Preparing Road-Race Motorcycles for Bathurst in 1977
Road Tales By Kelly Ashton
IN the early 1970s, me and my mate Clayton were two young blokes who worked simply to keep our motorbikes in chrome and paint. I owned an AJS 500 single and was apprenticed in the Graphic Arts industry, which is just a nice way of saying ‘slave labourer’. Clay rode a 500 BSA single and was an apprentice Aircraft Ground Engineer for Qantas, so he had the better job, with a slightly less embarrassing pay rate.
Apart from the beers on Friday and Saturday night, and the 55-cents-a-day for work (5 cents bridge toll, 15 cents for morning tea’s buttered finger bun and 35 cents for lunch’s ham and salad roll) plus a massive $2 a week petrol money, the rest of my measly pay was poured into the motorbike.
Naturally, that money was never enough, so apart from our day jobs, we found ourselves scamming weekend work in all weird situations, from labouring (Yuk!) to the best bang-for-buck job, hand inserting the colour supplement in the Sunday Mirror in an era when machines were still too dumb to do it—although looking at today’s Sunday papers, I’d guess they still do it by hand. It was pay-dirt for me, worth three full weeks wages in one long Saturday night. It was such a lurk, but you had to be a member of the Printing and Kindred Industries Union to do it. As an apprentice, I wasn’t allowed to join, and Clay was way off track being in an industry that wasn’t kindred at all. In fact, the handful of young and dumb people who did the bulk of the work would often ask why the bulk of the workers seemed to be bludging and drinking beers. “Have you got your Union Card with you?” would be the standard question to shut us right up and put us all back to work.
There was also one temp job I did, working in a bike shop, which was really good, and the way I got the job was even better.
Apart from my Ajay, I was building up a bike to race, a NorBSA: BSA B33 cast-iron single in a Norton Featherbed frame. I’d pulled the wheels apart, had them re-chromed, painted and rebuilt, had the tank painted and lined, and by this time, I figured it was time get into the motor and change it from a hollow shell for the build-up, to a fire-breathing powerhouse.
I took some advice from my mate Clayton. He was a total BSA nut and his Beeza was actually a genuine 1955 BSA B34 Gold Star which he’d paid $400 for, but it was missing its all-important, all-alloy Goldie motor. In its place was fitted a more pedestrian B33 engine, with its less racy cast-iron cylinder head and barrel. His quest at the time was simply to obtain the correct alloy motor, and his collection of ‘nearly there’ Goldie motors and parts was growing, with early Goldie motors from the 1940s, 500 cc heads, 350 cc barrels, correct bare crankcase and more. But he gave me some good insider information, informing me that there was a Hagon BSA Slider Short Circuit racer down at John Dunn Motorcycles in Manly Vale, and I could buy it for $175.
“Yank the red-hot B33 motor from the Slider and stick it straight into your NorBSA,” he said. “It will end up cheaper than getting hot cams and a balance job and big valves and a high-compression piston.”
Now, this was early in 1977 and I was fresh out of hospital from a nasty head-on smash on my AJS. Of course, all head-on smashes are nasty, there just ain’t no nice ones. I think when I went onto sickness benefits, it was like a pay rise compared to the slave labour apprenticeship wages I was receiving before that. So not only was I rebuilding a completely stuffed Ajay, but a NorBSA as well, all the time doing it with a totally stuffed leg in full plaster. I’d done a real number on my right leg, femur, fib, tib, blah, blah, blah, and was fitted with a modern-as-tomorrow plaster cast complete with a pair of fibreglass rods to act as a hinge for a tiny bit of knee movement.
There I was, standing in the showroom of John Dunn Motorcycles, talking to a smiling John Dunn and handing over $75 deposit on the Hagon/Beeza Slider.
“I’ll be back in a week with the other hundred bucks to pick it up…” I started to say, when John butted in: “One hundred bucks? he yelped. “Try two hundred, it’s TWO hundred and seventy five dollars for the Hagon!”
“But Clayton told me $175,” I bleated.
“No, that was the price to Clayton, because he’s a Manly Vale local, and he’s been coming into my shop and drooling all over the bikes since he was 11-years-old, and he really loves BSAs,” he added.
