TALES FROMTHE SHED
Frank’s been away on holiday . Which means of course that he's actually done more work than he usually does while actually working ...
Frank’s been away on holiday. Which means of course that he’s actually done more work than
he usually does while actually working…
Probably my greatest claim to international fame and superstardom is that I once wrote – about a Triumph Trident – that everyone should have one … once. This has been quoted back at me endlessly, which is monstrous flattering of course. However… it was originally intended as a joke. Like the joke about the best reason for riding a Panther being that you can become an active and revered member of the galaxy-spanning mighty Panther Owners’ Club. Neither statement is untrue, in fact. It’s just the way I try to tell them. Here’s another example: everyone should have a Bullet.
You may have observed – assuming you can keep your eyes open once you reach these last pages – that life in The Shed has not been entirely humorous in recent times. Not very recently, in fact. The A65T, my unlovely BBSA project, arrived in its palatial new home inn January 2018, which means that I have failed to make it work for a very long time. I’’ve a long history of mechanical ineptitude, aand mostly enjoy it, because I have a decent sense of humour and take a perverse delight inn laughing at myself. More about the Beezer inn a little while.
Meanwhile…
Having failed to fix the BSA, I decided to
fix the Matchless. The 1965 CSR which has been a Shed resident for a very long time, for which I have a great soft spot, and which is no stranger in How It’s Made terms, was built by AMC, and their mad methods are no mystery to me. Unlike the BSA, which although a more modern design, a design produced by Top Technical Chaps at BSA Group’s centre of excellence, Umber slade Hall, demonstrates at every turn why BSA went bust. Unlike the CSR, which is great. And although I’d fettled about with it for a while fairly recently, I’d never actually put the Matchless back on the road. The reasons were two-fold. The front brake and the sparks.
The former is easier to raise an ironic laugh with. If you have a great memory and a very quiet life, you may recall Rowena’s own best BSA, a B25SS which got The Shed treatment twice in only twenty years or so, and which was finally finished just before I acquired the A65T. I did actually enjoy fettling around with the B25SS. Most of it worked well in the end. Apart from the front brake, which is spectacularly feeble, despite being entirely new internally.
And this has what to do with the Matchless? The CSR boasts a neat 2ls front
brake, a brake plate from a Commando. Once I got the bike running last time, I rode it out of The Shed and applied the brake to stop it on the drive. Which it did. And sharpish, too. Snag was that it refused to release. Back to the bench. Slowly.
The second and potentially more wallet-threatening minor whoopsie concerned the sparks – or rather, the eccentric arrival of the sparks and their considerable lack of enthusiasm.
Neither of these tiny flaws in an otherwise perfect in every way motorcycle should be a problem. The brake simply needs stripping, cleaning, lubing and putting back together again (easily said, if not accomplished), while the feeble and occasional sparks would certainly respond well to a decent clean of the magneto slip-ring, and maybe new HT leads, because those currently fitted are ancient and dubious. As are the generic jumble pick-ups and plug caps.
Tiny challenges, great potential rewards. How could I fail?
Well… it’s like this. A long lifetime of laziness compelled me to fix the brake the idler’s way. Grease the pivots of both cams from the outside, apply the brake, then when it sticks on, apply Thor, King of Hammers, to the levers on the drum to release it. Repeat until it frees off. Which it did, after only slightly longer than it would have taken to remove the wheel and do the job properly. Bodge? Me? I have an A-level in bodge.
And the sparks? Those hesitant and unconvincing sparks? They’ve entirely vanished. There are no sparks. This is shocking (add your own joke here). The always marvellous and entirely dependable Lucas K2F magneto was rebuilt by a noted expert only a decade or so ago. Maybe fifteen years. Memory struggles. How come it’s already stopped working? I am of course outraged and decide at once to return the magneto to the guy who rebuilt it. Except… Except I can’t remember who did rebuild it. Collapse of outrage, goodbye righteous indignation, welcome home frustration and self-pity. Decide a decisive decision about the A65T, a positive, manly and indeed bold decision.
