The Triumph of the North!
You may remember, in a past issue, a story about a Norman Autocycle by regular correspondent Richard Hyatt. This month he recalls another of his many other machines, his Triumph T100.
My Triumph, 508HHY, came from a chap at the Imperial College London – it was a nice machine, powerful and sounded good. Bathtub body and a little distributor and I discovered the fancy Energy Transfer ignition whereby it all relied on the magnetism being spot on. I ventured further and faster afield on this, all over the place – learning the boundaries of adhesion of the footrest rubbers (thankfully not too many times!). I can’t now remember how old it was when I bought it, but it couldn’t have been many years old looking at my age and the registration (1959 or ’60 at a guess). This machine I remember not so much for the bike, but for the people and places I associate with it and, in particular, a holiday I had on it.
I discovered Harwoods of Richmond (on the roundabout). What a place! A little shop but full of knowledge. Then there was Kays in Bond Street, Ealing. Kays shop was an engineering store on the ground floor if I remember rightly, but all the bike bits were downstairs
– a tight flight of steps down into the basement where all the bike stuff was. The guy down there never saw daylight for eight hours a day! Like Harwoods, Kays always had the same people behind the counter – they were always there, year after year.
These shops were visited regularly as I and a pal were planning a trip on our bikes – our first camping trip on our bikes and we wanted to fettle them to reduce any unpleasant surprises. He had an Ariel Leader which needed rings and small end bushes, very jangly they were. By now, we were not too hesitant about pulling things apart, we were learning all the time and quite proficient about sorting our bikes out.
Gathering all the parts needed for his top end job, we had the barrels and pistons off pretty quickly and, having read somewhere about expansion of metals, we decided to put the gudgeon pin into the icebox of his mum’s fridge to shrink it as we needed to get the new small end bush in.
This took place over the weekend – the problem was that, the following weekend, when it came to reassemble the engine, we’d completely forgotten about where we’d put this gudgeon pin. Eventually after about a day of tipping everything out of everywhere, his mum asked if we wanted a drink and found it with the ice cubes!
The engine went back together fine and ran nicely afterwards, ready for our trip. We rode from London out westwards to the centre of Wales and then progressively northwards – Lakes, Scotland and what is now known as the North Coast 500.
We covered around 2000 miles and the bikes went really well. I kept 508HHY for a while, then sold it on for HDT160J, a T120 Bonneville, a very nice oil-in-frame model.