I must have adopted the correct gutted look on my dismayed face, and my shoulders must have slumped to exactly the right level. Maybe it was the glisten of a tear in my one good eye, but John Dunn, master motorbike salesman, looked at me and said, “Yeah, orright, you can have it for $175, and you can give me the other hundred bucks in a week, yeah?”
He must’ve been eager to offload it, as he asked if it could live at my place from right now, rather than clutter up the showroom, and good old Dunny even delivered it to my shed right there and then.
The next day, Clay was helping me start it, and then doing the test ride, as my leg was not quite Hagon Slider-ready, what with the full length plaster and all. Obviously, it would be too unsafe for the road with its rudimentary brakes and rubber-band forks and dirt track tyres, so Clay elected to test ride it up and down the new concrete footpath outside my oldies’ house.
Clay was an excellent rider, but not into all those fancy capers like wheel-stands and burnouts and stuff like that. I was mightily impressed when he lined up on the narrow white band of fresh concrete, hunched over the handlebars and gated beautifully in a style which would’ve put him at the first corner of a dirt track in first place. The evil beast reared up and propped the front wheel about a foot above the deck, leaving a huge black streak of rubber behind for about 20 feet; that strip of black stopped for a short distance for the change into second, then started up again once second was hooked and the front wheel clawed the air again. Yeah, house numbers 87, 89, 91 and right through to about 109 got full benefit of a bellowing Hagon Beeza as Clay flashed past the front gates of their residences rather than risk it on the main road. To this day, I can never work out why my parents’ neighbours hated me so much.
Naturally, no time was wasted installing the fire-breather in place of the plodder road engine and the NorBSA was starting to look like something.
It took about a week to install and it was during that same week that I realised that one week was really not enough time to find 100 smackeroosters to pay of the final down payment.
I lobbed at John Dunn Motorcycles and fronted the boss. “I’m a little bit financially fatigued, at the minute, John,” I said in my most sincere voice. “And I don’t think I’ll be able to find that hunnert bucks for months from now.”
“Ye-s-s-s-s-s, and?” he asked with one eyebrow arching in a most intimidating manner.
“Well,’ I began. “I was thinking maybe I could work here for a while, you know, sweep some floors, clean and polish the new bikes on the floor, rake the gravel out the front until you think the debt is paid off…”
“Hmmmm,” he said, but it was a bad-sounding Hmmmmm, and proving my judgement correct, he finally said, “No, I don’t think so.”
At that instant, fate stepped in and I asked a dumb question which got me a job.
Peering into the workshop, I’d noticed a 650 pre-unit Triumph motor bolted up in the engine stand in the vise. “Is that motor from a double-engined Trumpy drag bike?” I asked innocently enough.
“No, but why do you ask?” John replied cautiously.
“It’s just that the cylinder head is bolted on backwards,” was my honest answer.
In truth, an eight-stud pre-unit motor’s cylinder head will bolt straight on back-to-front with no modifications apart from swapping inlet and exhaust cams and retiming. All pushrods, pushrod tubes and manifolds fit straight on and some people thought maybe it would be ‘something different’ to have their custom Trumpy’s zorst pipes shoot straight out the back while the bell-mouths of the carbs pointed forward in the mistaken belief that ‘ram air charging’ would give a power boost. Technically, it should, but the biggest difference shows up when the ram-charged Trumpy is held flat open and the 100-mile-per-hour breeze tends to keep the throttle slides fully open even after the twist grip is wound back to ‘stop, please’. Yee hah for dopey modifications. Of course, on supercharged, double-engined drag bikes, reversing the rear donk’s head and having all the inlet ports close together can really simplify the blower plumbing.
John’s reply took a little time, but finally, he muttered, “No, it’s not from a double-engined dragster, but from that Rickmann Metisse over there and some dufus bolted it on the wrong way around,” he added sheepishly. “Well spotted, though… I think I’ve just found a job for you…”
So there I was, propped up on a barstool with my plastered leg out to one side removing and replacing an eight stud head on a pre-unit Trumpy motor. It was a real shame, as the tappets were set perfectly to what the factory manual states: two-thou clearance on the inlet tappets and four-thou on the exhausts. But it was also good as no-one who races with big cams ever puts just two- and four-thou tappet clearance on a motor about to be thrashed. Gasket settle will close those figures up to nothing after a few laps of practice.
