nostalgia for my own youth to a world where things were done differently, for different reasons. It’s not necessarily a world I’d want to live in, but every now and then I get a glimpse through Ernie’s eyes that lets me appreciate not only where we are now, but where we’ve come from and how we got here.