Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2020 i The Classic MotorCycle

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been fascinated by toy/model motorcycles (and cars), and the whole lockdown and isolating period has shown me that there’s plenty of other people who think alike. It came into my mind recently, as I walked back through the local forest, on a leaf-strewn path, and spotted something blue and sparkling in among the first of the fallen autumn foliage; I stopped and picked it up, it being a small (say, 1:64 scale) Chevrolet toy car. Alongside the path, there was a log and so I carefully placed it on the top of it, in case its owner returned. Why did I think that? Well, when we were children, my brother Simon had a bathtub Triumph toy he took everywhere with him,…

It was a complete surprise to discover my picture and Alan Turner’s article ‘A Long Call From Sussex’ in the November 2020 edition of The Classic MotorCycle (p36-38), as I’m the current owner of the featured AJS 18S, and have been so for about 50 years. The AJS has been a joy to ride and maintain for the last 20 of those and yes, the visit to Hellingly and meeting the Wright family as documented was fantastic. Please allow me to fill in some of the gaps: My uncle Colin in Eastbourne acquired the AJS from a work mate in the late 1960s, as a rolling chassis restoration project. I was about 16 years old when I first saw the AJS. It was propped up against the inside wall of…

By the late 1960s, the days when an unmodified road bike could be fitted with knobby tyres and be called an International Six Days Trials (ISDT) machine were long passed – it called for something specialised to match the Eastern bloc two-strokes. The British squad bosses were keen to keep the Trophy team mounted on home machinery, but the choices were few and what remained of the British industry showed little interest in competing in the motorcycling Olympics. Apathy might have ruled in the boardrooms at Small Heath and Meriden, but, thanks to the determination of multiple six days gold medal winner Ken Heanes, the Trophy team did compete on British bikes in the 45th International in Spain, in 1970. The team’s Cheney Triumphs were arguably some of the most…

Two-stroke roadsters were never more popular than in the third quarter of the last century. In this country, long-established Villiers was well placed to take advantage of the post-Second World War demand for affordable personal transport – supplying numerous assemblers and manufacturers – while BSA and others made complete machines. The pattern was repeated across the continent, with Italian makers in particular producing stylish small motorcycles and scooters. And then Yamaha and Suzuki burst onto the scene offering performance and sophistication never previously seen – or expected – in strokers. Their 125s more than filled the ride-to-work void left by Bantams and Captains, and their quarter-litre jobs belied their modest size with quite incredible levels of performance. Soon, even those rocket-ships had been eclipsed both in capacity and performance, and…

1954 1 Professional motorcycle road racer Ray (full name, William Raymond) Amm of then Rhodesia, now the Republic of Zimbabwe, heading for an unexpected win in the year’s controversial Senior race astride the ‘Proboscis Norton,’ so named because of its unusual streamlined fairing. After two postponements, Friday’s 500cc event finally started at noon in poor visibility – then it got worse. Tragically, Simon Sandys-Winsch (348cc Velocette) got no further than the Highlander before falling in the appalling conditions, later succumbing to his injuries. Tellingly, 16 riders posted their fastest circuit on their first, push start lap, with none faster on the second circuit, when the rain was worst, with visibility down to 20 yards in places. Yet the race went on… Until approaching 2pm, when, suddenly, the stewards announced they were…

Alongside JAP speedway engine development, specialists made frames, including speedway rider Alec Jackson, who was to later take over speedway engine production. Most off-season during the early/mid 1930s, engine development work had two objectives – reliability and power. For example, over winter 1932/3, the cylinder head was modified, which, with other details, took measured (at the crankshaft) output to over 40bhp. At the same time, for reliability, the rocker box was redesigned, the small oilbox for gravity feeding the valve stems between races was dropped, with the rocker box redesigned to accept an oil feed. At crankcase level, the then-familiar single Pilgrim pump was replaced by a double plunger unit. As the oil flow for each chamber of the double Pilgrim pump is independently controllable, for the first time a…

Posed in the car park of The Motor Cycle offices at Dorset House, Stamford Street, London – is 28-year-old Egyptian Thabit Abdel Said, who, on his self-built Matchless G3L, had ridden from his home city of Khartoum, the Sudan, to England. The Motor Cycle’s report, published in the August 6, 1953 volume, began: “It is rapidly becoming almost commonplace for a motorcyclist to turn up… and remark casually that he (or she) has ridden from some distant part of the world… [but] Abdel Said called in with a tale of determination and courage that would be hard to equal.” It was explained that two years prior, Thabit Abdel Said had decided he would like to see more of the world, and the best way he could do it was by…

Just writing to say I enjoyed the article in the November issue of The Classic Motorcycle, regarding the Lakeland Motor Museum. My father, Peter Gasson, was a fan of AJW motorcycles and at one time had five in his collection. He used his 1938 JAP engine model extensively, and rode from Surrey over to the TT races on several occasions in the 1970s. He was the marque specialist with the VMCC for many years and owned one of the V-twin Anzani Vulpine/Summit engined models. This was a powerful and solid bike, the only downside being that the clutch struggled to cope, resulting in burned corks and clutch slip. Sometime in the 1980s (I think) three of the AJWs were sold to the National Motorcycle Museum – the JAP engined model,…

