TALES FROMTHE SHED ............................
Progress! Success everywhere! It cannot last! Well, maybe…
Progress! Success everywhere! It cannot last! Well, maybe…
Let me share a thing with you: we receive some fairly strange correspondence here at the RC rest home for ancient motorcycles. One of my favourite was from a guy writing to tell me why he was not renewing his RC sub. We receive very few of these, happily, but we always read them – mostly they make perfect sense, some of them are very sad, but a few are just … strange. This chap wasn’t renewing because even I (even I? what does that mean?), FW, had taken a pile of parts to be powder-coated. It appears that I should have refinished them myself by hand using skill and ancient paints, several of which I’d never even heard of. Curious.
What is more curious is that being as what I am – a possibly interminable motor bicycling journaliser-person – I ride lots of bikes, most of them thankfully not my own. I say ‘thankfully’ with great care, because it usually means that the particular bike isn’t one which I’d fancy for myself, which is great and not a criticism, but sometimes… sometimes it’s because the bike is profoundly horrid – maybe even actually dangerous.
There can be many reasons for this, often involving the use of poor quality components, but sometimes bikes are horrors because Proud Owner believes he has skills and abilities way beyond reality. This can be very scary indeed. I think we would all agree that anyone who rides a motorcycle needs to be aware of his or her personal skill level, and the same logic applies to folk who fling the spanners at those same bikes. Both of these apply to me.
Of course I can refinish a painted part, but I simply lack the time, energy and will power to rub a rusty frame back to bare metal, then rustproof it, then coat it with precious unguents to both make it look good and stay that way for a long time. Easy, you might say, just get the bits blasted and then refinish them yourself, FW The Idle. I could do that. But life is too short. I apologise with a complete lack of sincerity for declining all recent opportunities to rub down rusty frames…
I also understand my own mechanical limits; my limitations as a mechanic. What this means is that whenever I hit a problem I cannot fix I ask for help. Usually from friends first – which may explain a certain shortage thereof – and when that fails I stomp down to Ace Mosickles in nearby Bude, cap in hand, hangdog expression on the chops and a carefully cultivated air of mixed poverty and desperation. This is difficult to do, but always works, I find. It’s a skill well worth having.
And so it was with that thousand-time cursed BSA B25SS, the subject of the longest rebuild in the history of civilisation – if such a word can be applied to a BSA B25SS, which I doubt. Despite everything – and I mean everything – the curse word machine simply refused to run. I have some sympathy: I try never to run myself as it is both undignified and strenuous, but I feel that a motorcycle should be of stronger mettle. Eventually I just gave up. I decided to throw the thing
back to a damp, dark recess of The Shed, and
concentrate instead on actually riding bikes rather than messing about idiotically and fruitlessly. My limits I had reached – of both ability and patience. I could take no more unsubtle jokes.
However, given that the thing had cost a fortune and devoured most of a lifetime to get to its current state of immobility, a plan was hatched. It would go to A Man Who Can.
So, patient Max came under cover of dark skies and rain with the big white van and took it away, with instructions to simply make the thing work. There was – so far as I could see – no reason why it wouldn’t, but I handed over a sparkly new Pazon ignition system supplied by the ever-helpful Paul Goff in case even Ace mechanics failed to fix the entirely new but useless points system.
Kenny didn’t even try. He remarked that there was a short somewhere, life was too short to seek out and destroy it, so he simply pulled it all apart, threw the new points, bobweights, so forth into a box and plumbed in the Pazon. Just like that. I’d expected that he’d spend a year or two dredging through the electrical innards, but early one morning just as the sun was rising I powered up the email to discover an Ace message asking me for a new primary chaincase gasket. A what?
It appears that the best way to get accurate timing is to use a strobe, and BSA fitted marks to their alternator rotors to achieve this. But the B25SS – of course – had not one accurate timing mark but a pair of opposite and entirely inaccurate timing marks, so Kenny had slipped a timing disc onto the end of the crank and timed the thing up. Just like that. Using geometry or something. This is what people like me pay people like Kenny money for. Of course the BSA started first kick. Of course it ticked over. Of course it charged, too, which it had never done before. Magic things, timing discs, plainly.
Kenny then decided that as well as making the bike run he would prep it for an MoT.