Ernie Earles: Ally pioneer
Birmingham-based Ernest Richard George Earles’ four-page UK patent application was duly granted to him in December 1951 for ‘motor cycle front wheel forks’. He had been an enthusiastic part-time trials and speedway rider before the outbreak of WWII and worked in the Austin Motor Company’s technical design department at Longbridge until 1942, when he bravely established his own company, Elms Metals, just a mile away at West Heath.
At Austin he’d been involved with the developing science of creating lightweight welded-up aluminium alloy fabrications, mainly for supply to aircraft manufacturers, and Elms Metals was Earles’ attempt to profit from that on his own account. It worked, and his company became a key supplier of alloy components to the aircraft industry, as well as metal pressings like exhaust manifolds and bodywork panels to the British car manufacturers located all around him – and all types of components to the British motorcycle industry, which for years had been headquartered in Birmingham.
Earles’ knowledge and expertise in producing weightsaving components meant he was the first port of call for companies seeking to save weight on their competition machines, both on and off road.
Norton’s nearby Bracebridge Street factory commissioned all the fuel and oil tanks for its factory GP bikes and Manx Norton customer racers from him from 1950 onwards, which his craftsmen duly produced from aluminium sheeting.
They’d later extend their prowess by fabricating the increasingly all-enveloping ‘dustbin’ streamlining adorning such bikes in the mid-1950s. By now a wealthy man, but still an ardent motorcyclist, Earles chose to focus his spare time on sponsoring a selection of local riders making their way up through the ranks, headed by Shipston-on-stour-based Cecil Sandford, who’d duly win a world title in 1952 on an MV Agusta single with an Earles fork.
He also began developing his own design of motorcycle front suspension as a counter to what he perceived were the deficiencies of the telescopic fork, which had by now become all but ubiquitous on every motorcycle, road or race.
the frame, damaging that instead,” says Sammy. “But there was no trace of this one ever having been down the road.” Sammy and mechanic Bob Stanley pieced together the parts to reconstruct the Earles BSA and got it running late in 1987. The bike was featured in a story written by Mick Duckworth in Classic Bike in June 1987. The frame is a work of art in itself, built from high-tensile Duralumin MG7 alloy pressings welded together to create tubing, mostly 1½in in diameter, then ground down and polished. This was achieved by simple gas welding, though later Earles frames were built to house Velocette and Norton motors using the gas-shielded argon arc-welding process. Although the lightweight material tended to work-harden in the stress of racing, Sammy Miller states that he found just a single fracture on the frame, on one of the mounting brackets for the fuel tank.
The aluminium twin-loop full cradle frame features a single top tube running to a point beneath the seat, where it bifurcates into the duplex cradle tubes, each with a triangulated subframe for the upper mounting points of the twin Girling shocks which are adjustable for spring preload. There’s a lower plate on each side, housing the footrests as well as the pivot point for the taper-section tubular steel swingarm, which delivers a 56in (1420mm) wheelbase. From the rider’s seat, the front end appears quite normal, with a Norton upper fork yoke beneath which the clip-on ’bars are mounted. The yoke carries twin tubular aluminium fabrications, at the bottom of which, behind the front wheel, is a spindle in which the horizontal fork locating the front axle pivots on Silentbloc bushes. Easily accessible adjustment to the steering geometry is via alternative locations for the spindle. Twin Girling shocks, readily adjustable for spring preload, fit between the axle housings and the upper fork members.
Apart from remaking the alloy fuel and oil tanks, Sammy was able to source the components needed to complete the bike quite easily, so the twin single-leading-shoe brakes – eight-inch (203mm) front, seven-inch (178mm) rear – came from the BSA parts bin. The 497cc engine is a second-series short-stroke BSA A7 Star Twin motor measuring 66 x 72.6mm and is fitted with one of the rare alloy cylinder heads such as Salt’s bike carried in photos of the era. But, although fully ported and fitted with polished conrods and high-compression pistons as well as the correct Amal TT carb found on Salt’s bike, it doesn’t have the racing camshaft of the original motor prepared at the BSA factory by inhouse tuning wizard Cyril Halliburn. But it does have the prized RRT2 close-ratio gearbox with the kickstart blanked off, ready to transmit what Sammy estimates to be 42bhp
peak horsepower in its present guise at 5800rpm, with the help of the twin exhausts ending in shapely megaphones. That’s a far cry from the alleged 50bhp-plus claimed for early BSA 500cc racing twins in the USA, which Sammy disdains as “showroom horsepower”.
Coupled with the Earles BSA’S low 304lb (138kg) halfdry weight, there’s quite enough performance to thrill. I rode the bike at the Miller Museum’s short test track, then several times up the hill at last year’s Goodwood Festival of Speed. A good number of the 200,000 spectators who attended made a point of checking out the machine in the paddock, with quite a few finding it hard to believe the bike was made 70 years ago!
Charlie Salt was tall in stature, so the Earles BSA has a spacious riding position. The clip-ons, mounted under the Norton upper tripleclamp, are spread quite wide to reflect that, with the resulting flat ’bars giving lots of space for me to reach forward and tuck behind the wire mesh flyscreen when flat out in top gear past Goodwood House. The comfy suede-covered seat would have been just the ticket for the six-lap TTS of the day, with the footrests mounted relatively low down giving easy access to the rather stiff one-up/threedown right-foot gearchange. You feel like you’re sitting ‘in the bike’ and this translates to a greater sense of command, as manifested by the ease it flicked from side to side through the Kennels Esses on the Goodwood hill. There’s good feedback from the front 19in tyre and the steering is very light – not at all as heavy as I’ve experienced on some Earles fork-equipped BMWS. Coupled with the reduced weight of the bike versus a steel-framed BSA twin, this results in an improbable sense of agility for an early-’50s parallel twin.
But you can have too much of a good thing, and I bemoaned the absence of a steering damper each time I rode over The Bump (the only one on the Goodwood hillclimb) when cranked over, which caused the front wheel to flap around – there’s no way Charlie Salt could have ridden this bike on the TT course without one! But otherwise the Earles BSA handled really nicely, though the pretty pathetic bite from the eight-inch sls front brake meant that I didn’t experience the way that an Earles fork can rise under hard braking – it wouldn’t stop hard enough to induce that!
But the standout feature of this beautiful bike is its exquisite frame – the first-ever aluminium chassis in Grand Prix racing history. This makes it a significant milestone in GP design – as well as being undeniable eye candy. What was that old cliché about looking good being half the battle?