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My Life on Two (or Three) Wheels: My Motorbikes (and sidecars) from 1964 to the present. ... "from Beezer to CJ"
This incomplete page will remain here for the time being, but it is now being completely re-written into separate chapter pages which will be based at http://www.drdisk.com.hk/motorbikes/ and will, in time replace this page altogether.
Before I get so old that I forget all about them, I want to record my motorcycling history. From riding my first BSA in 1964 to horsing around on a Chang Jiang just the other day, riding motorbikes has always been a very enjoyable part of my life.
This page will probably take many weeks or months or years to complete, and may not be done in Chronological order. So come back again later and see whether it has grown. It is currently in a kind of "scratch pad" state and I shall work on bits and pieces as I have time to recall all my memories. Some of the facts and figures may be a bit out until I can unearth some of my old diaries from years gone by. More photos will have to wait until I can get them from storage and scan them.
I am quite sure that several of the motorbikes listed below are listed in the wrong order. I am pretty sure that every incident described is listed with the correct bike, it's just that I cannot now remember which one came first. I shall have to put them into better order when I can get some more information.
If anyone has copies of the Australian "Two Wheels" magazine dating back to the 1972-1974 period and can look up the articles therein written by Phil Smith, please contact me at smithp AT ics DOT edu DOT hk so that I can get some of these facts and figures more correct. I particularly need a copy of the article titled "Diary of an Enthusiast" written by me towards the end of 1972 or in the first half of 1973. (My memory is not as good as it was!)
A special "Thank you!" to my mother, Mrs Wenche Smith of Geelong, who dug around amongst the family photos and found the black and white prints and ancient polaroid photos which have been scanned and reproduced on this page. On all photographs in this page, click on the small Thumbnail print to get a larger photo. Some of the colour slides which she also found are now included after having been diditised.
Firstly, Important information for all motorcyclists:
Presentation by CMA Qld: Where the Rubber Hits the Road
From 1940s to 1960s: My Introduction to Motorcycling
When I was "kneehigh to a grasshopper" and the handlebars of the average motorbike were still way above my head, I can remember being enthralled at the sight of motorbikes, nearly always with sidecars fitted, that used to park in the streets of Chilwell near where I lived. I can remember lots of Harley-Davidson V-twins with their exposed pushrods which operated overhead inlet valves; I used to love to watch the rider start his machine and loved to see those pushrods jumping up and down and those rockers pushing down on the valves. Of course, at that age, I had no clue at all of what the various moving parts were called, I just loved to watch them. I can also remember that one nearby industry had a few old hand-shift BMW Boxer-twin machines which hauled huge box sidecars. The BMW R75 had two gear levers beside the tank on the right hand side. One selected the four forward speeds of the front gearbox; and one selected reverse gear. Another lever down on the right changed between high and low ratios in the gearbox back at the differential. This machine had eight forward and two reverse gears. I only learned the intricate details many years later ... to me as a little guy it was amazing enough that the bike had three gear-shift levers! This model of bike also had an enormous dome on top of the fuel tank. I learned much later in life that this item was the air cleaner for the motor.
My uncle Ottar was forever tinkering with his motorbikes in
the back yard and patiently explaining such things as, "This is the piston ...
this is the cylinder ... this black stuff is carbon ... etc.," even though I didn't
really have much of a clue about what he was talking about. But most importantly, a
love for motorbikes began to grow inside. In the picture at right Ottar Abrahmsen
on the left is showing Kevin Tomasini his Calthorpe of unknown vintage and unknown engine
capacity. From the photo I can see it is a side-valve with the magneto fitted out in
front of the frame down tube. The bike was fitted with the then-standard girder
forks ... telescopic forks were still exceptionally rare. I remember watching Ottar
working on this bike over and over again. This picture was taken in the back yard at
9 Bloomsbury Street Chilwell, Geelong. On all photographs on this page, click on the
thumbnail to see a larger photo with greater detail.
As I continued to grow, my dad rode motorbikes and I fondly remember peering around him to watch as he stripped and re-built motors and generally kept his bikes well serviced. Many times I got to ride behind him on the pillion seat; my dad was never into sidecars. I especially loved the run from Geelong to Bacchus Marsh and back.
In about 1960, Dad's Triumph
Speed Twin (500cc OHV Parallel Twin) motorbike caught fire as he started it outside Auntie
Annice's place in Chilwell and was quite badly burnt before the fire brigade put it
out. He had it brought home to Belmont where we then lived and bought a second-hand
Norton 600cc OHV Single to ride to work on while he re-built the Triumph. Many, many
nights we worked in the shed through to the wee small hours of the morning as that Triumph
was gradually repaired, repainted and reassembled. I think the most amazing thing to
me while rebuilding that bike, was to see the inner workings of the sprung hub. The
photo at right is not my Dad's Speed Twin but it is exactly identical in every way
including the colour scheme. My love for all things mechanical was continuing to
grow. And during this time I gained an excellent understanding of the innards of a
motorbike engine.
My dad bought all of his new motorbike spare parts from Pratt & Osborne Motors at the corner of Moorabool and Myers streets in Geelong. When I was just a little kid, he introduced me to Norm Osborne. Little did I guess then that I was going to be dealing with Norm and his son Allan long after my own dad was dead and gone. And if I had occasion to go back to Geelong with a motorbike today, more than fifty years later, I would still ride up to that corner to see whether any of the people I once knew at Pratt & Osborne are still there. I should imagine Norm would have passed away years ago and Allan has probably well and truly retired by now.
I think Dad knew for sure he had a motorcycling son when he looked out his office window one day and saw me going past helmetless as pillion passenger on a BSA 500cc single which had picked me up while I was hitch-hiking. I was about 16 years old at that time. When he got home that night, Dad tried to tell me off for riding on a motorbike without a helmet. At the same time I could see in his face that he knew that if he were me he would have done the same thing.
