VELOCETTE VALIANT
Everyone agreed that Velocette needed a small capacity sportster. No one expected this. Frank Westworth is gently entertained…
Everyone agreed that Velocette needed a small capacity sportster. No one expected this. Frank Westworth is gently entertained…
There is always a plan. Some plans are ggreat plans, others less sso. Some plans lead tto enormous success, ggreat wealth and kkudosd – others, less so. And the results of some plans can best be described as heroic failures – a peculiarly British concept, especially perhaps in the motorcycle arena. Take Velocette’s Great Post-war Plan, the motorcycle for Everyman, the LE. How could it fail to win over everyone, sell in millions, redefine the two-wheeled world and ensure that Velocette became the world’s biggest builder of bikes? You need to look at the Honda Cub for the answer. One of these machines did everything its maker hoped for, the other failed, heroically.
By now, gentle reader, you will have observed that I am chattering away about a bike which is plainly not the bike in the photos. Bear with me. Had the Velo LE’s production line struggled to cope with massive demand for a docile water-cooled sidevalve flat-twin of great complexity, great charm, delicate performance and a considerable stylistic individualism, then the Valiant – the machine you can see here – would surely never have happened.
Which would be a shame, because the Valiant offers a pleasant alternative to the other sub-250cc machinery on the market in the mid-50s – mainly Triumph’s Cub and a selection of strokers sharing Villiers engines. Should you actually want that kind of machine – and judging by the huge popularity of the Triumph Cub, you may well fancy a bike of similar light weight, faintly peppy performance
and economical running – then a Valiant makes a refreshing change.
It might not be instantly apparent, but the core of the nifty little sports machine you can probably see nearby is indeed the even less sporting LE, and one of the reasons Velocette decided to produce a flat-twin small capacity sports twin was because the seriously expensive tooling they’d built for the LE was woefully under-used. Applying rosy-tinted hindsight it would surely have made more sense to build on the consistent success of their sporting 350 and 500 singles by building a 250 single to join them, maybe reintroducing the MOV after its brief post-war appearance and disappearance. Those 250s are gems, every one, and it would probably have cost far less to build – certainly to toolup for – than the Valiant. However…
The crankcases are basically the same as those used on the MkIII LE, a little longer and with alterations to suit the Valiant’s ohv design, and almost all the transmission components including the swinging arm and enclosed drive shaft are shared with the later LE, along with the Miller electrics. And the front forks are from the LE, as are the wheels. But… that’s not actually a lot of shared componentry. All things are a compromise, of course, but my own view is that the Valiant has one compromise too far – its capacity. Why did Veloce not take the engine out to 250cc? If they had, not only would the bike have been a little faster, but 250 is a more
popular capacity and would have been ready and waiting for the introduction of the 1961 250cc learner law.
The standard answer is that the bottom end wasn’t sufficiently strong to take the extra waft of an ohv top end. The official statements – so far as I can find any – suggest that ‘the gyroscopic effects would become more noticeable’. Which is a little strange, given that Douglas used the same layout to tremendous effect and their 350cc flat twins are notably smooth operators.
In any case, Veloce engineers decided that the bottom end needed a little beefing up, so they made the big end bearings wider – which increased the offset between the cylinders as the con rods run side-by side, which in turn meant that they had to cast longer crankcases, as already mentioned. Bore and stroke were the same as the LE at 50 x 49mm, and although I am of course no engineer it doesn’t seem too adventurous to stretch them to 54 x 54, which provides a handy 247cc, and which Veloce employed for the last of their flat twins – the gloriously bonkers Viceroy scooter. But no…
Just like the LE and its even more handsome offspring the Vogue, the drivetrain is remarkably complicated, all the way from the front, where lives the generator, to the rear wheel and its shaft drive. Admire the line drawings which may be nearby and marvel at the cost of it all, given that the power output of the LE, 8bhp @ 5000rpm compares only carefully with, say, a Villiers 9E’s 8.4bhp at 4000rpm. OK, the Valiant produces a lofty and sporting 12bhp @ 6000rpm, compared with, say, a Triumph T20 Cub’s 10bhp @ 6000rpm, but BSA’s C15 whacked out an easy 15bhp @ 7000 … and cost less. While the Valiant would have set an enthusiast back some £185 in 1957 or so, a Cub shook the tills at £144. The sales results speak for themselves.
