MORE CUTPRICE CLASSICS
Alan Davis’s article about his BSA C11 in RC177 brought back memories of BSA C10 and C11s that I owned many years ago. In fact the first bike I had on the road in 1959 was a 1946/47 BSA C11. It had girder forks, and it got me to work every day without any real problems, but it was replaced by a B31 in 1960, after a few months.
Some time around 1963 I fitted a BSA C10 engine into a Bond Mark C Minicar that I’d acquired. Foolishly I thought doing away with the smoky Villiers 8E engine and replacing it with a low-tune 4-stroke engine would be an improvement. After weeks of work, the result was terrible. It vibrated like mad and simply overheated. It took just a day to reverse everything to the way it was meant to be. We live and learn (or do we?).
Getting to work was much quicker with two wheels so I acquired a cousin of my first bike – a BSA C10. It had plunger rear suspension and, although it had a sidevalve engine, it was equipped with an alloy cylinder head. I guess this feature came from BSA’s tuning shop, where they were determined to extract the last bit of power from this mighty engine.
But there was a problem; because the alloy head was warped, it blew head gaskets with monotonous regularity. Eventually I visited a local bike breaker hoping to find an iron head – and live with the drop in performance. He didn’t have one, but he did have a complete C11 engine for a couple of quid. The deal was done, but on the way home with my new acquisition, I suddenly thought it might not fit. The rockerbox of the C11 engine would need a recess in the base of the fuel tank that was not necessary with the C10 engine.
Fortunately, BSA fitted the same tank to both the C models, so it just dropped in. I can’t remember being impressed by any dramatic increase in performance with the change to overhead valves, but the bike carried on taking me to work every day until one day it developed a peculiar, irregular jerking in the transmission. Taking the gearbox apart that evening showed that a gear had shed a tooth. Must have been the extra power from the ohv engine. The late (and much missed) Reg Hall of Charlie’s Motorcycles in Bristol supplied a replacement gear from stock, and so I carried on commuting until the mid-1980s. I was working abroad so much, it just languished in the shed. The photo shows my son David, posing on the C10 c1971, before it became a C11.
I gave it to a neighbour, whose daughter was keen to get a motorbike. What happened to it after that is unknown, but PDE 642 doesn’t appear on the DVLA database, so I guess it’s joined the choir invisible.
Great memories. Alan Freke, member 1190
Great memories, indeed. Thanks Alan. Anyone else care to share their ‘budget upgrades’ from days gone by? I suspect Frank will pop up with a pic of his Airfield any second now! RowenaH