June 1964: 1951 BSA C10 250cc Side Valve single
When my age eventually reached 17 years and 9 months, my dad took me in to the Police Station and I walked out with my motorbike Learner's Permit. Dad then took me to Sale in the ute and we bought a BSA C10 250cc sidevalve single, registration number DA-690, if I remember correctly, for £40 - my first motorbike! I also bought my first army-surplus flying suit to keep out the rain and wind. A "pudding basin" style helmet and a pair of leather gloves were also necessities. The old BSA (pronounced "beezer" for those of you too young to remember) was very reliable, but we did have a few breakdowns.
The most memorable breakdown was the day she caught fire. We lived on George Baillie's farm at River Road, Tyers at that time. I was all set to ride to work at the LVWSB in Traralgon. It was a dull Friday morning, but the sun was trying hard to break through the fog. I straddled the bike, tickled the carby (splashing copious amounts of petrol everywhere as usual), and gave her a kick. She coughed, but didn't start, so I prepared to give her a second kick. Suddenly my Mum and Dad were yelling at me at the top of their lungs, "Get off the bike ... get off that bloody bike ..." My legs were warming rapidly. I glanced down and bright yellow flames were leaping up all around my legs. I very rapidly leapt off and laid the bike on its side on the lawn. Dad ran out the garden hose in order to wash all the burning petrol down the sloping yard away from the bike.
That weekend I had to strip down the whole bike, paint it, re-wire it, and put it back together so I could ride her to work on Monday. The BSA never had a speedo, so I don't know how far I rode her altogether, but there were several rather slow trips across the state, so somewhere around 5,000 miles would be a good guess.
Sadly,
I do not possess a photograph of my Beezer. In those days, if one could afford an
8-shot black and white roll of 620 film for the Brownie, one used it very sparingly, only
birthdays and Christmas, and then, even when the roll was eventually finished, one often
had to wait before one could afford to have it developed.
However I have located the two photos at the right showing almost identical bikes.
The differences are that my bike had telescopic forks in place of the girder forks shown
in the pictures. Also mine did not have a speedometer as shown on the lady
dispatch-rider's bike. Mine had a black frame and running gear with the tanks,
forks, and mudguards painted fire-engine red.
During the time I owned the Beezer, my Dad taught me all the steps necessary for greasing and lubrication and how to keep a chain adjusted correctly. He also showed me how to remove the head, decarbonise it and grind in the valves, etc. Mechanic Joe Brown taught me how to "feel" the right tension when tightening up the head bolts and the correct pattern for tightening them so that I would never ever have a leaking head gasket. These early lessons geared me up for a lifetime of knowing how to correctly look after and maintain motorcycles, although I have to confess that I was not always perfect with my maintenance, and at times some of my bikes let me down because I had failed to correctly apply what I had learned in these early lessons.
December 1964: 1964 Yamaha "Santa Barbara" YA6 125cc Rotary Valve
single
In December 1964, my Dad could see that I was thoroughly hooked on riding motorbikes so he agreed to help me trade in my faithful old BSA on a brand spanking new shiny blue Yamaha YA6 125cc Rotary Valve single. For those who don't remember rotary valves, these engines were two-cycle (two stroke) and the transfer ports and exhaust ports were opened and closed by the piston as in a normal two-stroke. The difference was that the carburettor was mounted inside the crankcase cover where it fed through a rotary disc valve mounted on the end of the crankshaft. This allowed very precise and adjustable intake timing of the fuel-air mixture into the crankcase ... something that was just not possible with a "normal" two-stroke where the inlet port was uncovered by the lower skirt of the piston as it went upward on each stroke. This arrangement meant that a great deal more power could be wrung out of a small engine and that it had better fuel consumption than a regular two-stroke. The registration number was DC-895.
Here's the whole picture from
which the one above was cropped. The YA6 is parked just near the bridge of Bridge
Street Ballarat and one of Ballarat's historic old trams is lumbering towards us.
Those were the days when the trams were our public transport running every few minutes,
all day long, on about seven or eight different routes, instead of being confined to a
short strip along the edge of Lake Wendouree on Sundays only. This shot was taken on
8th January 1966.
The Yamaha YA6 was
the first model to feature Yamaha's dramatic new "Autolube" system.
Two-stroke oil was kept in a separate oil tank from which a pump caused a steady but
miniscule amount to kind of "ooze" into the bike's intake chamber (where the
rotary valve was located). From the valve chamber it was carried into the crankase
with the charge of fuel-air mixture where it lubricated the innards more by luck than
management, just like any other two-stroke engine. The Autolube system meant that
you never had to mix oil with the petrol and since the pump was controlled both by the
speed of the engine as well as the throttle cable, it theoretically pumped in exactly the
right amount to keep the engine well lubricated without the haze of blue smoke that
followed the typical two-stroke in those days. In the picture at the right (click on
thumbnail for a good view) you can see the layout of how the system worked. As the
oil pump was critical to this system, the manual called for frequent checking and I soon
became adept at tuning it very precisely, so that the engine was always well-lubricated
but so that I never saw any blue smoke unless I pulled on the oil-pump cable with my hand
to make it out-of-synch with the throttle cable.
Spark plugs and melted pistons:
The spark plug installed in the bike when it was new was made by NGK, a brand which nobody anywhere had ever heard of in Australia in those days. Every once in a while the plug would get bridged by a tiny bit of grit and when it did so, the bike would roll to a stop. Each time it only took a moment or two to pull out the plug, clean it and put it back and we were soon away again. However, I decided that it would be wise to carry a spare plug in my toolkit. I checked in the rider's manual and the only advice it gave was to fit an NGK plug. It showed pretty pictures of wet plugs, oily plugs, dried and blistered plugs and nice tan clean plugs and suggested which NGK plug should be fitted depending upon the condition of your original plug. I stopped at motor garages and most had never heard of a Yamaha. They could tell me what plugs to put in every model of BSA, Triumph, Norton, Indian or Harley, but a Yamaha was an absolutely unknown quantity. Eventually, in January 1965, I found a plug dealer somewhere who actually had the name "Yamaha" in his plug catalogue. The only models listed were "Twin" and "Single" and since mine was a single, I bought the recommended Champion brand plug. The next day, on Port Arlington Road near Point Henry, the original plug fouled, so I pulled it out and inserted the new one from my toolkit. As I crossed on a back road towards the Queenscliffe Road, I noticed that my motor was making a kind of "tinny" noise. A few minutes later, on the back road between Drysdale and St Leonards, the engine suddenly stopped firing but the normal engine braking effect was completely absent ... the bike just rolled on and on down the hill with the engine turning over but no sign of exhaust noise. I phoned my dad who was at Indented Head that day and he advised me to take the head off and look at the piston. When I did so, I found an enormous hole straight through the middle of the top of the piston. It turned out that the Champion plug was of the wrong heat range and that the "tinny" noise I had heard was called "detonation" and that the whole time that noise was present the aluminium of the piston had been melting away and getting blown out through the exhaust port and into the exhaust pipe which was now neatly lined with shiny aluminium. The bike was fitted with a new piston and I bought half a dozen shiny new NGK plugs of the correct heat range from Pratt & Osborne Motors in Geelong. I had learned an expensive lesson about two-stroke engines: they were extremely fussy about what kind of spark plugs you put into them.
