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Perhaps one of the most striking things about this bike is that we haven’t seen it before. Not, I mean, this particular BSA A10, which many of you may have seen at the NEC Bike Show in November, but that we haven’t – to the best of my knowledge – come across a bike called ‘The Inventor’. With hindsight it seems such a logical and apposite name for a custom bike. After all, virtually every one-off custom build is a process of invention and reinvention. While it may not require the creation of new parts, most projects will require innovative thinking to circumnavigate problems. With a track record of radical bikes – the Beezer being the latest – Vic Jefford could very well justify the title of ‘The Inventor’ himself. And yet the bike’s name has absolutely nothing to do with him. ‘The Inventor’ is the nickname of the BSA’s owner, Chris Rycroft from Leeds, and with good reason. He invents things. Not huge, shiny, flashy things, but things that you can use and for which, one day, you might have cause to be very grateful to Mr Rycroft. The popular image of an inventor is of a slightly demented chap with wild hair and even wilder eyes who rarely emerges from his underground laboratory or converted garden shed. Nothing could be further from the truth in Chris’s case; a tall, dapper, softly-spoken man, he has the air of a manager – which is exactly the job that he’s done over the last thirty years in the building trade, working on site and managing maintenance contracts. That level of experience meant that he frequently encounters certain recurring predicaments, among which are problems in installing or repairing bath and basin taps. As anyone who’s tried to replace or repair a tap will know, this generally involves removing the tap and turning off the water (or, unless you’re not worried about flooding, doing those two actions in the opposite order). The problem is often a broken or corroded washer, so Chris figured that there must be a quicker and easier way to replace a failed washer. He went away and eventually designed a new square ‘top hat’ washer which would not only be stronger and infinitely more durable, but that could be fitted without dismantling half of the plumbing. His Split Klick washer is so clever and yet so simple that even your technophobic correspondent could understand the ingenuity of this little blue hinged Nylon-6 washer which clicks together in a jigsaw-type watertight seal. The top hat washer was followed by a Split-Klick (named after that click-together closure) centralising washer, which makes fitting new taps a breeze – not that I have any intention of doing that job myself. This is probably one of the longest diatribes on domestic plumbing that I can remember in BSH, but firstly it may just be a solution to the leaky tap that’s been annoying you, and secondly, I don’t get to meet many inventors. Especially BSA-riding ones. The story of this build begins some number of years ago. Without giving away his age, Chris has owned this BSA A10 Road Rocket for more years of his life than he hasn’t owned it, and it went through its first transformation quite early on in its existence. In 2001, due to that year’s foot and mouth outbreak, the Farmyard Party was held at the Pickering showground in North Yorkshire. Thanks to a blocked air filter on the Beezer, it took Chris some six hours to make the journey from Leeds (instead of the hour and a half it would normally take). But his mood was somewhat improved by the sight of a white Suzuki GSX-R lowrider, or, more specifically, its radical four-into-four exhaust system. It had been built by one Vic Jefford (and would be featured on the cover of BSH at the beginning of 2002), then still working on a nearby farm, and some four months away from launching Destiny Cycles. However, Chris had never met Vic before, and had no idea to whom the Suzuki belonged, but he was so impressed by its exhausts that he had to find out who was responsible. To ensure that he did, Chris sat down by the bike and waited. And waited. When Vic’s good lady, Lin, returned to the Suzuki and her own green Gixer (on which, if I recall correctly, the exhausts were not fabricated by her old man, but by Nick Parravani at Norfolk-based Competition Fabrications), she was a little startled to find that they appeared to have acquired a stalker. When she and Chris tracked Vic down, Chris explained that he wanted Vic to build him an exhaust system. Introductions were made and details exchanged. Vic expected to duly hear from Chris; what he didn’t expect was that, when he and Lin arrived home from the Farmyard that weekend, they would find a BSA parked behind their house with a note from Chris tucked under the seat. They later found out that his friends had been utterly incredulous that Chris had left the Beezer, his pride and joy, with complete strangers, and complete strangers who weren’t at home, come to that. Fortunately, he’d picked the right person to trust. Vic constructed a new exhaust system with which Chris was suitably impressed, although he had no idea that, almost exactly a year later, it would more than prove its worth in a most unexpected way. In 2002, Chris was back at the Farmyard Party, and rather surprised to find his BSA had won a prize in the custom show. Surprised because he hadn’t