Allen Millyard: The early years
If you don’t know who Allen Millyard is, then let Pip Higham’s interview from 2016 enlighten you!
One thing I had to ask was: “Where did all this begin?” Allen tells me about his Dad. He designed and built large cranes, and would make mock-ups on the kitchen table when Allen was a lad, made out of cardboard and wood. He used these to observe how the various components twisted and distorted when presented with a bag of sugar to lift. The practical results from the experiments stuck in Allen’s mind. From an early age Allen loved metalwork and his teacher encouraged him in any way he could. It wasn’t long before Allen found an old Raleigh moped dumped in a hedge. The motor was toast, but within days he had appropriated a Suffolk general purpose engine. After fashioning a couple of brackets out of a length of old bed iron and persuading a pulley on to the end of the Suffolk crank, he had a moped that was capable of better performance than Mr Raleigh ever contemplated.
After this, Allen ‘found’ another engine... from a Mini! A Bantam frame, some Greeves forks and more bed iron fell under the Millyard hacksaw and by locking up one of the drive shafts where it exited the Mini diff and welding a sprocket on to the opposite side, quickly he converted several large pieces of scrap into a living thing. A set of FS1-E wheels and an antique Honda 50 fuel tank completed the machine which Allen rode around the streets close to home. More bikes followed, including a 500cc Matchless; an indication of what was to come. Honda 90s were in plentiful supply as the frames rotted and repair became uneconomical. Allen amassed a few of them and set to on his dad’s Myford ML7 in an effort to build a V-twin out of a pair of C90s. The crankcases were fashioned out of a solid chunk of aluminium and the top-ends were mounted at 90 degrees in much the same way as the later SS100. An LE Velocette oil pump driven by the forward cylinder cam and a three-speed Francis Barnett gearbox somehow provided lubrication and forward propulsion, while the original Honda generator found refuge on the opposite side of the engine to where it had originally lived. Allen’s Malaguti Olympique donated its kidney and the first proper road-going and vaguely road legal Millyard special was born. And all this, at 17! Work, marriage and kids followed, with Allen zipping around on various bikes and even building a revolutionary downhill mountain bike for one of his lads. That bike, of course, became a world beater.
Allen Millyard, we salute you!