AJS 500 SINGLE
Traditional British big singles. Straightforward and simple to fettle; rewarding to ride. At least, they should be. But Simon Lock’s summer rides were afflicted by mysterious mechanical mishaps…
Traditional British big singles. Straightforward and simple to fettle; rewarding to ride. At least, they should be. But Simon Lock’s summer rides were afflicted by mysterious mechanical mishaps…
Can a motorcycle get so deeply enmeshed in your psyche that you simply can’t get rid of it? Despite being regularly advertised, concatenations of uncanny circumstances mean that this motorcycle never actually leaves the shed in someone else’s hands. Instead it pauses for effect in unexpected, remote locations and for apparently unwarranted reasons. Is it consciously choosing to embarrass when it highlights your basic motorcycling ineptitude? Perhaps this motorcycle conspires to stay with you but still continues to challenge your conviction that you’ve finally got it sorted.
The biggest question of all is this: Do you dare take it on a long touring weekend?
Such a device lurks about my shed. On rain-darkened afternoons, when I’m pottering about in the endless tidying-up cycle that precedes actually doing some maintenance, I sometimes get the feeling that it knows more than I do about how we stand in relation to each other. For example, I’ve just returned
from a 50 mile trundle around the lanes of Somerset, all lovely for the first 35 miles or so then a progressively worsening misfire appeared when opening the throttle hard from low revs. It’s never done this before, and now the plug is sooted up, which it wasn’t before. I’ve come to suspect that this machine is planning, plotting even. Certainly, I notice that each new morning the map marking the extent of its oily empire extends further across the garage floor.
My suspicions are further aroused because this bike is very coy about its own identity. It passes itself off as a humble 350cc AJS 16MS, when really it’s a 500cc beast with an exhaust note and grunt up hills to match. The V5C tells the truth about the engine size at least but its appearance is deceptive. And when it comes to knowing, I also should have known better. Its serendipitous appearance, advertised on my route home, obviously involved more than chance. When it refused to start for the vendor that was, in hindsight, a brightly flaring, warning beacon. When he delivered it for just £20, the very next morning, that was another omen. But who can’t coax an old single into life?
The Ajay came to me as a bargain, spotted on my last day of term prior to the Christmas holidays. It shared its shed with an immaculate and beautifully detailed Le Mans and a couple of old Triumph twins. Though it consistently refused to start for the increasingly infuriated vendor, there was a cough or two, so it clearly just needed the expert ‘Hand of Lock’ to resuscitate it.
I do like a big single and have previously owned an Ariel Red Hunter, BSA B33, B31/33, Enfield Bullet 500s... You get the idea! I also like to ring the changes. ‘So little time, so many bikes to try’ has been my philosophy for some years now. On arrival it was apparent that the Ajay was exactly the bike I wanted… that week, at least. Proper patina (aka neglect), mostly original, apart from the barrels upward being from an 18S and the remainder from a 16MS. The registration number had also not left the dealer with the rest of the bike. ‘Someone’s sold on the original plate,’ remarked the vendor. Hmm, I wonder who that could have been then?
On a positive front, the failure to start had been simply a duff spark plug. As the vendor remarked, it ran really well with a new plug. And it did! First kick and off it went – even, almost, ticking over. I tried to forget that the vendor had tried four or five plugs while I was in his shed watching. Obviously he kept a collection of duff plugs so visitors could drive down his asking price. Don’t we all?
Choosing not to focus too closely on this mildly unusual scenario, I got on with my standard approach to an old bike that has stood for years with old oil, a suspect spark plug, tyres from the 1990s and sundry tatty bits of wiring hanging off. Give it a big kick, get on and go for a ride. I did exactly that. Nothing untoward happened, nothing I later missed fell off and after a circuit of the local lanes I returned home pleased with my purchase. Into the shed it went; into the Christmas celebrations went I, and in the New Year it had a flat battery.
Of course, that’s no problem on a bike with a magneto. And the Ajay has a great big, fat SR magneto stuck right in front of the barrel. You can’t miss it. But, oddly, the HT lead doesn’t come from the magneto – it weaves its way from the airbox area past the carb to the plug. How innovative. Inside the place the airbox had once called home was a coil – a Lucas coil. Reeling in horror at this discovery, I went back to the house to regroup my thoughts with the assistance of leftover Christmas cake.
