Category: Stories

Brooklands day!!

LOTS of Velocettes at Brooklands… For those of you a little too far away to catch the ‘action’ at Brookands, whether at ‘home’ or abroad, here are a few pictures of the event. The pictures speak for themselves for the most part and will require little extraneous comment! The weather was beautiful spring-time stuff, with…


Saved rigid MSS from Australia

   The the old year is gone … and can be done and dusted. A strange mix for me, towards the end more and more challenging. The time of year when I should be doing my own bike and helping others do theirs, ‘God willing’, has left me with a logistically difficult re-location which has…


Visit to Wayne… and a grumble

Space-Poor play-room… Well, I’ve been here in the UK 5 weeks now and not all has gone smoothly, not least of all the merry-go-round with the banks/licenses/ID etc. Since I have been out of the country since 1981 (!), there have been a few changes to things like Anti-Terrorism- and Anti-Money-Laundering-Legislation and -Requirements which have…


Rigid Velocette gearbox ‘field-strip’

Promises, promises… I had promised that I would describe a quick ‘field-strip’ of a gearbox, in this case the one on the GTP, which is similar to all other pre-swingarm models. Actually the swingarm models are very similar and only differ in detail from this procedure. First to come off are the footrest and gear-change…


A Leica-ly Story!

I may have mentioned it before, but if I am going to take a sixty-year-old motorcycle on a tour and take photographs along the way, you can bet that I won’t be using a digital @#%$&** camera! So, I got me (excuse the language) a worthy camera built at around the same period as the…


8″ Miller HID-Conversion

Ever wondered what the world looked like at night beyond the yellow glare of the street-lamps? Now’s the time to find out and even for the let’s-keep-everything-original (well, original looking, anyway) buffs, here is a low-profile change that could save your life or someone that you love (no-one else gets to ride the bike, rest…


Paint Preparation

Today has seen much go on in the workshop. but not much that I can actually document, well… not pictorially, anyway! AS time goes on, I suppose I could try out my video-skills and show how I was doing something AS I am doing it…will have to give that a go! I started off doing…


Looking for a Project Object

Well, things are sort of moving, but not necessarily in the direction that I had originally thought or ‘planned’! It COULD be, that the first bike to be restored will still be a Velocette, but a much later model than planned: I spotted the bike pictured above on the ‘net’ for sale in goode olde…


Bike Pick Up and the Way Home

When I was finished setting it up, by which time it was getting dark, we set off into the void. About half an hour into the trip home the clutch-cable popped its nipple in such a way that the spare screw-on job I always had with me wouldn’t help, (just as it was beginning to…


1956 Matchless G80S

Ah yes, the one and only Matchless I ever owned. I believe that this was bought in 1981; four international moves, a divorce and a number of other life-changing events have made it impossible to keep all my paperwork and photos intact, unfortunately…I picked this one up in London for the aforementioned sum (£800) and…