Which is how come I find myself singing songs of praise about the Bullet. What a bike. Everyone should have one. Oh look: here’s one now!
I think I mentioned last month that the Bullet’s ignition switch had failed – after only fifteen years of neglect. Cue the traditional cry of ‘Modern junk!’ which should be sung in an ironic tone, because the magneto on the Matchless was rebuilt more recently than that. And in any case, the new switch rocked up in record time from the remarkable guys at Hitchcocks, and worked instantly. Because I am a professional investigative journalist and seeker after the truth, I of course squirted some very, very old switch cleaner into the removed original switch, worked the key, sprayed some more, worked the key some more in a process uncannily similar to that involved in freeing off the CSR front brake, then refitted the original switch to see whether my skilled ministrations had accomplished a cure. Whether the duff switch would now work. Of course it did.
Of course I removed it once again and replaced the new one, muttering into my beard only a little about the colossal impediment to total motorcycling delight involved by needing to carry two different keys on the RE’s key ring. But I’d paid for a new switch, so I was going to use it. Down any other route lies insanity.
As you would expect, I keep meticulous records of the maintenance all the bikes have received. That is a lie. An untruth. In fact I rely on the vast store of photos on my computer’s hard drive. I root back through the gasquillions of pics I’ve taken in The Shed until I find the least inappropriate. Which is how I discovered that the Bullet was last MoT’ d in 2017 and had covered an earth-shaking 11 miles since. Which I could attempt to pretend is impressive, except… it’s not really.
Inflamed with embarrassment, I contacted the guys at Ace Mosickles in downtown Bude and booked an MoT. The bike deserved a decent prepping, as its mileage has been so woefully low. I pumped up the tyres and confirmed that the oil was up to the mark on the dipstick. This is technical stuff. Attention to the rigours of planned service routines ensures that my bikes never ever let me down.
I should of course change the oil. I cannot discover when I last did this. I have also lost the owner’s handbook and the huge and scary workshop manual. There is only one thing to do: order an oil filter from Hitchcocks and discover which oil is recommended by those helpful folk who post videos of How To Change Your Oil on YouTube. Discover that they use 15/40, which is unfortunate as I have oceans of 0/15 for the car, 20/50 for the ancient clunkers, and enough Rotella X40 to keep an entire fleet of Norton rotaries purring like kittens for centuries. I do not actually have a Norton rotary – at least not one on the road… and the one we do still have uses Silkolene. Do you want some Rotella X40, going cheap? Or indeed free?
Austen down at Ace confirms that the Bullet is booked in. I check its tyres again. They’ve neither increased nor decreased their pressures since I pumped them up earlier that same day. This may be a miracle. I open the fuel filler, displaying my customary engineering understanding of how to turn a key. There is some sort of stuff slapping around in the tank. It might still be petrol. I read dozens of scare stories in the internet, so it might have transmuted into scary molecular acid capable of destroying spaceships. Which is a worry. Reasoning that the Bullet is quite a long way from being a spaceship, and also being far too lazy to drain whatever it is in the tank, I flick the choke lever, turn the key and press the button.
And off it runs. Of course it does. My relentless maintenance schedule pays off again. Thundered down to Ace Mosickles, was greeted by Kenny and a large mug of something which was almost certainly a molecular acid capable of destroying spaceships, at which I sipped sociably while nonchalantly wondering whether while the bike was being inspected they might see their way to dropping out the (hot, of unknown age) oil and replacing it with fresh and possibly clean oil. Of course they would. This, gentle reader. Is how to accomplish a hands-free oil change.
And of course it rattled through Ordeal by MoT, as it should, being a noble Bullet. And I rode home by the seriously long route, which is a sort-of MoT tradition, marvelling at the way the engine felt happier and became mechanically quieter the more we chugged along by the coast. What a bike. Everyone should have one.
