Going for gold
To younger readers, the concept of buying your new bike in a crate and assembling it yourself seems almost incomprehensible.
Once the shop window of the motorcycling world when this Matador was developed, the ISDT was still a major event.
The whole kit bike idea was to save a whopping tax bill on a new motorcycle, as much as 362/3% when Motorcycle’s man John Ebbrell was issued with his new staff bike in the early part of 1971. In theory, any manufacturer could supply their machines in kit form but the practice was limited to competition bikes mostly. Tax collection in those pre-vat days meant anything sold would have a purchase tax added to the wholesale price of whatever was being bought.
In the dark days of 1943 this was actually 100% on all goods. John did a quick bit of arithmetic on paper to arrive at a saving of £65 or thereabouts. Actually John would also have been working with the new-fangled decimal currency introduced a couple of months earlier. This whole purchase tax thing would go out the window when the UK joined the EC – European Communities – as it was in 1973. This had VAT added at a slightly lower rate than purchase tax and there was no option to buy your new trials, enduro or motocrosser in a crate to save money.
In case you’re wondering why I’m trawling through the tax laws of the UK it is because I’m standing in the courtyard of Sammy Miller’s museum at Bashley Manor and looking over a smart Mk4 Bultaco Matador SD. The bike in our pictures here is a 1973 machine so would have been assembled at the dealers but is essentially the same as the earlier Mk4 models which would have come in the crates.
The owner of the Matador, Mike Dawson, tells me
his reasoning behind buying such a machine, and it is as simple as a friend of his had one in the Seventies and it made an impression on him when he was young. “He used to pull wheelies away from our house and I’d be following on my FS1E moped…” It took a year or two before Mike acquired the aspirational Bulto, 2014 to be precise, along the way were many other motorcycles and a career in race cars.
He adds he can make no claim for the cosmetics of the bike as he bought it ‘as is’ though he took it along to Sammy to have the engine and mechanicals gone through and be sorted. “It was quite amusing when I turned up with the bike as Sammy thought it was his old machine from the 1971 ISDT in the Isle of Man,” says Mike, “It isn’t, nor has it any actual ISDT history, but it is a version of the model Sammy and Sid Lampkin rode in that event.”
The Matador had been supplied new by Ken Blake at Etna Motorcycles in Poole, Dorset and Ken actually saw the bike at Sammy’s when Mike brought it in, the numberplate was a dead giveaway and there was more valuable provenance to go with the bike thanks to the records Ken still had access to. Provenance is a major thing in the world of not just old motorcycles but the antique world and the like. With access to these records the history of the Matador was added to.
Now, enduros were not frequent in the UK, yes there was the ISDT hotly contested by the industry but there were not that many home events for riders to compete in as practice, this means most of the bikes such as the Matador would be trail orientated if they were sold in the UK.
The Mk3 version was much less competition orientated for just this reason. In the Mk4 though, Bultaco upped their game and removed the equipment carried by the previous model but not needed in an enduro. Even then there were two versions on ‘just’ the Matador, the other was designated Matador
SD and came as close as any production machine could ever come to being a works team bike. From being a warmed-up trail bike the Mk4 became a nocompromise enduro machine and bridged the gap between the every-man machine and the barely tamed MX bike which the Mk5 Matador became.
But to backtrack slightly, Ebbrell was a normal enthusiast who was capable of wielding spanners and probably the sort of rider who would be buying the Matador anyway. So the task ahead of him wasn’t daunting and reading his words he raised a journalistic eyebrow in the direction of the claim ‘build in an afternoon’ which may well be true if you had a factory comp-shop to build in and were shoving these things together on a daily basis.
John instructed any purchaser to read the manual supplied, then read it again, then before you start the build have another read to make sure it has sunk in. In the end it took him a day to build and another day to settle it in.
In the same way we make our suggestions on assembling bikes in CDB, the Motorcycle passed on the tips gained through years of tech features. Assemble everything loosely, get some help and work carefully.
There would be an added complication for the press in those days… metric spanners would be relatively new to the workshop. Mr Ebbrell admitted he had to buy some as the ones in the kit were not up to the job.