About two-stroke oils:
The manual for the YA6 told me that I must never use any oil other than "Genuine Yamaha Autolube Oil" in my bike. Now I have a tendency to be a bit of a pedantic perfectionist when it comes to obeying manuals. However I soon learned it was impossible to purchase "Genuine Yamaha Autolube Oil" anywhere around the places I was likely to ride. Occasionally I was able to find "Two Stroke Oil" or "Outboard Oil" both of which tended to be outrageously expensive. My Dad told me that in his day, everyone with a two-stroke just added plain cheap old run-of-the-mill, ordinary, everyday SAE 30 oil to their petrol tanks and hoped they were adding the correct amounts. I decided that since Dad often knew what he was talking about, that I would try running the Yamaha on SAE 30 oil. It never missed a beat. I kept accurate records in a Shell Driver's Log Book of all the oil and petrol I bought and after a while I was able to calculate that the Autolube pump was doling out the oil at an average petrol to oil ratio of around 50 to 1, so it was certainly far more economical than mixing the oil with the petrol in the fuel tank. In retrospect, I realise that it was also very much more environmentally friendly than two-strokes running on premix, although nobody really thought about such matters back in those days.
Polishing the cylinder fins!
In those early motorcycling days, I always seemed to have a lot more time on my hands than I do today. A lot of this excess time was spent cleaning and polishing the little motorbike. The whole bike looked gleaming and shiny, but the fins on the cylinder looked kind of dull. Therefore I decided to polish up the outside of the cylinder. A television advertisement back in those days showed a bloke polishing his car (a street Hot Rod) engine with Johnsons Duraglo floor polish. I figured if it would polish the engine of a car, it could also polish the engine of a motorbike. Thus it happened that one day I "borrowed" my mum's can of Duraglo and took it out to the motorbike shed. For a couple of weeks, I did the same trick and you could see your face in each one of the fins of that engine. One day I had the bike at the local motorbike shop for some reason when the chief mechanic told me, "This engine is running too hot." He got down and took a squiz and exclaimed, "What the hell has happened to your cylinder fins?" I told him I had polished them to make them nice and shiny. He told me that the cast iron fins would radiate the heat into the atmosphere much more efficiently if they were not polished. I knew from the manual that the cylinder consisted of an iron sleeve pressed in to an aluminium barrel, but what he told me made sense when I thought back to my high school Physics classes. So then it was back to work using lots of elbow-grease to remove the Duraglo from the outside of that cylinder. Somehow it did seem to run consistently cooler after that. Another lesson learned.
Memories from the YA6 era:
This bike was the first one I was able to go longer distances on. Only half of
the capacity of the BSA but much faster and more reliable. The memories thinking of
this bike brings back are:
- Christmas holidays when I rode it to my Grandmother's place at Indented Head.
Family get-togethers and watching the movies under the stars on the beach.
- Going on it to visit the Hiorth family on the farm at Wallington. Taking lots of
photos there because they had a flower farm and I was experimenting with my new camera.
Haven't a clue where all those old colour slides would be now ...
- Riding it to East Sale to watch the air displays. I loved being close to planes in
those days as well. Now I am too close to planes too often: in the last year or so I
have been in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Australia, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, Malaysia,
Singapore and probably other places I have forgotten. Riding the Yamaha around
Victoria was a lot more fun. Life was a lot less complicated.
- Long rides from Tyers to Ballarat nearly every Friday and back again nearly every Sunday
... counting mileposts so I didn't go to sleep while driving ... making up songs about the
next towns along the road and singing them to myself in my helmet to try to stay awake ...
coming across far too many bad truck accidents on the Western Highway - good reminders to
stay awake ... the beautiful avenues of trees in Bacchus Marsh and Ballarat where the
seasons were so marked by the changing of the trees.
The YA6 was used to commute between my parent's home in Ballarat and my work in Traralgon and made frequent visits to Geelong and Melbourne as well as turning up in various parts of country Victoria on all sorts of odd occasions, so it ran up well over a thousand miles each month. And I started to get sick of a bike that ran so slowly. So it came about one day that we went to Pratt & Osborne Motors in Geelong where, after I had borrowed the money from my Grandpa, I purchased a shiny red and white Yamaha YDS3, registration number DH-528, if I recall it correctly.
1966: 1962 Yamaha MJ2 55cc Moped
(step-through).
In the photo at far right my sister Karen is seated on the 1963 Yamaha MJ2, registered number DG-495, which we bought in 1966. The red and white marks on the power pole indicate that this was the tram stop so she appears to be waiting for a tram! The hedge behind her was in the front of our home at 166 Victoria Street Ballarat. The second photo, taken in Scott Street Buninyong about a year later, shows Karen riding my YDS3 Yamaha past her MJ2, indicating that the MJ2 had limited days ... it was shortly afterwards traded in on a Honda Dream ... see below.
The day the gearbox broke: one Friday afternoon, while Karen was
riding home from work, the gearbox of the little MJ2 jammed tight. Fortunately it
was only 50 metres from the front gate so it was wheeled home and put in the shed.
