The Old Guy On The Matchless Motorbike

I’VE had my fair share of heroes over the years. People like Mike Hailwood and John Cooper, two Englishmen who raced motorbikes firstly because it was fun, secondly to earn money. Americans like Cal Rayborn, Mert Lawwill and even Steve McQueen were blokes who loved their motorbikes and racing. Ron Toombs and Wayne Gardner were two of my Aussie bike racing heroes, but the bloke who had the biggest influence in my life was a weird old dude named Rod MacCallum.

Rod was reasonably well known around the Northern Beaches of Sydney as ‘The Old Guy On The Matcho’.

I first met The Old Guy in about 1970. I was 15-years-old and hitchhiking up Allambie Road to school when this crazy old coot on a decrepit old Matchless, 500 cc, single-cylinder motorbike picked me up and deposited me outside the school gate. Of course, I thought it was a pretty darn cool arrival for a young bloke, but naturally, no bastard noticed — dopey pricks.

This was in the days before the helmet laws and other sensible shit, so hitching lifts on motorbikes was as commonplace as cars. And I’d seen this old fella before — he’d picked me up hitching in his car as well, a Peugeot 203 fitted with a Holden six-cylinder motor which he drove even faster than he rode his bike.

Old Rod sure was a weird old dude, but very interesting and so clued up and skilful, imparting so much knowledge to me and quite a few mates. Looking back, we were all thick as shit in the neck of a bottle and twice as nasty, but just a few years after I first met him, I had my learner’s permit and a 1950 AJS 500 single and I reckon I wouldn’t have gotten too far with that Ajay without Old Rod’s guidance.

See, for my mates and me, old British bikes were just the coolest things about. I mean, the look, the sound — the pure class! And Old Rod’s Matcho was definite class — a rat bike four decades before they became popular. It looked different to any other Matchless single, apart from the fact that it looked like it was hand-painted in a sandstorm. Whatever wasn’t gritty black was rust-coloured. But looks aside, this bike really went well, handled and stopped better than most old bikes.

Old Rod was a Depression Kid, which I’m sure means something else today, but anyone who grew up between the two World Wars knew what real hardship was. Let’s just say they knew the value of money and didn’t let anything go to waste. My Dad was of the same era, although his plight growing up in Bondi was better than most, as Granddad was one of the few blokes fully employed throughout the whole of the Depression years. Mind you, Dad reckons he used to stash his shoes and socks in the park on the way to Waverley Public School so he could be barefoot like most of the other kids.

For Depression Kids, waste was a sin and a crime, and Old Rod never changed his thrifty ways, sometimes to the point of ridicule. But jeez, he was clever; when it came to making do with what you had or could get for free, he was a crafty old bugger!

It’s only now that I fully realise just how much I learnt from Old Rod. Back then, I appreciated the guidance, but gee whiz, Rod’s thriftiness could be mistaken for downright stingy stupidity. He was a genius welder, but such a tight-arse, he’d unwind coathangers and weld up the not-so-important shit with some of the world’s crappiest, most impure steel. While I’m prepared to admit I’d never seen one of his coathanger wire welds fail, I always made a point of ducking down to CIG to buy a packet of real welding wire whenever he was doing stuff on my bikes.

Old Rod taught me and many other neighbourhood budding bikers so much about working on old bikes; his cluttered backyard was more like a tech college classroom. Everything was rule-of-thumb and hands-on; the textbooks could always be dragged out, but rarely were.

It was so good learning about checking and altering compression ratios, building spoked wheels and setting up cam timing. Honestly, when you have a couple of hundred different ways a pair of cams can be installed in an AJS single engine and only two or three ways could possibly result in a running engine, it’s handy to know that an old bloke can teach a young dufus the basics of four-stroke cam opening and closing theory in a few minutes. Especially when your camshafts are home-ground racing cams made by Aussie tuning legend Sid Willis and the original factory timing marks have long since lost their relevance.

The Old Guy on the Matcho taught me many, many things, from how to make stuff that’s light enough and strong enough to do the job, but not so strong that it puts stress on and breaks other components; how every modification you make on a motorbike has some sort of effect on every other component; how everything is a compromise; what works fine on the racetrack may not work at all on the road. He taught me about frame design and steering geometry, things like the correct profile for strengthening gussets and why it’s the correct profile. He was a fantastic teacher and he even taught me the basics of welding. I’d like to say I could weld, but the statement would be too much like saying Asians can drive.

Everything he did was done as cheaply as possible. For instance, when he convinced me to start road-racing on my AJS, he’d decided it was also time for his stepson Demon’s racing debut and his own long-awaited return to the track. He’d organise the racing plates and numbers for the three bikes. Of course, that didn’t involve hitting the local bike shop for nine plastic race plates (three plates each for the three bikes) and a shipload of race numbers, oh no — too expensive and too easy. No, we all sat down and with a fret saw cut out three ovals from an old sheet of Masonite he’d had as a lining board on one of his sheds. Then we painted those god-forsaken Masonite ovals with yellow paint then used one of just three templates he made for the numerals 5, 0 and 1, cutting out an amount of numerals on black adhesive vinyl. Old Rod was racing number 515 Demon was 500 and I was 505.

“Why do we have race numbers in the 500s?” I asked, innocently enough.

“When you get to an interstate racetrack and find one of the locals races under the same number as yours, guess who has to change?” was his reply. “Trust me — no one else will have 505, and I covered three race numbers with just three stencil templates.”

