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Adjustable Spanner and other Tales
by John Lee, August 1997
by John Lee, August 1997
Last month the Register thundered on to my doormat, and on casually flipping
through it I noticed something that slightly confused me. However, instead of just
doing the obvious thing and picking up the telephone I thought I would have a go
at relating the following.
Now, this may seem irrelevant, but read on. My late father was a signwriter and the business was run from workshops at the bottom of the garden. One of the 'steady little earners' was to write coffin plates for two of the local undertakers, and in consequence there was a regular flow of frock coated gentlemen up and down the garden path.
One day, way way back around 1950, my sister and 1 were in the open garage behind the workshop where I was fixing her bike when this, to us, tall, thin, bespectacled, black clad apparition appeared before us. His first words were (please read in broad Yorkshire) something like, "Now what thee need ther lad ist adjoostable spunner". We had never heard anyone speak like that before and we just rolled up. We never forgot the incident and we still refer to him as 'Adjustable Spanner'.
We now move on to around 1956/7. I was visiting a motorcycling mate of mine who lived out in the Laindon 'plotlands', in an area now covered by Ford Dunton Research Plant. In his garden was this BSA V-twin trike which he said I could have for £20. It looked pretty sound, ali panelled in grey primer, complete with tattered pram hood. I said I would give him twenty five if he could get it started and drive it over to my house in Grays. Two days later he drove it up the backway and I parted with my hard earned. It in fact ran quite well and seemed very sound and it soon became obvious that the body had been fabric covered originally. I decided I would do it up a bit. I don't remember how many months of late nights and weekends it took, but many tins of Brushing Beico cellulose and regular sore and bleeding fingers meant that it was a real eyecatcher. When it came to that sort of job I knew what I was doing, having been well taught by my father who was also a master coachpainter. When it came to upholstering and hood making however, I knew nothing.
I went down to Benson's, then at Hadleigh, and they were great. Told me how to do the fluting and piping etc., and sold me all the ingredients. I went home and set about the job on Mum's ancient Singer, and very slowly produced a narrow fluted and padded red vinyl seat and backrest, a double duck hood and all the trim. The Singer never recovered and mother never forgave me. In the end it looked great, the bodywork in Beico Ming Blue, the wings and hood in black with the wheels and upholstery in dark red.
Forty years on and the memory is weak, but I don't think I had to do much to it mechanically to get it on the road except sort out the exhaust. In a local side street there was a shop that sold cheap batteries and silencers. The silencers all had multi-diameter inlets and outlets that you cut back to the size you needed - a great idea. I fitted a long straight through version and a copper tailpipe, it sounded great and I have been a V-twin enthusiast ever since.
I have omitted to mention that it was a 1931 model, registration number VL 3509, and I think it must have been the basic model as it had no speedo and not even the lugs for shock absorbers. I think it may have had a speedo head in the dash but no cable or drive unit. I paid a visit to that wonderful emporium, the Pride & clark secondhand spares counter in, was it, Stockwell Road. I came away with a 'new' cap for the front of the gearbox, complete with speedo drive and cable. That little spares counter at Pride and Clark never let me down, you just told them what you wanted and they went and got you one.
By this time I was using the BSA regularly along with whichever motorcycle I had at the time. The carburettor however was clapped out, lousy tickover and massive flat spots. No amount of bushing, shimming and bodging would effect a cure. At this time I was an apprentice at Rotary Hoes, and they used 600cc JAP engines and two or three versions of their own vertical twin engines on the excellent Howard Gem Rotovator. I borrowed I think three different carbs at different times, including the petrol/TVO one, and they all worked up to a point but they all went back. Finally I did the obvious, I looked up Solex's address in London, got on the bike and eventually walked into their showroom and plonked down my old carb in part exchange for a new one straight off the shelf. If only I could do that today. With the new carb it was transformed and I used it for quite long trips, never doubting its reliability. At one point I used to take a nurse girlfriend back to her West London hospital on a Sunday night, a seventy mile round trip.
It was all a long time ago, but I can only at the moment think of two other things that concerned me, one of which I cured and the other I started on but which I know now I had incorrectly diagnosed in the first place. The first concerned over-exuberant cornering. We all know what happens once the inside front wheel loses contact with the ground, it can take an awful lot of the wrong side of the road to get things sorted out again, if you are lucky, that is. As I wrote earlier, mine had no friction dampers on the front, nor any lugs to fit them to. At this point I will backtrack a few years.