Back to the engine, after that minor digression. With commendable common sense, Veloce ditched the LE’s water cooling, which saved lots of weight, cost and complexity, and cast their new twin’s barrels in iron, topped with a pair of neat alloy heads. Access to the valvegear is as easy as you’d hope, and the clearances are adjusted by eccentric rocker spindles – familiar to fettlers of AJS and Matchless twins. Very neat. And there are two carbs for the rider to kick in those unguarded moments of clumsiness. The entire machine was plainly designed by engineers, not accountants.
Four gears in the box, then that neat drive shaft to rotate the rear wheel. This truly is enthusiast engineering, and it’s a great shame that it’s mostly hidden away behind a glass-fibre ‘bonnet’ – which at least made cleaning easy.
Neat duplex frame, owing nothing to either the LE or the singles, and more than sufficiently stout to handle the bike’s performance. The rear shocks don’t have the ‘arcuate’ adjustable top mountings seen on both the LE and the singles, but the Valiant mysteriously handles as well as the singles
and rather better than the LE. Life is filled with wonder. The forks are apparently the same as the LE, while the rear shocks on this machine look like the later Girling type – the first Valiants came with shocks from Woodhead-Munroe, for some long-lost reason. But never mind that, the front and rear ends on the short-test victim worked together fine, the frame was utterly planted and … even the brakes worked well!
There was – unsurprisingly, perhaps – no plan to borrow the Valiant. It just sort-of happened, not least because I’d just seen a Viceroy scooter for sale at auction near Leominster and have always rather fancied one, so dropped a line to Chris at nearby Venture Classics to see whether he was around so I could have a bash at those two birds with a single stone. Or something. Any excuse for a familiar favourite ride and terrifying coffee being good enough. Of course it poured down for almost the entire trip, so I took three wheels instead of two, being feeble in that way, and was suitably chastened when Martin my dinner date appeared on his spotless BMW. Which, entirely coincidentally, you can read about elsewhere in this very issue. As ever, I should pretend that there was a great plan … but no; it just happened.
I remember the Valiant from my school days, somewhat quaintly, although I can’t remember actually riding one. I may have done, of course, but it was the early 1970s and memory can apparently be unreliable. Certainly a pair of schoolmates built a schoolboy hovercraft using the engine from a Velocette Viceroy to power it, and as the Viceroy’s exhaust was a seriously weighty bit of kit, far too heavy to allow the hovercraft to actually hover, one of the reprobates acquired a set of pipes and silencers from a Valiant and… the rest has faded into history. Which is doubtless a good thing.
My point though was that both flat Velos
– the Viceroy and the Valiant – were in a local breaker’s yard. In 1971. Which suggests that although very few of either model were sold – 1600 over the entire seven-year Valiant production is not a lot – they weren’t valued much by those who did buy them. Both are very well made – they really are – and they were so expensive that they’d not appeal to anyone who was on the breadline, so what went wrong? Time to fire up the victim and have a blast. A sort-of slow, gentle blast, of course.
Two fuel taps make sense when one carb is bound to be a long way away from whichever tap is in use should you only switch on a single – but there’s no trip mileometer on the tiny speedo so you need to keep a mental track of your fuel level. Each tiny Amal is fitted with a strangler, as they were cheerily known. These are a decorative but simple device to choke off the air through the carb while happy rider performs the kicking routine. Which is not at all difficult. Had you worked that out already? Correct, cylinders of <100cc and a compression ratio of 8.0:1 are not hard to kick. However, the kickstart lever is oddly awkward to use, and its throw is very short. There must be a reason for this, but I can’t find one. It’s not a problem, because although the little beast hadn’t run in a while – as I said already, the decision to abuse Chris’s hospitality once again was not planned in advance – it fired up straight away. Sounds and feels just like a tiny flat twin, you know. There’s a surprise. Not.