Thus fortified, I removed the mag cover to see that someone had decided to use the nice, stationary points on the mag as a trigger for a coil. So the mag must be U/S then. But at least that explains the kill switch hidden under the seat. After all, if you leave the ignition on and the points are closed then the coil will flatten the battery. I can’t quite recall when I first came to be assured of the certainty of this lesson but I have subsequently proved the great truth that practice embeds learning.
Notwithstanding this discovery, everything seemed to work provided you turned off the kill switch at night… and so explorations of local lanes began in earnest. In my world, exploration involves finding the narrowest, winding lanes in the local area and plodding down them in third gear at 15mph. This results in the most wonderful chuffing noise that only a big single can make. It possibly isn’t entirely kind to the chains dotted around the bike but makes me feel good and always leads to some picturesque village which has that very modern essential of a café with nice coffee and some form of sugar-infused refreshment for the exhausted explorer.
After an hour or two of riding, I’m often just five miles from home but have no idea how I got to where I am and am unable to retrace the route. The greatest joy of such intrepid trips is trying to find the same café again next time. I’m hoping that other noted explorers will forgive my lack of preparation but I can assure them that my backside gets just as sore as theirs –
have you seen the state of the saddle?
As time wended its gentle way further into the New Year, my horizons expanded and I started to go for longer journeys. At some point, on some rural highway dotted with horse droppings and with the standard Somerset-lane-dividing flowers and grass arrangement, I thought I detected a misfire as I approached a particularly tight bend. But no, it had gone as quickly as it came and I decided that I’d imagined it. A second manifestation of misbehaviour as I approached a roundabout resulted in my coasting to a silent halt. A quick kick and off we went again, concluding that the uncertain tickover might need a look. Oh, how often, my fellow optimists, have we convinced ourselves that warning signs can be explained away in a manner that requires minimal intervention?
They can’t be explained away forever, as I was to discover.
One March afternoon, I decided that a quick jaunt around the lanes was in order and off I went. A happy motorbicyclist was I: long hedges were brushed, bees evicted from visor, bleating lambs scattered asunder – you’ll recognise the picture of two-wheeled, bucolic contentment as I plodded my happy way down ever tighter lanes. When the power gradually fell off, I found myself near the top of a hill. Then I found myself meditating on the charm of the skylarks which I could hear, oh so clearly, above the sound of silence. Oh dear.
Summoning my best mechanical skills, I was reminded of those inexplicable misfires and stoppages. Like the expert analyst that I certainly am, I headed straight to the horn button to see what power was available. Repeated pressing of said button, in increasingly Fawlty-esque manner, followed by checking that said instrument was still attached, and not just by wires, produced some alarm, though not the sonorous sort that I anticipated. The brake light was clearly in cahoots with the horn and, after thinking to check the fuse as well, I reached the sure and certain conclusion that the battery had gone flat.
All those lanes ridden at low speed with the sidelights on had clearly allowed it to discharge to the point where it was no longer able to supply enough volts to fire the coil. At this point I patted myself on the back (metaphorically, because it’s difficult to do in reality when wearing armoured kit in a very narrow lane) at the wonder of my own logical and deductive prowess. I decided that the cure was to spend a happy half hour observing the wildlife while the battery restored itself through rest to the point where it could produce a spark and I could go home. I rested; the battery rested; the sky glowered ever so slightly more than it had when the engine was running.
And nothing happened.
Knowing that I just needed to charge the battery, I called my wife to come and get me and the battery. She detests tiny lanes with blind bends. Nevertheless, my dulcet tones and the gathering clouds overcame her misgivings and she collected me and the box of uncooperative lead acid and we returned home to discover that my voltmeter had clearly received an unhelpful clonk of some sort as it gave a false reading of 6V. My test lamp also lit up very brightly.
One of the great things about the human brain is its ability to move on seamlessly from sure and certain poor conclusions to newer even more sure and certain poor conclusions. I am very good indeed at this. The battery was fine, the bike had misfired before, ergo there was a poor connection somewhere rather than a flat battery. That would explain all those odd misfires I had ignored on previous trips. Now my conclusion encompassed all hitherto known signs and symptoms and was therefore certain. What a man of substance, wit, prescience and explanatory fortitude am I. Therefore let me return to the dead bike and revive it with special, expert wiggling of wires. Please can I have another lift along those winding, narrow lanes? So kind.