Next morning, my brother Mick and I decided we ought to repair the gearbox. It was a
bitterly cold day with a strong wind blowing, raining on and off and a few patches of
sleet to make life miserable. Now out in the back yard at Victoria Street we had a
huge "motorbike shed" ... it was actually large enough to hangar a decent sized
aeroplane if it had been at an airport instead of in our back yard. But the
motorbike shed was too cold for fixing the little Yamaha, so when Mum wasn't
looking, we spread pages of The Ballarat Courier all over the dining table in our
enormous kitchen and Mick lifted the MJ2 up onto the table so that it was easy to work on
and so that we would stay nice and warm right beside the huge black slow-combustion
kitchen range with its roaring coke fire.
We had no manual for the MJ2 so we had to "play it by ear". What our ears
heard we were not actually quite prepared for. When I removed the side case off the
gearbox, we heard a loud "sproing" and the tinkling sound of a myriad of gearbox
internals bouncing off the walls and landing all around the kitchen floor instead of on
the paper-covered kitchen table.
While Mick and I were on hands and knees scrabbling around looking for gearbox bits all
over the kitchen floor, Mum came in and was somewhat horrified to see the Yamaha on the
middle of the dining table. It just wasn't quite her idea of a centrepiece!
As her arguments fell on deaf ears, she retired to the lounge room shaking her head.
When we had recovered all the parts we could find, we then had to ponder how we were going
to get this gearbox back together again - remember, there was no manual. Just
imagine for a moment a three-dimensional jig-saw puzzle for which there was no picture and
which we had never seen assembled before.
Well with a little trial and error we somehow managed to assemble the correct gears and
pinions on to the correct shafts and got all the bits back into the case again. Eventually
we had also figured out how to reassemble the shifting mechanism and the automatic clutch
and were ready to finally pull the cases together again. Trouble was, we had two
small parts left over and we had no idea where they belonged. Finally we shrugged
our shoulders and put the spare parts into the pannier bag in case the bike ever decided
it needed them.
After assembly was completed and new oil added to the gearbox, we started her up, still on
the kitchen table, and tested the gears. It selected all gears perfectly. We
lifted it down off the dining table and since it was far too cold outside for a test run,
Mick decided to ride it up the passageway in the middle of the house. Now just as he
was thinking of doing so, the Jehovah's Witnesses, all wrapped up in thick coats and
mittens, knocked at the front door. I went to answer it and discovered who they were
and gave Mick a nod. He understood perfectly and from the opposite end of the house
he absolutely gunned that little Yamaha straight towards the front door as I opened it
wide. Magnified by the confines of the passageway, the induction roar and the
exhaust note of the accelerating Yamaha combined to howl like a tortured banshee.
Just to add to this cacophony, Mick pressed and held down the horn button as well.
Two startled JW's leapt backwards as Mick was just changing into third gear and the Yamaha
came hurtling out through the front door like a bullet exploding from the barrel of a
gun..
At the front step the Yamaha became airborne and completely cleared the front verandah and
the steps down to the path landing neatly somewhere out in the middle of the front lawn
which was conveniently covered in a good mixture of hail and sleet. An experienced
scrambles racer as well as a stunt rider, Mick dropped the flying Yamaha over into a power
slide that would make any speedway rider green with envy. After doing a few
doughnuts, he circled the front yard, scrambled up the ramp at the end of the verandah and
came powering along the verandah sending the JW's stepping backwards again out into the
sleet. Mick jumped the Yamaha off the other end of the verandah and took it around
to the back yard and parked it in the motorbike shed.
Meanwhile, during Mick's superb performance, my Dad, never one to miss a good show, had
come to the door to see what was happening.
With the wildly screaming Yamaha and its huge and lanky six foot plus rider safely out of
harm's way around in the back shed, the two Jehovah's Witnesses gingerly stepped back onto
the verandah, so Dad turned in towards the passage looking towards the other end of the
house and yells out in a loud voice, "Hey boys! These crazy jokers haven't
taken the hint and left yet. You'd better start up the Harleys!"
A stentorian voice from the back of the house, Mick had just come in the back door and
heard Dad's shout, thundered back, "I'll just grab the knuckle dusters first, Dad,
and we'll all be right there with you!"
We didn't have any Harleys inside of course, nor were there any knuckle dusters in our
house, but our unwelcome visitors were not to know that. At that point the two guys
hurried off out into the driving sleet and we never saw them again.
But this still isn't the end of the story. You remember those two gearbox parts that
were left over? Well, the next day when Mum was sweeping the kitchen, she found two
more parts of the Yamaha gearbox under the kitchen cupboard, so we put them into the left
pannier along with the other left-over parts.
And over the next year or so that gearbox never missed a beat and we still have no idea of
why it was jammed or of where those four spare parts should have been. So when we
were trading it in down at Pratt and Osborne Motors we told them about the parts in the
pannier and they just looked at them and shrugged their shoulders. Then we told them
all about the day the parts got to be in the pannier instead of in the gearbox and the
whole staff was just shrieking with laughter.
Motorbikes really are a lot of fun!
My sister thinks the incident with the Jehovah's witnesses was on a different day to the
day we fixed the MJ2 gearbox and that I have mixed two stories rogether. If so, it's
a good read anyway!
Before leaving the MJ2, I simply must relate one hilarious incident that occurred in
Victoria Street, Ballarat. I was riding the Yamaha MJ2 homeward in drizzling rain
when a little old lady in a black coat carrying an umbrella started crossing the road. I
hit the horn and the brakes and instead of getting out of the way she started running
along the road right in front of my front wheel the same way as I was going. I came to a
full stop about a foot away from her, apologised for frightening her and tried to drive
around her.
Well, she furled her umbrella and proceeded to chase me belting me over the top of my
helmet over and over again and shouting all sorts of obscenities at me. I was enjoying the
laugh so much that I didn't accelerate; just pottered along between the tram lines in
first gear as she continued smashing her umbrella over the helmet. An oncoming tram
approached. I saw in the rear vision mirror that there would be no traffic to worry about
for a minute or two. I kept riding slowly towards the tram with my assailant
trotting along at my right side, puffing a little, but keeping up remarkably well for a
lady of her age. At the last instant, the tram driver now clanging his bell incessantly, I
did a 90º turn to the left off the tramline and accelerated away over to the side of the
road. I then fell off the bike from laughing after a quick look over my shoulder showed me
the dear old duck now belting the front of the tram with her brolly while the driver
continually rang his bell to try to get her off the tracks.