A moment of comparison. Although the obvious comparator is Triumph’s Cub, the Valiant feels like a full-size machine, whereas I always feel that I’m dwarfing a Cub – riding a Cub feels like cruelty to machinery, in fact. The Velo’s riding position suited me at once, which is a good thing, because there’s very little in the way of adjustment. At least the handlebar levers aren’t welded to the bars…
And, do you know, the engine sounds really interesting. It rustles rather than rattles, rocks a little bit laterally, as flat twins tend to do, and is less smooth than I’d expected. Clutch is as light as a clutch can be. Gear selection is easy. Chris had warned me that the clutch might slip. It didn’t. This is a good thing, as the clutch itself is sandwiched between the engine and the gearbox –
it’s not just a matter of whipping off the primary chaincase cover and flailing with a screwdriver for ten minutes. Noted experts always assure me that these powerplants are easy to work on. I always believe them. I have no wish to find out for myself.
It’s not entirely rapid. This is possibly why Veloce christened their baby sporting twin the Valiant; it does make a valiant attempt to be quick, but it is no vicious brute or velociraptor, should Veloce ever have considered those as names. No venom or indeed viperishness is evident. A Velocette Violent it is not. But it is actually pretty darned fun to ride. There’s none of that tachometer frippery – the engine is probably impossible to over-rev and it gets decently unwilling at around 15mph in first, so you know when to change up. Which is easy. This is a very sweet gearbox. And top arrives very quickly, such is the slender powerband.
If you’re trolling along a decently deserted byway, the Valiant is really nice to ride. Far more sophisticated in its feel than a 4-stroke single of the same late-1950s period, and with a truly comfy riding position. The brakes work well. And the steering is sublime – in fact I can really see how ownership would appeal. The big snag lands when you’re on an A-road with other traffic, because you’re slower than most heavies and have no spare power to overtake anything other than tractors – and if they’re towing trailers then the Velo’s relaxed acceleration makes a chap pray that in the half-hour or so it takes to get past nothing approaches from in front. Mindfulness, is what it needs. But – and this is a big BUT – it genuinely is a delight. It whirrs and purrs along, and it even sounds great, unlike the LE, which is disturbingly silent.
If a chap was a Velocette completist, one of these would be a must.
However. A sports bike this is not. Not in any sense. Although its quoted power is OK for the time and for the capacity, I imagine that’s bhp at the crank, because it doesn’t feel like 12bhp is available at the rear wheel. That complex and inertia-packed drivetrain must surely chomp into the engine’s precious horses – which is a shame, because that same drivetrain is one of the bike’s best bits. In an era of rusting, flapping and grinding chains, shaft drive must have seemed like an unimaginable delight. But as with Sunbeam’s excellent S7 and S8, I fear that it also devoured the power on its way to providing smooth, quiet transmission which never gets the rider filthy and never demands adjustment. An obvious comparison would be with the equally remarkable Douglas Dragonfly, where that fine Bristolian bunch went to the trouble of turning the drive from their own flat-twin though a right angle so they could use a chain final drive.
And as is the way in the RC Cosmic Coincidences Dept, not only was there a Viceroy for sale at the Leominster auction, but there were two Valiants, one in pieces, which is a scary notion, but the other was complete and was a genuine Valiant Vee Line. The temptation was tremendous, but I manfully resisted – mainly because I couldn’t actually manage to get the free time to get there for the auction. Which is as good an excuse as any. And the point I’m clumsily making is that the little Velo, despite being slow – a top speed of a claimed 67mph does not light many fires – it was utterly charming, and interesting. Interesting enough to provide that ongoing fascination with weird machinery which is lacking in more mainstream motorcycles. That is what I miss most about the rotary Nortons I ran for so many years; that peculiar sense of achievement when the bike runs right, your journey is
flawless, and you switch off and smile.
Unhappily for Veloce, their cheery air-cooled twins failed to set fire to the bike buying public; although it was available from 1957 through to 1964, it cannot have made any money for the Hall Green folk. A genuine heroic failure, then. The upside is that it’s light, fun, is easy to handle and would easily provide years of gentle riding in the company of other machines of similar performance, a VMCC run, for example. And it does have a great and noble name badge on the fuel tank. Tempted?