Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2021 i Classic Motorcycle Mechanics

Newark Winter Classic cancelled It’s all getting boringly familiar, but thanks to the worsening situation and rising infection rate of Covid-19, Mortons Media Group has reluctantly taken the decision to cancel the Carole Nash Winter Classic show, planned for January 9-10 at Newark Showground. This season-opening event has always been a firm favourite with motorcycle enthusiasts from all over the UK, but with the increase of cases worldwide, Mortons feels this is the safest thing to do for the well-being of visitors and traders. Not only is the show a highlight in the event calendar, it is also a strong social event for visitors at the show, with people naming a ‘day out with their friends’ as one of the top three reasons for going. Given the current restrictions with…

SUBSCRIBE TODAY SHARE YOUR PROJECT WITH THE WORLD! FEEDBACK Post to Mechanics, PO Box 99, Horncastle, Lincs LN9 6LZ or email your pictures to editorial@classicmechanics.com Upset and disappointed Having read your article on the Valmoto Triumph in Classic Motorcycle Mechanics, which incidentally was brought to my attention by a very upset Steve and Yvonne Jones (Craig Jones’ parents), I’m not amused to read that the Valmoto Team ran an illegal motorcycle in one of the best races ever seen at Donington. This race has many special memories, especially for Craig’s parents who consider it his best ever performance, including all his World Championship races, and to indicate that he won on a 650cc engine is an insult to not only Craig’s ability, but to myself and late partner…

The way we were… Send us your nostalgic snaps of you back in the day with your steed! Either send to me at bsimmonds@ mortons.co.uk or via our vibrant Facebook page. C’mon! We've teamed up with The Hobby Company (www.hobbyco.net) which distributes Tamiya plastic motorcycle kits in the UK to give our favourite restoration one of its amazing motorcycles in miniature. So, send in your pictures of your bikes and you could win the chance to indulge in a miniature motorcycle restoration of your own. Remember to send your name and address on each submission so we know where to post the kit. Dean Welburn says: “I’ve never been without a bike since I got my first moped in 1976. The whole family has been involved right from the start with…

Tool of the month Soldering on! Ralph Ferrand works with tools all day long – he sells them too at bikerstoolbox.co.uk so he knows what works. with BIKER'S TOOLBOX Soldering on bikes should be avoided whenever possible. However, for certain areas of a motorcycle, soldering is the only answer, the most notable of which is the handlebar switches. Restoring switches is time consuming, but rewarding. There seems to be a lot of options for soldering these days. Back in my day a bog standard electric soldering iron was pretty much all that was on offer. For bigger jobs there was always the blow torch and gas iron. Nowadays there are irons powered by butane gas, lithium ion batteries and even a baby one that plugs into a USB port. Laser…

Project Suzuki TR750 part 7 Piston ‘n’ ported! Our Malc’s on it with the motor of this very special Suzuki – it’s just a shame that his wallet has run off to hide! WORDS AND PICS: MALC SHAW Last time the exhausts had been built and fitted and I felt the essence of the bike was coming together. There were a few niggles and areas that I was thinking needed to be addressed, both practical and aesthetic. First the engine. To recap, previously I had spoken to BDK Race Engineering. The brief was not out and out bhp but a usable, tractable engine. I’d had a number of conversations with James at BDK and in order to save a few quid had altered the inlet angle and…

What to buy and how much to pay Bargain-priced monkey bikes no longer seem to exist and all the sub one grand examples have disappeared. Low mileage, mid-70s examples like our bike in camera can fetch £3500 in top condition, with weathered patinated examples possibly £1000 less. Modified and running STs, whether 70s or 80s, seem to start at around £2300, with tidy original machines topping out around £3800. Early original and untouched, American market examples of the ST90 complete with bolt-on, chrome, front down-tubes and the high-level motorsport-style exhaust can cost as much as £4500, which is eye-watering money for something so little. Watch out for genuine Japanese machines sporting later Chinese copy-cat engines; their value is dramatically less. Here at CMM we’d either be looking for a private…

Project Yamaha RZV500R (51X) part 8 Firing on all four! After more than 12 months of hard work, where every single nut, bolt and washer on Chappie’s RZV was replaced or restored, the beast is finally ready to dress and ride. Time to burn some oil! WORDS AND PICS: JEFF WARE G’day! Last time we spoke we had fitted the RZV engine and it was time to sort the fuelling and exhaust, hook up the electrics and fire the RZV into life. With Covid-19 still in full force, there were some delays in progress, but eventually I got the job done and what a task it was! Routing the wiring loom and repairing it as we went, Tim and I put a solid few days into that…