My experience with that old bird was better than any of the feathered variety!
1966: 1966 Yamaha YDS3 "Catalina" 250cc Two-stroke parallel twin [see Road Test]
The photograph on the right shows
me, with the pudding-basin helmet of those days, riding out of the back yard in about
1966. This photo was taken at our home at 166 Victoria Street, Ballarat, shortly
after the bike was purchased. The colour shot, taken at the rear of The Vicarage,
Warrenheip Street, Buninyong, in 1967, shows that our family cat found the YDS3 to be an
ideal mount.
The YDS3 was faster, stronger, stouter; it was somehow a much more satisfying motorcycle. But there was something missing. At every motorcycle rally I would see a few, a very few, riders with sidecars. Now whenever I went out for a ride I would take with me whatever I could. I learned to fill the pockets of my flying suit with everything I just might need on the way. I would do this until my pockets were absolutely full. If I strapped a pack onto the carrying rack at the back, I could bring more stuff. This was duly done until there was no room to attach anything else to the carrying rack! Panniers were fitted. I soon discovered that panniers could hold a lot of stuff. I filled 'em up until they were full! I began to look enviously at sidecars.
I shall divert here slightly from discussing the YDS3 to discussing the various sidecars which ran alongside it.
The 1946 Dusting sidecar.
During a trip to Pratt & Osborne in Geelong in 1968 I asked about fitting a sidecar and I was told that the Dusting was the best sidecar ever made and if I brought my bike back next Saturday I could have a 1946 Dusting sidecar chassis fitted to it. They only had a chassis and I would have to arrange a body for myself. The week dragged by very slowly and next Saturday finally arrived and I hurried down to Geelong. The mountings were fabricated and the sidecar was fitted and aligned and I was taught the importance of always keeping any sidecar correctly aligned and how to go about that science. The guy who fitted it was named "Mac" or "Macca" I think, but I am not sure after all these years. We shall call him "Mac" for now until somebody with a better memory than mine corrects me. Anyway he very wisely drove me down to the Eastern Gardens where "there's nothing to run into if you don't get the hang of it."
You see, when you are driving a sidecar outfit, the process of steering it is a totally different matter to the process of steering a regular solo motorbike. On the solo machine, you just lean it into the corner and around you go. But scientifically speaking, how exactly do you lean it into the corner? Well, believe it or not, if you are going to take a corner to the right, you actually begin that corner by steering to the left. As you turn the front wheel to the left, the bike begins to fall over to the right ... after all, there is nothing to hold it up. As it begins to fall, the forward motion is causing it to want to stand up again. These two forces balance each other out and the bike kind of "falls around in a curve". Now look what happens if you add a sidecar to the same bike. All of the controls are the same. The motor gearbox and clutch are all the same. But the steering ... Sheesh!!! Let me describe briefly my first attempt to ride in the Eastern Gardens. I let the clutch out and the bike started moving. The path turned gently to the right. Now with some 60,000 miles or thereabouts of riding experience I reckoned I knew pretty well how to turn a motorbike around a very gentle right hand curve. But suddenly I discovered that this outfit seemed to have a mind of its own! I crossed the lawn on the left and then through the flower beds and then had the sense to pull the clutch in and hit the brakes just in time to avoid mowing down a row of standard roses. By this time Mac was killing himself laughing at the expression on my face. I felt more like Mulga Bill! We pushed the outfit back onto the path. Then Mac explained to me the difference between riding a solo and a sidecar. The sidecar outfit is so obedient that it goes exactly where you point it. When I had wanted to turn right, I had naturally begun the turn by turning the handlebar slightly to the left. The outfit, obeyed me by going exactly where I had pointed it straight across the lawn and the flower beds! Mac explained to me that I had to overcome my natural inclination to turn the other way and to very deliberately turn the handlebars towards where I wanted the outfit to go. Somehow it made sense to me and I took all the turns correctly from then on. After a bit more practice we went back to Pratt & Osborne and dropped off Mac while I headed back to Buninyong. Norm and Allan Osborne both came out to see me off. Norm advised me that if I learned to ride on the road with just the chassis for a while before I fitted a body to it, then I should have no real problems after I fitted the body. He also recommended that I get out into a paddock and practise lifting the sidecar up into the air by turning sharply left and then to control the machine as a strangely unbalanced solo so that I would know what it felt like when the sidecar was approaching lifting point.
Chair in the air ... and over she goes!
The trip to Buninyong was relatively uneventful. A couple of times I momentarily forgot I had a sidecar and felt most uncomfortable for a second or two as I started to drift in the wrong direction. Then I would remember the sidecar and simply turn where I wanted to go and, surprise, surprise! it went exactly where I pointed it. However, as I deliberately kept my speed down low, I had no disasters. In fact as I arrived in Buninyong, I felt pretty pleased with myself that I had so quickly mastered this business of riding a sidecar. At that time I lived in Scott Street Buninyong which was a gravel road. The left turn into Scott Street had a steep adverse camber. I arrived at that corner without incident and turned left. Suddenly I felt decidedly uncomfortable and then suddenly lost it. Next moment I discovered myself lyng in the ditch with the motorbike on its side and the sidecar sticking uselessly up in the air, its wheel still spinning freely! I suddenly realised that perhaps I had not yet really mastered this skill at all. I pushed it back up onto the road and slowly and carefully rode the final 50 metres home.
That weekend I took the sidecar out several times and got more used to riding it. By Monday when it was time to ride it to Ballarat Teachers' College where I was then a student, I strapped my backpack onto the sidecar chassis and had no problem at all getting there.
The following weekend was the scheduled Stunt Team practice day out at the old airport. So I went out there on my sidecar and out in the paddock I followed Norm Osborne's advice and practiced lifting the sidecar. Before long I found I was able to do tight figure-eights on two wheels with the sidecar in the air all the way. I think a few weekends of practice like that really helped me to become a far more proficient sidecar rider.
