Old Bike Australasia

A sprocketty tale

-

In 1982 I was living in Glenbrook (Blue Mountains NSW) and scored a job as a station mechanic through the government employment agency in Penrith – in those days, via a 3 x 5 white card on the noticeboar­d – on Scott Creek/Willeroo, a run-down million-acre cattle station 50km west of Katherine, NT, run by a Texan called Luke (who had flown a single-engined plane solo across the Pacific to Australia). There was some excitement at the time in the Penrith Job Centre, as I was their first client to land an interstate job through their office; thus the sweetener was that they paid my airfare up there.

So I flew to Katherine via Alice Springs and had my first experience with the Territory. It was a real adventure for a recently-arrived Pommie! It was also my first encounter with water buffalo, snakes in the workshop, wild boar and axle-bending termite mounds. But after a few months I was hanging out for a bit of independen­t transport, and longed for the mothballed motor bike sitting back in Glenbrook – my pride and joy, a burgundy red 1972 750GT Ducati V-Twin. I decided to go and rescue it. I took two weeks off work and hitch-hiked back to Sydney. I got the bike running again, bolted on a shonky luggage rack and headed for Bourke in mid July. I dozed off while riding, ran off the road and while trying to stay upright I dropped my wallet from my jacket in a storm drain, which I only realised when I stopped for petrol at the next roadhouse. Thanks to the help of the local friendly policeman I was able to re-track and retrieve it from the ditch 20 kms out of town. Phew. I ploughed into a washout on a gravel road at 90 km/h near Mt Isa and did a somersault over the front wheel. Much to my surprise the bike still worked, so after a few days recovering in the Boulia Hotel I eventually arrived back in Scott Creek. The bike was direly in need of some care by then, so I cleaned it up, including washing the drive chain in kerosene….I guess I didn’t lubricate it properly afterwards, and on my first trip out of the front gate the chain broke and jammed up the gearbox. Bugger. What was more embarrassi­ng was that my passenger was a young lady from the station, who was not amused at having to walk 5 km back home! Fortunatel­y I had a workshop manual with me, so I stripped in all down and found some teeth stripped off the fifth gear cog in the gearbox. After a fair few expensive phone calls I found a bike shop in Brisbane who could locate the parts I needed; but they took about a month to arrive, so I forgot about the bike for a while and focussed on repairing the station’s busted up fleet of Toyota Landcruise­rs.

I also had my first drive on a Cat E12 Grader, and a Cat D7 Dozer – what fun. But I learned a lot about repairing machines when the spare parts shop wasn’t just down the road so to speak.

When the Ducati parts finally came I laboriousl­y re-assembled the gearbox, only to discover I had mislaid the final drive chain sprocket on the gearbox output shaft. I searched high and low, but no go, and I couldn’t face another month’s wait to order another. So I improvised. In the parts store of the workshop I came across a drive sprocket from a John Deere harvester. Hmm… exactly the right tooth pitch and width, but with a very different bushing. Another search produced a plain bushing of the right diameter (JD tractor this time) – but no splines. Two days later, I had managed to knock up some custom splining by cutting lengths of key steel, brazing them into the bush and filing them square, then brazing the sprocket outer onto the bushing. I was surprised to find it actually fitted – in fact it was

“like a bought one”.

When I finally left the job at the end of the dry season (October) that sprocket ran fine all the way to Mt Isa, up to Boroloola, across to Cairns and down to Brisbane. I visited the dealership who had sent me the parts, and I related the story. He took a look

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Australia