actually entered it, and, as far as he knew, the bike was outside his tent on the camp site. Only it wasn’t. Feeling it should worthy of a place in the show, one Mr VB Jefford had purloined it and moved it to the show arena... Perhaps I should explain that, even at this point, the BSA was far from stock. Back then, the 650 twin was housed in a high necked rigid frame and featured a prism tank, angular oil tank and a set of Cycle Haven girder forks. The tanks were painted an extremely purple shade of purple, with matching purple handgrips. It was very much of its time. Anyway, there was Chris, on his way home from the Farmyard with his unexpected but much-appreciated prize, a man happy with his lot. Until he hit a pothole. It was one of those comedic moments that are immensely entertaining when they happen to someone else, but pretty rubbish when you’re on the receiving end. As the front end of the BSA descended into the hole in the road, the headstock split, the forks and front wheel bid a rapid farewell to the rest of the bike, which went in one direction, the front end in another. The rest of the chop lurched downwards, leaving Chris sitting upright and steering the bike with his hands on the tank, much to the bemusement of a lady gardener whose house he passed while still travelling on his BSA monocycle at considerable speed. When he managed to bring the chop – well, really half-a-chop by now – to a halt, he was surprised that it, and he, were both still upright. He quickly realised that the reason for this was the new exhaust system. Although now rather scuffed and dented, Vic Jefford’s sturdy pipework had acted as a set of skis, stopping the bike from lurching over and sustaining considerably more damage to both machine and rider. However, when he took the bike back to Vic, he found that, in there in the Destiny Cycles small print was a clause invalidating the exhaust system’s lifetime warranty ‘if used for purposes of inappropriate sledging or tobogganning’. Honest. Needing a new set of pipes, Chris figured that there were one or two other jobs he might as well undertake (including putting the frame back together). But then, having begun the torturous and lengthy process of patenting and then marketing his Split-Klick washer, the bike was put to one side. A couple of years later, Chris saw the frame for Vic’s Indian-engined ‘Jack of Hearts’ chop with its three-dimensional Maltese cross detailing. It was enough to persuade him that he wanted a new frame, and, ergo, if he was going to have a new frame, then he might as well have a completely new bike. Then he happened to casually ask Vic, “Could you do a BSA with a belt drive?” Does the Pope poo in the woods? That was about the only instruction he gave Vic, other than to say that he wanted a Swedish-style frame with the tank sitting as snugly over the engine as possible. This had been his one criticism of the BSA in its previous guise, that the tall frame left a large gap between rocker covers and headstock, and he wanted the new incarnation of the chop to be a little, low bike. He’d seen German company, TTS’s spoked wheels on ‘Manhattan’, so that was another choice made, although Chris opted for a more sensible eighty spokes over the 120 and 240-spoked versions sported by Manhattan. Vic began work on the 1960 BSA engine, completely stripping it down and checking all the internals, handing over the cylinder head work to Jimmy Doon. The heads were vapour-blasted and then coated in two-pack lacquer by Vic. He cut away the timing chest cover to expose the black belt-driven generator. The exposed primary and final belts then had to match that black, which turned out to be a little more of a problem than expected. He found that the engine primary had a cream-coloured belt, and ended up having to order one in black from Germany. Vic also stripped the dynamo, spinning down the outer case and then sleeving it in a polished aluminium tube. As with all recent builds, Woody, third member and pin-up boy of Destiny Cycles, was involved in many of the stylish and original details, sometimes pre-empting Chris’s own ideas. For example, Chris had seen some finned rocker covers by British twin specialists, SRM Engineering. He put a pair on back order but, when he rang to Lin to tell her they’d finally arrived, she broke the news that Woody had already made a set. “And the thing is,” says Chris, “Although the SRM covers were really good, I knew without seeing them that the ones Woody had made would be better.” At the front of the engine, extra finning was added, sloping gently to the pipes so that the exhaust heat sink flanges look like part of the head, and rather better than the usual affair of sunburst collets. It looks so authentic that several people have assumed that it was a variation of cylinder head produced by the Birmingham Small Arms factory. In fact, it was an idea that Vic drew on the pack of an Oatso Simple packet and then handed to Woody, along with two blocks of ally. The sharper among you will already have noticed that this engine boasts twin carbs, and those still more knowledgeable may be shaking your heads and muttering that BSA didn’t make a twin carb A10. Well, yes and no. For a couple of years in the 1950s, BSA fitted its A10 heads with a detachable Y-shaped manifold which owners could, if they chose, remove and fit twin