SCOOPERMAN! The sunny side of the classic world, with the VJMC’s Steve Cooper Many of us are on some form of social media, forums and the like. Such set ups can facilitate an instant fix of best classics in less time than it takes to make a morning cuppa. We’re also quite likely to post a reply or comment to a post along the lines of, ‘No one will pay that for one of those!’ Do you think not? Do you reckon the guy who is asking £20,000 for a Yamaha RD500 is a foolish dreamer? What about the dealer with the Suzuki RG500 up for £40,000? Scoff as much as you like, inhale sharply through your teeth and then shake your head. Why? Because the reality is that someone,…

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; he was also taken under Mr Green’s wing at school. From an early age Allen loved metalwork and Mr Green encouraged him in any way he could. It wasn’t long though, before Allen found…

Q&A Our very own wizened sages, Messrs Mark Haycock and Steve Cooper are here to answer all of your woes, be they mechanical or spiritual. Every month we will be giving advice, as well as some general tips. PLATING PROBLEMS! Q: I have a few related questions that hopefully the CMM staff or one of its readers can answer. I am at my wit’s end because if I ask any plating business all they want me to do is send them the items so they can do it and charge me! I had a low voltage copper plating bath set given to me. My questions are: 1. A rusty, pitted steel, headlight bowl from the 1960s – can I plate this so much that with sanding down I can…

Project Suzuki TS400 Apache part 5 Wagons ROLL! Scoop gets all excited as his TS400 is readied for shipping out… WORDS AND PICS: STEVE COOPER Having stuck my neck out to buy the Apache I was keen to find out just how far the restoration process had gone. The bike had been advertised honestly as still needing some work so it was a given that it would need some fettling in The Workshop of Woes. In the previous instalment I’d mentioned how helpful it can be to get the back story to any old bike. Therefore I was chuffed when the vendor, Chris Toma, emailed me with an overview of what had been done and what still needed sorting. In no particular order the frame, swingarm and…

Project 1989 Yamaha TZR250 3MA part 6 COVID-19(89) It took eight months to complete, but Darren’s 1989 3MA has rolled out of Jeff’s shed sober and looking better than a bought one. Must be that Aussie sunshine… WORDS: JEFF WARE PICS: HEATHER WARE G’day! Well it has been one hell of a ride but the journey from wreck to weapon was well worth it. Darren’s TZR250 3MA is better than new and I mean that. Tim, Darren and I did not leave one nut, bolt or washer alone – every single component was cleaned, wire-wheeled or refreshed in some way and the bike was stripped in its entirety then carefully reassembled. It’s basically a blueprinted bike. As you may have seen last time, we fitted the fairings…

Stuff The latest riding kit, top tools, tyres, retro clothing and more ! HJC RPHA 90S ‘Modular’ is the popular term for a helmet that does two jobs: that of an open faced and full-face lid! This is the reinvented RPHA 90S which looks like a full-face helmet (and is modelled on their RPHA 11 race lid), yet functions as a modular helmet. It’s homologated as either, has a sun visor, is anti-fog and anti-scratch and has the ‘RapidFire’ visor replacement system too. Being a very useful touring sorta lid, it’s handy that it’s also ready for the SMART HJC Bluetooth communication system – sold separately, batteries not included, etc. www.oxfordproducts.com ALCOSENSE BREATHALYSERS Now, we know that we bikers don’t drink and ride – it’s hard to swing a leg…

BRISTOL SHOW DATE CHANGE Just like the Classic Dirt Bike Show, the Bristol Classic Bike Show – traditionally a season curtain raiser for us classic fans – is (for one year only) switching to a new summer date to try and beat the Covid-19 pandemic. Usually held in February at the Royal Bath & West Showground in Somerset, the 2021 event will be at the same venue, but switch weekends so it’s held on July 24 and 25. Given the continued uncertainty over the pandemic during the winter, and the immediate future of events with indoor content, organiser Mortons Media believes the best way to ensure that the South West’s biggest and best classic bike show can go ahead is to run it later in the year. Hopefully these changes…

News Ardingly ‘appens! At last! An event that actually went ahead back in October, pre second lockdown! Despite torrential rain the evening before and heavy showers on the Sunday morning there was a good turnout of buyers and stallholders at the Ardingly South of England Classic Motorcycle Show and Autojumble, with many taking advantage of the indoor space available. Full precautions were in place, with Test and Trace, one-way systems and extra hand wash and hand-sanitising stations. The main attraction is always the all-motorcycle ‘jumble, and the October event didn’t fail to please the ardent ’jumble-goer, with loads of complete bikes, projects and autojumble for sale. A cut-down show featured a small display of machines, many first time out as folk had made progress with restorations during the lockdown. ELK…

