Eric's Online Diary: Kick starting the past

I know this is supposed to be a diary (and therefore current) but back in 2010, I went to a riding day in Arborfield near Reading with the Vintage Motorcycle Club. This is an adaptation of an article I wrote for PA Motoring. Tom (my son) came along and took the pictures. It was a very wet day!

Riding vintage bikes is a shock to the system for anyone used to modern machinery. My expectations were lowered by the fact I'd ridden 1960s British bikes, but it's amazining how things have come on and, yet, in other ways, a bike is a bike ...

My BMW GS has twin, 320mm ventilated front disc brakes with electronic ABS and power assistance. A finger on the lever is all you needed to trigger massive stopping power, yet the machine I’m sitting on at the start of the riding day has rubber brake blocks rubbing on the wheel rim. They are operated by rod and lever like the brakes on my first bicycle and ABS is meaningless – the chances of me locking the front wheel are not high.

That’s just one difference between a motorcycle made in 1914 and one built more than 90 years later. The Vintage Motor Cycle Club holds a number of riding events where members bring along their cherished machines and let soft modern bikers like me ride them. This one's at Arborfield army base, near Reading, which is quite interesting as Margaret's youngest brother Norman was based here for basic training when he joined the army.

The events are important for the VMCC – there are around three a year – and they help to attract new blood to the club, younger bikers who might be tempted off their Yamahas and Hondas and onto an Ariel or an AJS. It's important that people stay interested in old bikes in order to keep them running and get them out on the road, even if it's just for a few days every year.

Some of the bikes at the day are worth big bucks, like the 1933 Brough Superior owned by Hugh Buttle from Malmsbury, Wilts. He says it’s valued around £35,000 (but I think he was being a little shy - they’ve gone for much more than that at auction recently) and those high prices, while good news for collectors, are not so welcome for enthusiasts like Hugh and VMCC official Vic Blake.

The Brough Superior club has had to take pretty drastic action and now operates a loan bike scheme for members who can’t afford one of their own. Vic agrees that many bikes are too expensive and out of reach of enthusiasts. “There are some crazy prices, but it is still possible to pick up a nice machine for around £4,000. That’s what we hope people here will do.”

Some of the bikes are absolutely pristine restoration projects, like the 1914 Wolf with the block brakes, and others look their age – all 80 years and more.

1912 Wolf - made in Wolverhampton

All of them are absolutely fascinating pieces of engineering – two strokes with hand-pumped oil injection, four-stroke singles with exposed valve gear, girder forks, hand gear-change, lever throttle, advance and retard levers, chokes, ticklers, valve-lifters and kick starts.

I chose one of the less shiny ones for my first taste of vintage riding. It was a 1927 Sunbeam and my first job is to kick-start it. My BMW starts at the push of a button and I’m a bit put out if it doesn’t fire immediately. It’s very convenient, but there’s no skill required, no artistry.

Now I’m being introduced to ignition retard and valve lifters and working out where the piston is. Actually, it’s not that hard – on the compression stroke you could jump up and down on the kick start and not shift it. Get to that point; use the valve lifter to ease the piston past top dead centre and give it a good kick. Like my BMW, it starts first time.

A lever throttle is a new experience to me, as is the hand-operated gear change (to say nothing of the foot brake being on the left-hand side). After a few scary moments when I moved the lever throttle the wrong way, things settle into a logical pattern. I wouldn’t want to ride this bike through central London, but pottering around the countryside would be rather pleasant on a warm Sunday.

Having delivered the Sunbeam back intact, I wound the clock back 13 years to try that Wolf. This machine, although almost 100 years old, has seen little use. It was bought in 1914 and its owner was killed in the First World War after riding it for just a couple of months. When he went to war, he stored it in a cellar and it was forgotten, bricked up, the house demolished and the cellar and bike covered with tarmac for a car park. It was uncovered after almost 90 years only when the site was being redeveloped.

Top box and panniers 1912 style - this is the Wolf

No ABS on these Wolf brakes

Wolf motorcycles were made in Wolverhampton and like many motorcycle factories, its bread and butter was making bicycles. That’s pretty obvious looking at the frame and brakes, but power comes from a hefty two-stroke engine and belt drive.

It was incredibly smooth. Not fast, but fast isn’t a word you want to hear with these brakes. It’s an amazing piece of engineering and craftwork (there’s a beautiful woven basket on the back) and it’s been game enough to finish the last four London to Brighton runs.

One thing these bikes do is touch the past in a manner that it’s impossible in other ways. When I got my first motorbike in 1969, my grandfather told me about his belt-drive Triumph. I'd never heard of a belt-driven motorcycle and when Grand-dad said it was leather, I thought he was going gaga. He said he'd ridden it to Liverpool and it had been raining and every time he came to a hill the belt was slipping so much he had to get off and push it. Now here I am riding a very similar machine (sorry for doubting your memory Grand-dad); and here's the thing, by getting onto a 1914 Wolf I'm able to have much the same experience my grandfather had when he was a young man. He'd have been about the same age as the chap who bought the Wolf and was killed in the First World War. My grandfather was medically unfit due to high blood pressure - a potentially fatal condition which probably saved his life.

The last bike I rode was the R1 of its day. The Sunbeam Model 9 just about cleaned up in 1929. It won the Isle of Man TT setting a lap record of 74mph; won the French, German, Austrian and Hungarian GPs, the Italian TT and set a lap record of 94mph in the GP of nations at Monza. If Valentino Rossi had been around in 1929, this is what he’d have been riding.

The Sunbeam is a 500cc single that’s much more like modern bikes in that it has a twistgrip throttle and fuel tank that sits between your knees unlike the flat tanks slung under the frame of older machines. It still has a hand change and only three gears. But it sounds superb and pulls like a tractor.

:: Vintage motorcycles are those made between 1915 and 1930; bikes made up to 1914 are veterans and those made between 1930 and 1945 are post-vintage. After 1945, it’s less formal and all kinds of bikes are called classics. The VMCC is very relaxed about more “modern” machines – anything over 25 years old can join in their rallies and events.

:: The Vintage Motor Cycle Club has 16,500 members and you don’t need to own a vintage motorcycle, or any motorcycle come to that, to be a member. More details on www.vmcc.net

:: A Brough Superior SS100 was sold by Bonhams for £158,000 in April 2010. Alternatively, eBay has listed a 1927 Triumph Model W for £4,650 and a 1939 BSA M20 for £3,999 in the same month.