The "Yellow Coffin"
The first body I had on the Yamaha outfit was a long yellow steel and particle-board "coffin" which was over two metres long so that it could be slept in (which I never did) and it was about 60 cm high and 60 cm wide. It was built by my dad and was so incredibly heavy that the "sidecar drove the bike" in that acceleration caused the bike to want to drive around the sidecar while deceleration caused the sidecar to want to continue on and circle around the bike. There must have been some bright yellow paint left over from some other project as it was painted a bright yellow all over. It had the cushions from a bucket seat that had originally been in some car. It took various members of the family around a few times and once took a well-known television personality on a tour of the Strzelecki Ranges. I didn't like it much as it caused excessive fuel consumption and slowed me down too much. I used it for a couple of camping trips, but otherwise I preferred to lift the body off and drive around with just the chassis.
The "Fish Box"
Somewhere in my travels, very soon after deciding that the yellow coffin was too heavy,
I found an abandoned wooden fish box. It was about 20 cm deep by about 45 cm
wide by about 1.1 metres long and was made of good, strong, solid but light weight, pine
wood. It cost me nothing except the price of four coach bolts from the nearest
hardware store which I used to mount it on the Dusting chassis. That box hung
around for years. It was a requirement in those days that all motorbikes needed to
display a front number plate. In the photo at the right it was still on the front
mudguard. However, to allow for better cooling I eventually moved my number plate
from the front mudguard to the front of the Fish Box. It had many different number
plates screwed onto that box over many years as it became the workhorse sidecar body that
was fitted to a succession of Dusting, Harley, Watsonian, DJP and Tilbrook sidecar
chassis. 
That old fish box was great for camping; great for lugging almost anything anywhere.
At some stage over the years, someone was painting their front fence white and I
hopped in to lend a hand. When we had finished painting the fence, my friend said,
"Why don't we paint your sidecar; its looked drab and dirty for Donkey's years."
So we undid the four coach bolts and the number plate screws and went ahead and
painted it a brilliant white. When the paint had dried, we mounted it back on the
chassis, and that white fish box became well known around Gippsland for many years.
Fairly early on in the fish box era, my father commented that if it had a lockable
toolbox, I could keep extra tools in it. My brother Mick was a carpenter and joiner
so in no time he had knocked up a solid wooden tool box and we used steel shelf brackets
to mount it to the front of the fish box. A hasp and staple meant that a padlock
could be used to lock it and, over a great many years, any time I carried anything I
didn't want stolen, it was thrown in that toolbox. The bike's front number plate was
then usually screwed to the front of the toolbox.
Now a sidecar is a very useful item for carting things around in, but the law requires that if the things you cart around happen to be people, then you are required to provide a proper seat for them. The first seat for the fish box was an abandoned shiny red-upholstered chrome-plated kitchen chair that had a bent leg. It only took a few moments with a hacksaw to remove all four legs and the fish box had a seat. The kitchen chair can be plainly seen in the photograph with the aeroplane above.
Eventually the kitchen chair seat was rusting and the upholstery was starting to go, so we found an abandoned Toyota Commuter folding auxilliary bus seat which we screwed to the floor of the fish box and which folded down to almost nothing when it was not in use. My passengers all reported that the Toyota seat also was a very comfortable way to travel in the sidecar. I wouldn't mind finding one of those Toyota seats today, as it would fit very nicely screwed to the inside of the boot lid of my Chang Jiang sidecar.
Now if that old fish box could talk it could tell of all sorts of crazy people who rode around on its chrome and red seat and some of the even stranger loads that it carried over the years. Many a time I picked up hitch-hikers and people whose motorbike or car had broken down and needed a lift to a town to purchase spares or petrol. I remember one fellow whose truck had broken down on a remote mountain road. I stopped to offer him a ride and he asked me whether it was safe to ride in such a small sidecar. As he had been waiting two or three hours and I was the first vehicle, I asked him whether he wanted to wait for the next car. He decided to come along in the fish box and after a somewhat apprehensive first 100 metres, I noticed he had a huge smile on his face. After 50 miles or so, when we reached a settlement where there was a motor garage, he told me he hadn't had so much fun since he was a kid and he badly wanted to own a sidecar for himself!
And if that old fish box could talk it would talk of this silly young owner who had dragged it alongside of a multitude of miscellaneous motorcycles. It ran along proudly beside Yamaha twins and singles of various vintages, a Triumph, several Harleys dating from 1925 to 1936, a Suzuki or two, A Moto Guzzi and a plethora of Hondas all the way up to a Gold Wing. It could talk of Kangaroo Rallies, Southern Cross Rallies, Alpine Rallies, and other motorbike rallies from the Warrumbungle Ranges to the Flinders Ranges. It could talk of lots of broken down motorbikes that were carted home in it (the seats were instantly removable). It could talk of bringing home a number of other sidecars that were gathered from all parts of the state in various different years. One of these was a Dusting Vauxhall Deluxe body which was in fairly delapidated condition but last time I heard about it, it had been fully restored and was going to rallies fitted to an Indian.
A "brand new" 1946 Dusting body to match the sidecar
The photograph at the right shows the "new" 1946 Dusting sidecar
shortly after it was fitted to my Yamaha YDS3. There are three motorcycles in the
picture: The Yamaha-Dusting outfit is in the foreground, the next bike with the leather
panniers is my brother Mick's BMW, and next to that is my sister's 305cc Honda Dream over
against the wall. A second Dusting sidecar chassis can just be seen beside the
shed in the background on the right. Picture was taken in the back yard of
our family home at 256 Commercial Road, Morwell.
The colour photographs at right
show the same Dusting body after it was repainted to match my Triumph Trophy, but at the
time the photos were taken, the Triumph was away having the engine repaired. The
little step-through was not really attached to it although the photo makes it look like
the most underpowered sidecar outfit you ever saw. My sister Karen is seated on the
step-through; my brother David is looking out through the back door.