I would’ve just gone down the local bike shop, but there you go.

Rod’s strangely sensible and sensibly strange ideas were everywhere. He had a special, own-design towing hitch on his car and trailer, one you’ll never see anywhere else. It was explained that, “Not only do I never have to tow anyone else’s trailer, but no-one can borrow mine, and as you all know, a loaned trailer will always be returned with a destroyed wiring plug.”

And on the homemade three-bike trailer, the frame was a lightweight steel-tubing structure, its suspension set-up an ingenious home-made Silentbloc (rubber in torsion) consisting of a 4 X 4-inch wooden post for an axle, with rubber wrapped around each end, and clamped around the rubber were U-bolts attached to the fork sliders, front wheels and mudguards from two early 1950s Triumph Thunderbirds front-ends set up in a swingarm-in-torsion fashion. With Klip-Lok roofing sections as wheel tracks, it meant for a light trailer.

But the cleverest thing about that trailer was the single 3/8” UNF nut welded to a raised plate dead centre of the trailer. When Old Rod would load his tiny race car on, it would bump into position, he’d sit in the car, then drop the appropriate bolt down through a plate in the race car’s floor, he’d tighten it down, preloading the car’s suspension and holding that sucker tighter than any straps could.

That race car was a stroke of genius, too; with Goggomobil wheels and brakes, a monocoque tubular steel chassis, a three-ply wooden floor you had to be careful of stepping on, and an aluminium body made from lithographic printing plate (not much thicker than a coke can), it also was one lightweight sucker. A red-hot Triumph pre-unit motor and Norton gearbox made it lighter and faster than a Honda Four.

When Old Rod started making his TriMat, I asked, “Why do you want to build a race bike with a Triumph engine and gearbox and a Matchless frame?”

The answer was simple: “Well, I’ve got a Trumpy motor and box over there, and a Matchless frame over there…”

Well Duhhh!

And with that, Old Rod started a soft shoe shuffle through the long grass down the back of one of the sheds. When asked what he was doing, he said, “Looking for the engine plates… ah, found it!”

He literally dug out a rusty old piece of checkerplate, dropped on the cardboard templates he’d just cut out and proceeded to grind out some functional Triumph Twin into Matchless Single engine plates. Back then, and to this day, I would’ve simply bought some 8 mm Duralium plate and scammed a quarter-hour on a bandsaw somewhere, but Rod figured it was more character building to spend more than just a few hours hand-filing and dressing rusty checkerplate; he had something that would do the same job for a lot smaller outlay. I went and got him some alloy anyway, and he ended up seeing reason.

Sometimes his tightfistedness bordered on the comical. Mrs Old Rod had sent him away for a few hours, and at a pre-determined time, Skraps, myself and other members of Rod’s family pounced on the backyard and set up the A-frame with a block and tackle attached, directly above the stripped hulk of a shitbox Morris 1100 he’d been promising to remove. We had Skraps’ brother’s ’57 Pontiac just backing the car trailer under the idly swinging 1100 body shell when Old Rod roared up on the Matcho unexpectedly and completely freaked out.

“I haven’t finished getting all the parts I wanted!” he bellowed as he leapt into the still-swinging car body.

“Keep working boys,” Mrs Old Rod urged. “Don’t worry about what he says — that heap goes today”

The second funniest sight I’ve seen in the post-war Housing Commission suburb of North Manly was the sight of Old Rod MacCallum, clutching screwdrivers spanners and pliers, while balancing in a swaying Morris 1100 and removing whatever precious treasures he could. He was still popping out dashboard instrument panel globes as the hulk was being securely strapped to the car trailer before the Ponty rumbled forwards, out of the driveway and into Nyrang Avenue, North Manly.

Of course, that led to the funniest sight I’ve ever witnessed in North Manly — the sight of Old Rod swearing and hurling abuse and cautioning the Ponty driver to stop 100 meters down and around the corner from Rod’s. He cut a very forlorn and pissed off figure as he trudged back with tools and a few valuable dash light globes and stainless steel Phillips head screws in his hand.

I do remember another funny time, up at Bathurst in about 1977. Old Rod had taken his 1937 Royal Enfield 500 up to the Mount, to ride in the Historic Machine Exhibition, as it was called in those days, even though it was really a race.

Old Rod had been making the pilgrimage to Bathurst for years, and that particular year, the Dubbo Boys, who were quite often camped near our campsite, were even rowdier than usual. They’d taken a real shine to Old Rod who was by far the oldest bastard there, even naming him ‘Digger’. They were constantly slapping him on the back and yelling out: “Digger! Digger… D-I-I-I-G-G-G-G-ER!” You know how it is when pissheads get something in their brain that they think is hilarious, so the keep repeating it until it’s not any more. The Dubbo Boys were generally okay, didn’t ride motorbikes but loved a drink and were quite funny to be around. Old Rod took their regular visits and friendly berating in his stride, but the whole time he stood there smiling with his hands behind his back, he was holding a wheel brace from his car, so even if they didn’t know it, the Dubbo Boys were never going to get too rowdy with Rod.

The Old Guy on the Matcho has been dead for quite a few decades now, but jeez, I still miss the old bugger. Taught me a lot of stuff, he did.

Road Tales By Kelly Ashton

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• How Skraps Got Back In The Saddle
• How Shitlegs Got His Name