SLIGHT CORRECTION

In the last episode of this tale I made a couple of comments which weren’t quite accurate, and I’m putting it down to a fevered and tortured mind busily processing the intricacies of cam timing, opening and closing points, valve clearances and so on. Triumph produced a number of alternative parts for their various models to be used when altering the performance of a particular machine for a need not covered by the standard one. The first of these parts are the tappets which run in a block in the barrel and work on the cams to actuate the rockers via pushrods. What I said was racing tappets require a different tappet block… they don’t, they’re just a different radius on the same basic tappet. This should have been obvious and indeed it was after I’d sent the piece in…

The other comment was reference the cam wheels which on my 650 are three-keyway ones to aid balancing up the cam timing. I said I didn’t know if the same style of cam wheel was available for the smaller unit engines too… I should have read the next page on Technical Information Bulletin 13 – a Triumph publication – which would have told me they were available, at least in the 1960s.