carbs. The reason was to comply with Daytona racing regulations which decreed that eligible machines had to effectively be production-based bikes. BSA had been very successful at Daytona in 1954, and designer, Bert Hopwood, wanted the company to continue to be competitive. However, the management baulked at investing in racing, and, in protest, he moved to Norton in 1955. With no-one left at BSA to fight the corner of the twin carb model, the cylinder head of the A10 was changed in 1956. The separate inlet manifold was dropped and a one piece, cast – and cheaper – manifold design was adopted until BSA pre-unit twin production ceased in 1963. Well, Mr Jefford likes symmetry, so the cylinder heads underwent a twin carb conversion, Vic, by a technical and mysterious scientific process known as ‘paper and greasy thumb rubbing’, came up with a template for a two-into-twin manifold, which he then passed to Woody to make into shiny reality. The BSA 4-speed gearbox was stripped and polished, and then offset by an inch-and-a-half to allow for the 200-section rear tyre. The outer casing was strengthened and bronze bushed to take an external Harley kickstart spring, while the kicker shaft was extended and end cover altered. Chris’s insistence upon a conversion to belt drive was simply because he hated the BSA’s chain drive. In its time, the purple chop had been a show bike as well as a regular ride, and he had memories of too much time wasted in cleaning the bike to enter it in shows. The polished and finished engine is, as I’ve commented in these pages before, like a piece of jewellery, and I honestly still cannot think of a better way to describe it. Such a beautiful engine needed something to, forgive the pun, frame it. The twin downtube rigid chassis was fabricated by Vic in CDS tube and the original Cycle Haven forks were resurrected, re-chromed and raked out more than before – the final rake at the front end is around 48 degrees. Two inches were cut off of either end of a set of Harley handlebars, with slots milled into them to allow the internal throttle to exit and the choke lever to be mounted. The headlight is instantly recognisable as a ‘Rapide’ light from Joe McGlynn at Crime Scene Choppers, and is mounted on an organic-styled bracket that Vic fabricated, and which swoops down from the handlebar mounting bolt and around the front damper. CSS only produces its headlight in a satin or black finish, so – probably much to Joe’s horror – Vic polished it, as he did the risers by Mark van der Kwaak. The tank is a secondhand autojumble find that Vic and Lin had picked up some years previously, and which had originally been intended to be fitted to the BSA in its previous guise in place of the prism tank, although that had never actually happened. Vic extended it slightly, and then removed the aircraft filler cap, replacing it with one of Crime Scene Chopper’s ‘Speedster Gas Caps’, a flip-up filler cap inspired by vintage Indy race cars. There is, quite obviously, an absence of braking paraphernalia at the front wheel, but that doesn’t mean that the BSA isn’t roadworthy. MoT regulations do, after all, merely stipulate that a vehicle must have two independent braking systems, it doesn’t say that one has to be at the front and one at the back… So, on the back wheel is a fully floating brake set up using two parallel mounted Tolle discs; the machined centre part of the Performance Machine brake caliper houses two pistons and two pads at the top of each, and, while they’re currently running off of one master cylinder (primarily because he wanted to finish it for the NEC but he only had one master cylinder and they’re bloody expensive…), Vic has left the facility for a second master cylinder to be plumbed in. The system did, he reports, bleed up perfectly, anyway. Ah, the paint. It was not, er, quite what Chris was expecting. Now, with all due respect, that’s his own fault. All he’d really decided was that he wanted his nickname of ‘The Inventor’ somewhere, and that was, basically, about the only guidance he gave Percy Badbrush of Badbrush Dezigns. Perhaps, because Vic, Lin and Chris had been so focused on the engine, they’d all rather assumed that the paint scheme would be something rather plain and subdued to showcase that motor. They just forgot to tell Percy that. Percy is an incredible artist and a theme of invention was a gift to him. For this bike, he produced some of the most awesome trompe d’oeil effects that you will find on any machine. The pencil shavings on the tank look as if you could brush them off (and Lin did try. Twice). Wires appear to twist out of the frame, and, on the rear mudguard, you could swear that that was indeed a spring. Incidentally, of that mudguard, Chris says plaintively, “I can’t stand rust, yet I paid Percy to paint rust on my bike … and it’s brilliant!” Once the bike had been assembled, Chris could see the full effect that Percy had been attempting to achieve and any initial misgivings vanished. Now, as he says, he loves it and couldn’t imagine how it could be improved. That’s probably just as well, because – whether he likes it or not – I think he’s stuck with the name of ‘The Inventor’ from now on. words: BLUE SPEC ENGINE: FRAME: FRONT END: REAR END: OTHER STUFF: PAINT and FINISH: THANKS TO: |
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