Show us your We want to see YOUR pride and joy in our pages, so you can share what you ride and restore with fellow readers. Email your hi-res shots to bsimmonds@mortons.co.uk or mail in some photos to the address at the front of the mag. Let us know what you’ve done and how you’ve done it and send before and after shots if you can. Do get in touch. Bertie. We’ve teamed up with SDoc100 which manufactures some of the best bike cleaning kit in the business! So, send in your pictures of your bikes and you could win an SDoc100 Chain Care Kit worth £50, which includes their new White Chain Spray 2.0 that offers four times more wear protection for chains and sprockets than the competition. Find…

Allen Millyard Award-winning motorcycle engineer! Sassy with the chassis! In this very issue you can read about our ride of Allen’s Super Six Zed! Here, he’s getting on with bike number two! Work on my second super six has been progressing slower than normal. The 1522cc engine is finished and ready to start, but for now I’m concentrating on building a complete rolling chassis for the new engine. With all the parts away for painting and plating, I only had a few bits of the bike remaining at home to work on, like the rear wheel hub, forks, clocks and electrical bits. I usually send the alloy parts for vapour blasting, then polish where required, but this time I decided to clean them myself at home with wire brushes and…

Getting the bike back to Blighty Shipping options are a very serious consideration when getting a bike to the UK from America and it really pays to look in depth at your options. You get exactly what you pay for here! If your recent purchase is going to be hurled into a container of closely packed bikes the chances are it’s going to get damaged and badly so; cheap shipping is exactly that. Also, the location of the bike can be a huge element in the cost of transportation. One shipping option that looked potentially attractive at £500 to the UK necessitated me getting the Apache from Tennessee up to the southern shores of The Great Lakes for onward transportation. However, when you get quotes of around $800 for those…

ANCESTRAL POWER PLANTS The DAX’s powerplant might very well be a fairly sophisticated (for the period) overhead cam motor, but it owes its very existence to something much earlier and arguably equally revolutionary. Pretty much all the small Honda singles are indebted to a humble, yet technically influential engine that first appeared back in 1958. Honda’s C100 Super Cub was designed to provide powered transport to people who weren’t motorcyclists… or car drivers. The very first Honda step-thru was targeted at people who needed basic, yet dependable transport and whose only experience of powered movement was a push bike. The power unit featured a semiautomatic transmission system coupled to a very basic, yet exquisitely designed and built, push-rod valved, 50cc four-stroke motor. With the emerging Asian Tiger economy gaining momentum…

Project Kawasaki Z550F Part 7 Fab four finished! Well, it was never going to be a full-on resto, but John’s done himself and the Kawasaki Z550F proud! WORDS AND PICS: JOHN VASSALLO Hello readers and welcome to my final foray with the Z550F! Firstly, I hope you all have kept busy like me, during this second lockdown. Reading bike magazines helps. Or it has me, so that’s good! Last time out, I wrote that the bike was pretty much ready for its first test ride. I’d gone over everything, the engine was running sweetly, but I still had no idea how it rode. So it was exciting stuff, taking a big (well, middleweight) four-cylinder bike for its first run in 17 years. With the tank empty, I…

STOOL SAMPLE! What is a man to do when his old faithful wooden stool crumbles beneath his very gluteus maximus? Build your own, of course! WORDS AND PICS: JIM LINDSAY Being a self-taught, amateur, part-time mechanic with the shortcomings that entails, I try to make life for myself in the workshop as easy as possible. That means good lighting, the best tools I can afford, a clean, tidy environment and, most importantly, comfort while I work. I think (and hope) that if I am as comfortable as possible I am less likely to make mistakes. The chief aid in this is my hydraulic bike bench. The second element is a comfy seat so, whenever the task permits, I can work sitting down. The short wooden stool I’d been using for…

Pip Higham Tuner, engineer, rider Tea-time stories! Dust’a want a brew lad? That’s ‘want’ with an ‘a’ not an ‘o’ mind. This was one of the most oft heard bellows at VBS towers back in the day. (For those of you youngsters out there who never encountered ‘VBS’, that stood for Village Bike Shop, a poor attempt at a humorous moniker for my tooning business which stuck like chain lube to a Levi’s leg; after a while it just had to stay.) We made a lot of tea back then, it always helped to maintain spirits at times of duress. And I have to say we experienced plenty of those. Mike and Brian, my two long-suffering side-kicks, were amazing at stuff I simply couldn’t do, Mike was, and still is,…