In the late Forties my father had bought a 1935 Jowett Kestrel, a long narrow 7hp car which carted the seven of us all over the south east of England for many years. Naturally the dampers were shot and replacements unobtainable initially, but something had to be done. All sorts of bodges were tried, including fitting a pair of telescopic dampers vertically on the front. We had removed these from the back of an early Volkswagen Beetle in a scrap yard near Gallows Corner, Romford. Eventually the correct Armstrongs became available again and the telescopic dampers went on the shelf in the garage, until, that is, I decided to fit them to the trike.
Easy really; fit the bottom end to an extended through bolt on the lower outer front spring and fit the top end to a plate adjacent to the inner end of the upper spring. The dampers must have been lying at about 20 degrees to the horizontal but worked very well. They improved comfort, producing just a little damping effect but almost totally removing body roll and greatly improving cornering. They were still on when I sold it.
The other problem I had was that every couple of weeks or so the exhaust tappets had to be readjusted. I could never make out why I did not run out of adjustment. Anyway, I in my ignorance decided that the rocker gear needed lubrication and that I would feed some oil up there. Just how I was going to achieve this I cannot remember, but it probably involved taking a feed from the vicinity of the pressure relief valve. The first thing I did was take a another trip to the Pride and Clark secondhand spares department and buy two inlet rocker boxes and fit them in place of the cutaway exhaust ones. I had no idea why the exhaust boxes were cut away, I just assumed it was so that they cleared the bonnet. In 1959 this was not a problem (now close your eyes before you read this next bit), I cut a hole in each side of the bonnet. The job never got done. I had had six years of deferment from National Service and the Queen refused point blank to give me the extra couple of years I needed. To me it was the end of the world. Around August 1959 I sold the trike locally, together with my Avon fared Dommie 88 and a 1939 Ford Prefect Tickford Drophead Coupe (except that if you did drop the head both doors flew open every time the brakes were applied). That was that, an end to an episode of life.
A year later the Queen decided I was the world's worst Air Wireless Fitter, so she sent me to the West Country and gave me a boat without a radio; close to the best thing that ever happened to me. It was seven years before I returned to Grays where my brother, a friend and I started a small business. Many moons later,' probably in the early seventies, the shop door bell dinged and in walked the instantly recognisable and never to be forgotten 'Adjustable Spanner'. I forget now what he had come to hire, probably a Kango or a hub puller, but it was not until I wrote out the hire contract that I found out his real name. It was of course the irrepressible Geoff High. Subsequently of course I found out he was (sorry, is) restoring a Scout and that he was a member of the Club. I had always regretted selling my trike and naturally asked Geoff if there was any trace of it within the Club. The answer was negative, as had been earlier enquiries I had made through friends with access to the DVLC records. All I knew of its subsequent history was that whilst I was enjoying my sojourn in the west it had at some point belonged to a chap called George in Chadwell St Mary, a boyfriend of one of my sisters.
As I said before, I've always loved V-twins, and although I had been riding a V-twin motorcycle since 1970 I still fancied another BSA trike. About five years ago I bought the disreputable old dog that resides under my lean-to. A couple of years ago I had brought it in to work and on the way home stopped in a back lane to buy some fruit off a roadside stall. In no time at all, a chap who had been leaning on the gate of the cottage next door had come over and uttered those near immortal words, "I used to have one like that". "So did I", says I, "Back in the fifties". It turned out that he had lived in Laindon at the time and had sold it when his first born came along. I told him that I had bought mine from a friend who had lived just over the hill from Laindon and how it had once had a fabric body which had been reskinned in ali and painted grey. "That wasn't grey paint" says he, "I used to work in the print and they were Daily Telegraph printing plates." He had owned VL 3509 before my mate Alan and I. And that, if you are still with me, is the end of my story - well, almost.
You may remember that this rambling epistle was triggered by the arrival of the Register last month. What caught my eye whilst casually flipping through it was my name at the top of page 314 as a previous owner of VL 3507, 'in 1950s' it says. So, who says, Mr Editor? Does the current owner have evidence that 3507 once belonged to a J Lee, or are there two J Lees who each owned a BSA trike in the fifties? I don't think so. As the enclosed photo clearly shows, mine was VL 3509, but it was almost certainly me who wrote the plate. Has Mr L Steltner got the wrong number on his car, or is it all down to a misprint in the Register? I dearly hope that they are one and the same car, in which case I would very much like to see it again. However, I think it more likely that they are two different cars registered and sold by the same dealer at about the same time.