A few hours later, with the motor bolted into the very early Rickman Metisse chassis, John was kicking it in the guts and giving it a flogging, popping monos up and down the concrete footpath next to the busy Condamine Street Manly Vale. Jeez, we were all dangerous arseholes in those days, and to think I get a bit indignant these days whenever I see some kid roaring through my suburb on an unregistered chook-chaser.
The next day, John Dunn Motorcycles’ newest employee was doing a full tune-up and service on a K1 Honda Four, which was good, considering I’d never even sat on a Honda Four at that stage. Then, I’d crack open the crates and assemble and pre-deliver some brand-new Jap bikes and do all sorts of really neat bike-shoppy type stuff.
In a lot less than a week, John sidled up and said, “Debt paid, the Slider’s yours and good work, thanks.”
I was pretty chuffed at that, but then John said, “Listen, buddy, it’s less than two weeks to Bathurst, and I need a real hand getting ready, would you be interested in working for money?”
Totally blown away, “Shit yeah!” was all I could say.
John was a handy B-grader road-racer at that time and in a week-and-a-half, he was going to tackle the Mountain at Bathurst in Easter, 1977. At his disposal were a TZ250 Yamaha, a TZ350, a psychopathic hoodlum of a motorbike, the mighty TZ750D, and even a Ducati 900SS; and he asked me to race-prep them all for him!
“Gulp!” I said and then gulped again. “Some of these bikes will be pulling 170-miles-per-freakin’-hour down Conrod Straight, and you want me, with my one good eye, my one bad leg and no commonsense at all, to race-prep them? Are you insane?”
“Naww, she’ll be apples,” he said. “You just do the grunt work, use your obvious good eye for detail, and I’ll check everything has been done right just before I leave for Bathurst.”
The next days saw me thoroughly cleaning and changing the gearing on three TZs, plus fork oil and springs, cleaning fuel filters, checking wheel balance, and the fact that everything was pointing to where it should’ve pointed. It sure was nice delving into the brand-new spares kits for the racers, and using lock-wire pliers for the first time and knowing that was my next purchase, but I couldn’t get over the fact that someone trusted me enough to do it, whereas if it had’ve been my decision, I wouldn’t have let me anywhere near those bikes.
Fettling the big Ducati was a cool thing, and even a bit more involved that the Yams. It was owned by a customer who had insisted John ride it in the Production Machine race. The Duke was a 1977 model, and if you know your Super Sports Ducatis, you’ll know this one was the de-knackered model to keep the Yanks happy. Don’t get me wrong, the 1977 900SS is a fine machine, but not a patch on the earlier Green Frame 750SS or the 750SS and 900SS from 1975/6. Yeah, Ducati had bowed to political pressure and the beautiful and shapely fibreglass tank was replaced by a dowdy steel version, the orgasm-inducing Conti megaphones had been silenced by ugly Lafranconi mufflers, and worst of all, the big, open bell-mouth, 40-mm Dell’Orto pumper carbs were replace by wheezing 36-mm carbs further strangled by air-cleaners. Criminal, I tells ya! Naturally, the brake pads and tyres were changed for something a little bit more racy, the gearing made taller, the Conti pipes fitted, and the 40-mm carbs with big, open bell-mouths made it onto the motor. All it needed was a fibreglass tank and it would’ve been a great bike again.
By Wednesday before Bathurst, four race-ready and preened machines were lined up in a neat row, and I was standing back, propped up on aluminium crutches, admiring my handiwork and wobbling my head in a most conceited manner.
As it turned out, John elected not to ride the TZ750; it had come down on loan from Norm Fraser Motorcycles in Newcastle, and was passed onto another racer, but luckily, the other three race bikes all performed well and came back in one piece, with no major dramas. Phew! And apart from the great experience, I had some Bugs Bunny in the old skyrocket, which was rapidly spent on the AJS and NorBSA. Some things change, and other things never change.
Road Tales by Kelly Ashton
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