One day an old sidecar rider from yesteryear approached me in the main street of Morwell and said, "That's a Dusting sidecar you have there, isn't it?" When I agreed he continued, "Well back in 1946, I bought a brand new Dusting Tourer and lifted the body off it and fitted a fish box in its place so I could do my deliveries. I sold the outfit after the war, but the original Dusting body is still up in the loft in my shed. Would you like to buy it for fifteen quid?" Immediately all other things planned for that day were cancelled and I followed him to his home where I duly purchased the sidecar body. The body was in excellent condition: excellent upholstery, excellent woodwork, excellent steel body. It was black with white pin-striping. Like the fish box, it needed only four new coach bolts to mount it to the chassis. Also like the fish box, it was used with a multitude of motorcycles. I eventually sold it in about 1974 or '75 attached to a fully restored 1936 1300 cc side-valve Harley. During the years I owned the Dusting body it alternated with the Fish Box: The Dusting was used when I wanted a "real" sidecar and the Fish box was used when I wasn't expecting to carry people but was likely to be lugging around all manner of other items or where the sidecar stood a chance of being knocked around.
1966: 1966 Yamaha YDS3 250cc Two-stroke parallel twin (Continued)
Now, after the sidecar diversion, ... back to discussing the Yammy!
The first word that comes to mind is "Reliability". Its one Achilles heel was its rear drive chain. Especially after the sidecar was fitted, the sprockets and chain seemed to last no time at all. This was at least in part due to the fact that I would much rather ride it than maintain it. Still I used to cook the chain on Mum's stove in a mixture of lard and Molybdenum Disulphide on a regular basis. While I was cooking the chain regularly, it lasted longer; when I overlooked it, it would very rapidly wear away.
The Speedometer and
tachometer were combined in a single instrument which was set into the headlight shell and
worked very well.
An early modification to the YDS3 was to add a full fairing. I had watched these gradually coming into use at road racing meetings, and decided to find out what one would cost. I contacted Pratt & Osborne and they made a replica of the one on Allan Osborne's works Yamaha racing bike. Then they cut a hole in the front and put a perspex disc in there for the headlight to shine through. Some mountings were made up and it was fitted and away I went. I like to imagine that it actually went faster. It felt like it was going faster, but that impression was probably largely due to the huge increase in engine noise that was reflected up at me. My Dad did not approve of the fairing ... after all, in his day everyone rode what we now refer to as "naked bikes". But I rode around with it for a year or two anyway.
The First Bingle... One
day, the Ballarat Rovers' Motorcycle
Club, of which I was a member, went out on a ride to Korweinguboora.
Korweinguboora was the site of our annual "Scramble championships". The
word "Scramble" in those days stood for what is now called "Motocross"
... the word "motocross" had then not yet been invented. We were
travelling out towards the track to do some work on it to prepare for an upcoming Scramble
meeting. At a left-handed corner on the road through the bush on the way, there was
just a nice scatter of round gravel stones over the surface of the bitumen. I had
somebody on the back as pillion passenger, perhaps my sister, Karen, or perhaps
another club member, I can't recall now, and upon hitting the gravel with the bike leaning
beautifully into the corner, those little gravel stones started rolling away from under
the tyres and I "lost it" and ended up dropping my bike on its side in the
bush. I ended up being taken to Ballarat Hospital in Ballarat to have my top lip
stitched back on, and Alwyn Sobey and others picked up my bike and took it home.
While I re-built the bike it lived right beside my bed in the front bedroom at Victoria
Street ... see picture at right. The bike suffered cracks to the fairing which I
tried to patch up myself, but it kind of never looked quite the same again. 
Hovever, I had learned something
very positive about a fairing ... they save your bike from lots of damage in a
bingle. As far as I can remember, I think that this was my first real accident on a
motorbike ... it wasn't to be my last ... The photo at right shows the fairing which
I had repaired by hand after the bingle. My brother Mick is on his Triumph-AJS 500cc
single scrambler beside it.
The "hand stand" stunt... Now in the early days of this bike, while it was still solo, it had a good pair of leather panniers at the rear. They were in excellent condition until ... about a week after the above bingle. One of the casualties from the bingle had been my handlebars. I immediately ordered a new set, but in the mean-time I borrowed a set of straight and very narrow handlebars from George Langley. Now previously I had this bike pretty well figured out ... if the handlebars would fit through the hole, then so would the rest of the bike including the panniers. I went out for a ride to try out my temporary bars and when I got back home, Dad's Holden Station Sedan was parked in the driveway, it's rear being exactly level with a gatepost attached to a kind of dividing fence down towards the rear of the drive. Now my thinking was, if the handlebars went through, then the rest would follow, right? Wrong! I'm not sure how fast I was going, but those panniers were pretty full of stuff and were a good five or six cm wider than the bars. Now if there was no reason to slow down, why should I? Suddenly, most unexpectedly, I found myself doing a perfect handstand on the handlebars. According to my sister Julie, who was watching this stunt unfold, I seemed to hang there for what seemed an age doing this perfect hand stand and then, ever so slowly, I toppled over and landed in a heap on the ground in front of the front wheel. When I picked myself up wondering what the heck had happened, there stood my Yamaha, undamaged, engine stalled, and tightly wedged upright between the rear of Dad's Holden and the gatepost. Er, ... I then had to go up to Delima's sadlery and leathergoods shop and get the seams of my pannier bags re-stitched.