As I said at the beginning, I could probably have sorted this out in one evening by picking up the telephone, but Mr Editor was pleading for copy. I hope he thinks it was worth it, and I will now sit back and await your comments.
John Lee
Now, this may seem irrelevant, but read on. My late father was a signwriter and the business was run from workshops at the bottom of the garden. One of the 'steady little earners' was to write coffin plates for two of the local undertakers, and in consequence there was a regular flow of frock coated gentlemen up and down the garden path.
One day, way way back around 1950, my sister and 1 were in the open garage behind the workshop where I was fixing her bike when this, to us, tall, thin, bespectacled, black clad apparition appeared before us. His first words were (please read in broad Yorkshire) something like, "Now what thee need ther lad ist adjoostable spunner". We had never heard anyone speak like that before and we just rolled up. We never forgot the incident and we still refer to him as 'Adjustable Spanner'.
We now move on to around 1956/7. I was visiting a motorcycling mate of mine who lived out in the Laindon 'plotlands', in an area now covered by Ford Dunton Research Plant. In his garden was this BSA V-twin trike which he said I could have for £20. It looked pretty sound, ali panelled in grey primer, complete with tattered pram hood. I said I would give him twenty five if he could get it started and drive it over to my house in Grays. Two days later he drove it up the backway and I parted with my hard earned. It in fact ran quite well and seemed very sound and it soon became obvious that the body had been fabric covered originally. I decided I would do it up a bit. I don't remember how many months of late nights and weekends it took, but many tins of Brushing Beico cellulose and regular sore and bleeding fingers meant that it was a real eyecatcher. When it came to that sort of job I knew what I was doing, having been well taught by my father who was also a master coachpainter. When it came to upholstering and hood making however, I knew nothing.
I went down to Benson's, then at Hadleigh, and they were great. Told me how to do the fluting and piping etc., and sold me all the ingredients. I went home and set about the job on Mum's ancient Singer, and very slowly produced a narrow fluted and padded red vinyl seat and backrest, a double duck hood and all the trim. The Singer never recovered and mother never forgave me. In the end it looked great, the bodywork in Beico Ming Blue, the wings and hood in black with the wheels and upholstery in dark red.
Forty years on and the memory is weak, but I don't think I had to do much to it mechanically to get it on the road except sort out the exhaust. In a local side street there was a shop that sold cheap batteries and silencers. The silencers all had multi-diameter inlets and outlets that you cut back to the size you needed - a great idea. I fitted a long straight through version and a copper tailpipe, it sounded great and I have been a V-twin enthusiast ever since.
I have omitted to mention that it was a 1931 model, registration number VL 3509, and I think it must have been the basic model as it had no speedo and not even the lugs for shock absorbers. I think it may have had a speedo head in the dash but no cable or drive unit. I paid a visit to that wonderful emporium, the Pride & clark secondhand spares counter in, was it, Stockwell Road. I came away with a 'new' cap for the front of the gearbox, complete with speedo drive and cable. That little spares counter at Pride and Clark never let me down, you just told them what you wanted and they went and got you one.
By this time I was using the BSA regularly along with whichever motorcycle I had at the time. The carburettor however was clapped out, lousy tickover and massive flat spots. No amount of bushing, shimming and bodging would effect a cure. At this time I was an apprentice at Rotary Hoes, and they used 600cc JAP engines and two or three versions of their own vertical twin engines on the excellent Howard Gem Rotovator. I borrowed I think three different carbs at different times, including the petrol/TVO one, and they all worked up to a point but they all went back. Finally I did the obvious, I looked up Solex's address in London, got on the bike and eventually walked into their showroom and plonked down my old carb in part exchange for a new one straight off the shelf. If only I could do that today. With the new carb it was transformed and I used it for quite long trips, never doubting its reliability. At one point I used to take a nurse girlfriend back to her West London hospital on a Sunday night, a seventy mile round trip.
It was all a long time ago, but I can only at the moment think of two other things that concerned me, one of which I cured and the other I started on but which I know now I had incorrectly diagnosed in the first place. The first concerned over-exuberant cornering. We all know what happens once the inside front wheel loses contact with the ground, it can take an awful lot of the wrong side of the road to get things sorted out again, if you are lucky, that is. As I wrote earlier, mine had no friction dampers on the front, nor any lugs to fit them to. At this point I will backtrack a few years.