You are, of course, anticipating a domestic ‘situation’ where my patently insane plan fails to work and both I and bike remain rooted in the countryside and
my wife discovers
that her unhappy negotiation of lanes and heightened stress have been pointless. How much you doubt me, dearest reader – for with the briefest of wiggles off we went. I am an expert wiggler. As you can imagine, I didn’t hang about but zoomed (as best one can on tiny lanes) back to civilisation before anything went wrong again.
Back in the safety of the shed, I charged the battery again (why not, it was only showing 6V?) and rewired the whole bike. This took four hours. Aren’t British bikes great? Honestly, I love rewiring and I have all the kit. Such fun. Problem solved, and the problem had been easy to spot once the seat was off: a nicely chafed, bare wire in the bunch I had wiggled so deftly out in the field. Everything worked perfectly, the new loom was very neat and I set off for a ride the very next evening.
After pushing the bike 200 yards back up the hill, I reached another sure and certain conclusion: that future test rides would head uphill rather than downhill from the shed. Did I mention the temperature was nearly 30-degrees C?
It’s a bit odd, isn’t it? A misfire that goes away; a dead bike that restarts; a dead battery that has 6V on the bench; a brake light that kills the battery; a horn that kills the battery. After my unplanned pushing exercise I did take the battery out to check it. Then I checked it on the bike. 6V, 2.1V. 6V, 6V. That’s not right. On the bench: 6V, 6V, 1.8V. That’s weird. And why was it that the brake light killed the engine and then it recovered when I released the brake?
By this time I’d acquired a really lovely BSA
A10 and decided that I’d had enough of the Ajay and its annoyances. It seemed to be working fine so I advertised it for sale and a chap duly came for a look. It started first kick and ran beautifully. It’s not charging he said, looking at the cheapo ammeter. Let’s put the voltmeter on, I replied. We did. It was charging happily.
‘I’m not really able to buy it,’ he lied. ‘I don’t really have room.’
Eventually, I was forced to face the situation. The symptoms all led to a very different conclusion than my sure and certain one. The intermittent total loss of volts, charging/ not charging, lack of a fire to explain how and where the missing volts went to earth, lack of blown fuse, strange recovery of volts when things are wiggled, battery that is dead but lives when put down on a bench. Could it be attributed to a broken bridging bar inside the lead acid battery that sometimes made contact and sometimes didn’t?
Ah… Well, you could look at it like that. Some helpful people on the internet did and very kindly refrained from passing judgement on my deductive skills.
Aren’t new batteries good? Well, provided you remember the kill switch. Is there really no hope?
With the new battery the prospect of getting home improved significantly, so I started to venture further abroad. When one essays to travel to distant climes and lands, and Wiltshire, eventually the necessity for fuel will appear. This happened to me, luckily at the top of a hill (see, I do learn) coming back into Bath. The familiar sound of an engine running on air prompted me to lean to the left and turn on the second
fuel tap. There should be a nice little margin there to get home…
The sound of tyres slowing on tarmac was, as you might’ve guessed, the sole consequence of my action. Still, at least this was the crest of the hill. Just a quarter of a mile of flat pushing until the downhill coast to home. It was a bit toasty again in the sun. I was a bit hot, and perspiring with something not like happiness. After about 200 yards I got to thinking about the petrol taps. Both ‘pull for on’ taps had leaked when I’d first got the bike and I’d removed the plungers and placed them in steam to expand the cork seals. It had worked a treat.
Some little thing at the back of my brain kept drawing me back to those taps. What had they got written on them? ‘Pull for on… turn for reserve’? Turn for reserve? Ah, well, I probably needed the exercise anyway!
There’s more, much more. I discovered during my needle-lowering exercise to cure the rich running that the Ajay is twin-plugged. No wonder it’s such a beast up hills. There, nestling in the centre of the head is a pink Lodge spark plug. Obviously no lead is attached but it makes you think that at some point one must have been. Either that or someone was so infuriated by plugs fouling up that they went to the trouble of fitting a second one to switch over to. Hmm, that might not be a bad idea! Have my plugs been fouling up?
After all this, it had to be christened. PVS
217 quickly became known as Pevsner, after Nikolaus Pevsner who explored all the counties of England… driven by his wife. It seems only fitting that a machine so rescued by my own lovely lady should carry such a name. And soon it’s time for the BIG TRIP into the wilds of Wales, beyond the reach of domestic rescue. Will Pevsner make it, or will I return home on the back of a truck to learn some more of his idiosyncrasies?