He was delighted with the packing of the bike – it came in one large crate and a smaller packing case – less impressive though was the American market manual in the boxes.
He also subliminally made a damning indictment on the kit bike scene of those days by saying there was no need to have to learn welding, do drilling or filing to assemble the Bultaco, in fact it showed evidence of having been assembled, test ridden then stripped for shipping. The inference here was not all bikes supplied in this way were as easy to assemble as the Matador and often had much more missing from the crates than the M6 bolt and Nyloc nut missed from this one.
Looking round Mike Dawson’s Matador he pointed out the differences Bultaco made to the standard one to make it more suitable for the ISDT and enduro competitions. In such an event punctures will hold a rider up and any competitor riding for national or factory honours would need to be able to fix a flat in record time. There were products available to go inside tubes which would deal with compression punctures, sort of a latex liquid which sealed the hole and allowed
the rider to carry on. This stuff would only deal with minor damage of course and a tube would need to be changed. A development on this theme was a product called Finilec, ,which is still available. This stuff foams up inside the tyre and is okay if you’re on tubeless but due to the number of cans I’ve used on tubes their success rate here is not so high. Still, the SD had a carrier for Finilec as part of the running gear. “No Finilec in there,” says Mike, “just a proper toolbox.”
When the Matador was at Sammy’s place and
Bob Stanley was going through it he made some suggestions on how to look after the bike. First off was to suggest he fit an electronic ignition for Mike. He did and the Electrex World setup is now in place and the bike starts easily, the original ignition was known to fail at inopportune moments.
Another tip from the top was to use 25:1 oil mix, yes, we know the modern world of oil has moved on and most of us will use a 50:1 but the team at the museum reckon the original 25:1 is best for these bikes. Don’t use synthetic either, it’s too sticky and semi-synthetic is better for the older engines.
Such a high oil content does, and did in the day, cause the exhaust to carbon up. It is a fact of life and the papers from the last century regularly featured two-stroke care and how to decoke an engine. Scraping carbon from the cylinder head is easy enough but getting the stuff out of the exhaust is harder. Bob Stanley took the pipe to a safe area, set to with gas welding equipment and burnt the insides out…
we’re told there was an impressive flame…
The motor itself is a development from the Pursang MX model, detuned with a lower compression ratio and a smaller carburettor to allow some flexibility in the bike’s performance. Mike tells me he’s also added a trials slow-action throttle rather than the MX type of standard. This is something I’ve done to my enduro bikes and yes there is some slight loss in acceleration but on the nadgery parts of a course it is so much better.
One of the problems with a competition bike restoration is original bits, the very nature of what they were designed for meant most were modified or in the case of a full enduro spec Matador, bits were shed or broken as the event progressed. “I was lucky with this one because all of the bits were there and undamaged which makes me think it’s never been enduro’d,” Mike says.
He goes on to add the special clock, flexibly mounted, was one of the first things to be damaged and to try sourcing one is as close to impossible as one can get. “These days, with digital technology easily available and virtually indestructible, there’d be no problem, but the original clock is a thing of beauty and the huge binnacle it is in to rubber mount it was a decent attempt to keep it safe.”
Something else which is difficult to keep safe is the glass fibre fuel tank. This subject is regularly visited in these pages and the fuel tanks on Spanish bikes were often made from this material, problem is the ethanol fuel can delaminate the stuff and destroy the tank as it leaves the old resin in carburettors to solidify. There are places who line tanks, there are even people making Slimline Sherpa tanks to original pattern, but with a resin able to cope with modern fuel. It was the former option used for this tank and Mike sent it up to Hartlepool Radiators who do tank renovations and their lining has proved to be excellent. “I still don’t leave any fuel in the tank for longer than necessary,” he adds.
There are a lot of neat touches with this Matador and it has been finished as though it was ready for wheeling up on the scrutineering ramps before the 1971 ISDT start. Touches such as wires on the ends of the foot controls to prevent snagging on bracken and gorse bushes, the roto-map route holder and the tanktop bag with its route map in place all add up to a nice looking machine presented with attention to detail.