In the late Forties my father had bought a 1935 Jowett Kestrel, a long narrow 7hp car which carted the seven of us all over the south east of England for many years. Naturally the dampers were shot and replacements unobtainable initially, but something had to be done. All sorts of bodges were tried, including fitting a pair of telescopic dampers vertically on the front. We had removed these from the back of an early Volkswagen Beetle in a scrap yard near Gallows Corner, Romford. Eventually the correct Armstrongs became available again and the telescopic dampers went on the shelf in the garage, until, that is, I decided to fit them to the trike.
Easy really; fit the bottom end to an extended through bolt on the lower outer front spring and fit the top end to a plate adjacent to the inner end of the upper spring. The dampers must have been lying at about 20 degrees to the horizontal but worked very well. They improved comfort, producing just a little damping effect but almost totally removing body roll and greatly improving cornering. They were still on when I sold it.
The other problem I had was that every couple of weeks or so the exhaust tappets had to be readjusted. I could never make out why I did not run out of adjustment. Anyway, I in my ignorance decided that the rocker gear needed lubrication and that I would feed some oil up there. Just how I was going to achieve this I cannot remember, but it probably involved taking a feed from the vicinity of the pressure relief valve. The first thing I did was take a another trip to the Pride and Clark secondhand spares department and buy two inlet rocker boxes and fit them in place of the cutaway exhaust ones. I had no idea why the exhaust boxes were cut away, I just assumed it was so that they cleared the bonnet. In 1959 this was not a problem (now close your eyes before you read this next bit), I cut a hole in each side of the bonnet. The job never got done. I had had six years of deferment from National Service and the Queen refused point blank to give me the extra couple of years I needed. To me it was the end of the world. Around August 1959 I sold the trike locally, together with my Avon fared Dommie 88 and a 1939 Ford Prefect Tickford Drophead Coupe (except that if you did drop the head both doors flew open every time the brakes were applied). That was that, an end to an episode of life.
A year later the Queen decided I was the world's worst Air Wireless Fitter, so she sent me to the West Country and gave me a boat without a radio; close to the best thing that ever happened to me. It was seven years before I returned to Grays where my brother, a friend and I started a small business. Many moons later,' probably in the early seventies, the shop door bell dinged and in walked the instantly recognisable and never to be forgotten 'Adjustable Spanner'. I forget now what he had come to hire, probably a Kango or a hub puller, but it was not until I wrote out the hire contract that I found out his real name. It was of course the irrepressible Geoff High. Subsequently of course I found out he was (sorry, is) restoring a Scout and that he was a member of the Club. I had always regretted selling my trike and naturally asked Geoff if there was any trace of it within the Club. The answer was negative, as had been earlier enquiries I had made through friends with access to the DVLC records. All I knew of its subsequent history was that whilst I was enjoying my sojourn in the west it had at some point belonged to a chap called George in Chadwell St Mary, a boyfriend of one of my sisters.
As I said before, I've always loved V-twins, and although I had been riding a V-twin motorcycle since 1970 I still fancied another BSA trike. About five years ago I bought the disreputable old dog that resides under my lean-to. A couple of years ago I had brought it in to work and on the way home stopped in a back lane to buy some fruit off a roadside stall. In no time at all, a chap who had been leaning on the gate of the cottage next door had come over and uttered those near immortal words, "I used to have one like that". "So did I", says I, "Back in the fifties". It turned out that he had lived in Laindon at the time and had sold it when his first born came along. I told him that I had bought mine from a friend who had lived just over the hill from Laindon and how it had once had a fabric body which had been reskinned in ali and painted grey. "That wasn't grey paint" says he, "I used to work in the print and they were Daily Telegraph printing plates." He had owned VL 3509 before my mate Alan and I. And that, if you are still with me, is the end of my story - well, almost.
You may remember that this rambling epistle was triggered by the arrival of the Register last month. What caught my eye whilst casually flipping through it was my name at the top of page 314 as a previous owner of VL 3507, 'in 1950s' it says. So, who says, Mr Editor? Does the current owner have evidence that 3507 once belonged to a J Lee, or are there two J Lees who each owned a BSA trike in the fifties? I don't think so. As the enclosed photo clearly shows, mine was VL 3509, but it was almost certainly me who wrote the plate. Has Mr L Steltner got the wrong number on his car, or is it all down to a misprint in the Register? I dearly hope that they are one and the same car, in which case I would very much like to see it again. However, I think it more likely that they are two different cars registered and sold by the same dealer at about the same time.
As I said at the beginning, I could probably have sorted this out in one evening by picking up the telephone, but Mr Editor was pleading for copy. I hope he thinks it was worth it, and I will now sit back and await your comments.
John Lee
  
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