With the easing of lockdown, we were able to get out and finally do some ‘visiting’ – and one of the first journeys was to Cambridgeshire, to see Colin Jansen and this pair of glorious BSA twins. Some may recognise one of the Beesas, as it was magazine featured some years ago, while the other is a ‘new build’ – made in response to a request from Colin’s brother Kevin, who rather liked his older sibling’s smart machine. Racy Beesa twins During the immediate post Second World War years, one would have said that sporting parallel twins were the preserve of Triumph, while BSA were single cylinder exponents, which, although true to an extent, is slightly simplistic. Though overshadowed somewhat by the exploits of its own Gold Stars, BSA made…

John Powell has an air of calm about him, even imperturbability. The 76-year-old Isle of Wight man, tall and limber, also smiles readily and is always willing to lend a hand. You would not think that just a couple of years ago, a freak accident forced him into total immobility for many months, and that after a year he was warned that during a forthcoming operation to glue his hip ball joint back on, the necessary movement of his braced neck carried the risk of total paralysis. Calm must have been useful at that point. Had it been a motorcycle accident? “In a sense,” grinned John. “I had a bad knee from a day spent trying to kick-start a Royal Enfield Meteor twin!” So instead of walking downstairs, next morning…

The move up the scale from enthusiastic member of a club to someone with a responsibility for the direction the club has to go in as the modern world throws all sorts of things in the way, is not always a conscious decision or one due to a desire to be in charge. “I’d joined the VMCC when I was at the Classic TT and a friend had said we could do the Jurby track day, but we’d to join the VMCC to do it. Naturally, once in I gravitated towards the older motorcycles for road riding, the sorts of machines I cut my motorcycling teeth on, so to speak and from there I became a member of my local section.” The catalyst for more involvement was an innocuous advert…

More than 50 British motorcycles – and motorcycle-related cars – from the National Motorcycle Museum will be offered by Bonhams Motorcycle Department at the Winter Sale on the weekend of December 5/6 at Bicester Heritage. The sale will be conducted online, though viewing will be available at Bicester. Highlights include some fabulous vintage ware, including two Bullnose Sunbeam Model 90s – one of which was the machine we featured in our January 2018 issue – and a 1929 Model 18 Norton, purchased from Bonhams and restored in the museum’s workshops. Rarities from the 1930s include a pair of 600cc Ariel Square fours – the earlier being a 1935 ohc example – and a single-cylinder OEC with the firm’s own special front end. Also from the 1930s comes a Python-engined Vincent-HRD.…

Glenn Hammond Curtiss (1878-1930) was an American aviation and motorcycle pioneer, who later went on to essentially found the US aircraft industry. He was originally a Western Union cycle messenger who built and raced his own bicycles, before opening a shop in his home town of Hammondsport, New York, southeast of Buffalo, where he manufactured a line of cycles he designed and developed himself. But with the availability of internal combustion engines, Curtiss became interested in motorcycles, so he began manufacturing his own design of 500cc single-cylinder motors in the back room of his bicycle shop, fuelled by a carburettor adapted from a tomato soup can containing a gauze screen to pull the fuel up by capillary action. These engines were used to power the Hercules motorcycles which Curtiss first…

The hope for this issue was that I’d be able to report we have a rolling chassis – and, happily, that’s exactly what I can say, though it hasn’t actually rolled anywhere far as yet, apart from off the bench and back on it, the other way round. Because of the way it’s been positioned up until now, so basically the other way round to how we normally have machines positioned on there, there was an ongoing effort to get the front end bits finished before swapping it round. And, as ever, a couple of little issues have held us up. But to go back a little, first. As previously reported, on reassembly we started to find out that perhaps the machine as acquired had been off the road for…

World title success in 1950 was the highlight for the family firm from Pesaro, on the eastern Italy coast. It was the Gilera that did it. Tucked away, in a back street garage behind the promenade in Douglas, Florian Camathias and his passenger Alfred Herzig worked away on their Gilera-powered outfit ready for the 1964 Isle of Man sidecar TT. Barely a stone’s throw from the garage, at the Pitcairn boarding house, stayed a 10-year-old boy called Raymond Ainscoe and his parents. Ray happened to be a huge Florian Camathias fan so naturally, when he learned that the Swiss racer’s garage was so close to his digs, there was no hanging about. “Camathias’ garage was just around the corner in one of the now-demolished garages on Finch Road, which led…

Electrical stuff, I freely admit, scares me, and not just because in my previous working life – one of them at least – it was not unknown for loud bangs, fizzing and eye-watering flashes to zip around the site as this mystical substance caught out the unwary practitioner of the art. This possibly explains my nervousness in tackling this area of motorcycle rebuilding. It is unlikely the electrical system of a motorcycle would cause such an incident as described, though I was witness fewer excuses available and the subject has to be tackled. It doesn’t help the point has also been reached where I am determined to use the bits I have in order to at least make the spark plugs spark. I know that a much quicker and easier…

THE SPECIALISTS With more than 50 years of refined production engineering, the history of VéloSoleX machines is long on detail. Much of it will be found on a website dedicated to these unusual machines, with additional support from an enthusiastic forum. When it comes to using ultra-lightweights, Covid-19 notwithstanding, the Buzzing Club (National Autocycle and Cyclemotor Club Ltd) also provides many opportunities. Thanks to both sources for their assistance with information. ■ https://the buzzingclub.net ■ www.velosolexclubuk.com MODEL HISTORY This guide focuses on the S3800 VéloSoleX, but much of it applies to any of the models. The S3800 is also the one most frequently offered for sale. Introduced in 1966, it was the latest evolution of a concept that had been in production for two decades. The design was established by…