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| Shown
here as it arrived, in a sad and sorry state
of utter dereliction, with a beautiful all-alloy TR5 engine that told
a terrible tale of woe. A total rebuild was required, even the cylinder liners had been mismatched to the cylinder barrels, causing serious warping of the cylinder head. They were removed and re- machined in-house, and the head skimmed to reinstate the flatness. |
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New main
bearings, big-end shells, and a reground crankshaft were also fitted. The valve guides were all renewed, one of them having disintegrated up as far as the base of the valve-spring and causing much damage to both the piston and the cylinder head in the process. The camshafts were T.100 race-kit items, and the engine photos show part of the process of setting up the valve timing on the bench. |
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And
after our complete restoration of this bike, it has been transformed
into this; a fine example of a mid-1950s Californian Desert Racer that
looks , sounds,and performs as it should do. Many hand-built components were used in the construction of this machine, in order to attain the required aspect of compact tidiness essential for its styling , from mudguard stays, rear seat-loop, oil-tank mounting platform and seat mounts, all were fabricated in-house using traditional benchwork and bronze-welding methods. |
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The
aluminium front race-plate is rubber-mounted onto the head-yokes via
fabricated, bronze-welded bracketry. The high-level straight-through exhausts have been lightly muted in order to reduce the noise level below the pain threshhold , but still emit a thunderous rasp of truly epic proportions. The riding experience is anything but banal and anodyne;it is an awesome and primaeval thing indeed, a counterblast to the creeping Lilliputianism of our times...... Wind that throttle on ! |
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