The best I ever owned…
My favourite motorcycle of them all was a 1961 T100A. The best bike I ever owned. I sold it when I got a serious girlfriend who didn’t like riding pillion. The mistakes I made!
I put a Wal Philips fuel injector on the T100A. Scary! A few days after the (new at the time) first Severn Bridge was officially opened, I crossed it at 2am. My speedo read 115mph and the throttle still had more travel. I chickened out. It terrified me. Unfortunately, the man in the tollbooth saw I was in police uniform. A few days later, we had a circular saying that all police vehicles crossing the bridge should stop at the booth, because all trips were logged.
Fortunately, I had been going so fast that he hadn’t taken the bike’s number – the bridge is in Gloucestershire, and I was well off my Bristol police ‘patch’.
I took the Wal Philips injector off because the steel plug insert in my bike’s alloy head came loose. Not sure it would have done that if I’d kept the original Amal carb. Also, the mixture was impossible to get right for normal riding. It was either too rich for town riding or too weak for fast work. Riding to work at 5.30 in the morning was accompanied by massive backfires with blue flames from the exhausts!