But seriously, it’s a while since I rode anywhere aboard a fairly old Bullet, and as well as being fun, the trip was also informative. It’s a 2004 Electra X, the model with the ‘lean-burn’ engine, and was Watsonian Squire’s development bike when they were RE importers back then. This means it has an unusual carb, a slightly loud exhaust and a curious froth tower and catch tank arrangement fitted to the oil tank, which as you know is inside the crankcase castings on these machines. The last RE I rode was a new twin, which I enjoyed, and which was rather a lot faster and a lot better braked than the elderly single, but the single is more charming. And isn’t that a curious judgement? Define ‘charming’?
Meanwhile, here comes a thorny topic. I can avoid it no longer. It is embarrassing. You can have a chuckle at my expense … but only one, please. The BSA. The A65T.
First things first: I enjoy projects in The Shed. It is in fact why we built The Shed in the first place. Projects are a lot of fun. This has not been much fun. I made lots of mistakes, the first of which was buying a machine with lots and lots of bits missing – in the full knowledge that they were missing. When asked – and it happens a surprising amount, given my incompetence in the common sense dept – I always suggest that would-be projecters buy a bike which is complete, or as complete as possible. This is always sensible. But I ignored my own advice because… and it felt like a good idea at the time… I didn’t want to end up with a large pile of discarded bits. This would have been inevitable, because I wanted to build a mild special, a basically stock A65T but styled to look a little like a mild, soft, single-carb A65FS Firebird Scrambler, painted in non-stock shades and intended for fun. For cheap fun, in fact.
I also had a lot of BSA/Triumph bits from the oily-frame generation, most of them left over from previous builds and previous projects. I thought they’d fit the A65. For example, the forks are the same as on the B25SS, pretty much, so I thought that the same bracketry and mud guarding would fit the A65T. Of course it doesn’t. I thought that lots of minor stuff from the same-year oily-frame Triumph twins would fit. Some does, but only some. But most infuriating of all, I assumed that new parts – mostly bought from specialist suppliers – would just fit, as they tend to do with Nortons and AJS, Matchless and Ariel. This is not the case, and because my bike was missing a lot of the small fittings and fastenings which in my view need to be the correct parts so that the bike runs well and feels good, the bill for small bits started to add up prodigiously. Old stuff at jumbles was largely unidentifiable – buying bits which look right on the advice of the vendor is a perilous path indeed. Old stuff from eBay is probably worse.
The final straw was something tiny and probably trivial – although the reason for it is sobering, if only for me! The primary drive was a complete horror story. It was probably the worst mess I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen (and rebuilt) a lot of messy primary drives. I pulled it all apart, destroying the alternator stator in the process. No big deal; shiny new Lucas alternators are readily available, and indeed I bought one, from a reputable supplier – about whom I have no complaints, by the way. My eyes were wide open all through this.
The stator refused to fit over the three studs which retain it. No worries, thought I, one of them must be bent. So I removed them and rolled them on the traditional piece of flat stuff. They’re all perfectly straight. The holes in the stator are smaller than the studs. This does not help. Next – and there may be a photo hereabouts – the stator is bigger than the space inside the chain case where it lives. It fits into a cylindrical ‘nest’ comprised of cast-in extensions of the drive-side crankcase – or at least it should fit. It doesn’t.
By this point I simply didn’t want to do anything else with the bike. This leaves the popular advert – ‘Project for sale, £100s spent, just needs finishing’. But… firstly that is truly defeatist, I still wanted that fake Firebird, and the project had already cost upwards of £3000, for which I could easily have bought a complete, running 1971 A65. Mistakes? We all make them. However, even at what was a pretty irritating time, alternatives have a way of present themselves.
I was chatting with Richard, a seriously good engineer and friend, as well as being a retired former MD of Norton Motors, and we were both amused at the idiot pickle I had created for myself. I asked, innocent-like, whether he fancied ‘just fixing the fine machine, that great tribute to British engineering’? I may have used stronger language.
He was amused – of course he was! After all, he’d worked in the BSA design department at Umber slade Hall when these terrifying machines were being readied for the 1971 model range, but had, he revealed, never actually worked on one. Time to hire a van, then. More next month…