The Yamaha Wine Maker... Talking about those panniers reminds me of the day I learned not to carry grapes on motorbikes. I stopped for a rest in Horsham and bought some fruit to eat. The grapes were beautiful, so I decided to buy an extra few pounds and take them home to Mum and the kids. In my left pannier already were my tool roll full of heavy tools, a spare set of new spark plugs, a spare tube and tyre-changing kit, a heavy "Hunter" lantern (big six-volt torch), and a myriad of other odds and ends that usually lived there. I put the brown paper bag full of grapes in on top of the rest of the stuff and headed off towards Ballarat. I stopped for petrol somewhere and the bloke who was filling my tank said, "looks like you have a bit of a leak back there, mate!" and pointed at my left pannier where there was a steady drip, drip, drip, of some evil-looking black liquid which was making a pool on the service station driveway. I quickly opened the pannier and there, on top of everything else, was a ripped and soggy brown paper bag with absolutely nothing in it. Under the remains of the bag and on top of all my tools and stuff were a couple of those stripped bare "trees" of grapevine twigs that are normally left over after you have had a really good feed of grapes. As I lifted out my tool roll, torch, tyre levers and stuff, there were a few more of these little bare trees amongst the stuff. I realised I couldn't do a thing about it then and there and continued home to Ballarat. There I removed the left pannier and emptied it out. Every tool and every item in that pannier had become saturated with grape juice. I put the pannier in the kitchen sink and scrubbed it out and hung it out on the clothes-line to dry. Every single tool had then to be cleaned of this sticky mess, dried off and returned to the tool rolls and things which themselves had to be all thoroughly scrubbed and hung out to dry. I think it took me several days before my pannier and its tool kits were back to normal. And never again have I bought any fruit that was softer than an apple and carried it any distance in my panniers. All the Rovers knew I was a teetotaler, but they had great fun calling me names lile "Winemaker", "Alky" and "Plonky" after they found out why my pannier was missing that week
While it has very little to do with my motorbikes, this might be a good place to explain how I became a teetotaler. As a kid my dad would often drink beer, sometimes too much of it, and I always reckoned he looked pretty silly when he got drunk. As a kid I therefore refused any alcoholic drink I was offered, but in my later teenage years, on a New Year's Eve, my brother convinced me that I ought to try some "Sparkling Rhinegold", after all, I could stop drinking whenever I liked and didn't have to get drunk. Wrong! That night I learned that I was an alcoholic. It made me feel so good I just wanted to drink more and more. "One glass was too many and a thousand glasses was not enough." From the haze of a hangover the next morning, I promised myself I wouldn't drink alcohol again. But somehow I didn't keep the promise. After that moment when I started at the New Year's Eve party, I just couldn't stop. Someone handed me an Alcoholics Anonymous publication that included the Twelve Steps. I read it and thought about it but did not immediately act upon it. In the first week of August 1967, on the Thursday night, my fellow Teachers' College students got me very drunk. Sometime that night or maybe early on the Friday morning was the last glass of alcoholic drink that I ever drank. I started work on the Twelve Steps and so it was that at my 21st birthday party on 10th September 1967, I was able to pour out the champagne for everyone else, but in my own glass there was non-alcoholic sparkling grape juice.
For a couple of years I lived in Buninyong, a few miles from Ballarat on the way to Geelong. Now Buninyong had a Volunteer Fire Brigade. This means that whenever the town's fire siren went off that all the local guys in the Fire Brigade would drop what they were doing and race down to the Fire Station to grab the fire engine and go out to fight the fire. Now my Yamaha YDS3 had a very distinctive induction roar. A contemporary magazine's Road Test described it as a "YOWL". It had good and effective mufflers so that it made no noticeable exhaust noise, but when the throttle was wide open the air intakes screamed like a tortured Banshee. The air was inducted to the engine via a paper air filter, through the twin carbies, and into the crankcase via the inlet ports which were uncovered at the critical moment by the bottom of the skirt of the rising piston. Now I don't know exactly how that noise was produced ... perhaps there was such a vacuum created in the crankcase as the piston rose that when the port opened, the fuel-air-oil mixture kind of exploded into the crank case. At any rate, the carbies and air filter didn't do much to stop this tremendous noise. Now after the sidecar was fitted, I had to open the throttle much wider to accelerate up the hill out of Buninyong towards Ballarat. The road had a 35 mph speed limit all the way along the main drag and then a speed derestriction sign at the base of the steep hill climb. It was my habit to always obey speed limits. But the derestriction sign meant that you could drive as fast as you liked provided that if you were doing more than 50 mph you had to be able to prove you were driving safely if the police pulled you up. So I developed the habit of quietly tootling along through town, but then kicking her down a gear and opening the throttle to the absolute maximum as I passed the derestriction sign. Now I mentioned above about this incredible induction roar that occurred at wide throttle openings. On the way to the de-restriction sign I passed the Fire Station. So the first morning with the sidecar fitted as I rode in to Ballarat Teachers' College, I kicked her down and wrapped it on. Therefore the induction roar from the motor started very loud with a low pitch and then gradually wound up until the engine was almost redlining by the time I reached the top of the hill at Mount Helen. Unknown to me this sudden crescendo of noise that nicely filled the whole valley was exactly the same pitch as the local fire siren. And many of the volunteer firemen dropped what they were doing and jumped in their utes and raced to the Fire Station. By the time they got there, I was over the summit of Mount Helen and there was no more fire siren. The following morning at exactly the same time, the fire siren was heard again and some of the volunteers raced to the station again. They talked among themselves wondering at what could possibly be causing these false alarms. The third morning, one of the firemen drove down and sat in his ute outside the Fire Station before the expected false alarm. We exchanged waves as I rode past and as we did so neither of us realised that my outfit was the cause for the false alarms. But as soon as I kicked her down and wrapped it on, the fireman nearly killed himself laughing when he realised that the fire sirens heard each morning were my motorbike accelerating up the hill. A couple of days later I happened to drop into his shop and he told me the full story about the false alarms. We had a good laugh over it. And a memo went out to all the Volunteer Fire Fighters explaining that at exactly 7:33 every morning, when they heard the fire siren, they had to wait and listen for me to change gear at the top of the hill before racing down to the station.
La-Yamaha Waltz: One night while everyone was asleep a water main burst under a street intersection out in the very flat Western part of Ballarat. That same night the temperature dropped to a few degrees below zero. The result was an acre or so of perfect mirror-surfaced ice all over and surrounding that intersection. At around 05:30 or 06:00 along comes Phil Smith, half-asleep, riding his Yamaha-Dusting sidecar outfit to an early pre-breakfast meeting at the College. I might have been speeding a little; I don't know. The headlight being on low-beam and the rider being in somewhat of a day-dream, the ice was not noticed until it was almost under the front wheel and apparently already under the sidecar wheel. About that same moment I noticed a policeman standing in the intersection ahead of me waving frantically. Well, when you see a policeman ahead of you waving frantically, you hit both brakes don't you? Well, I did so, and in the blink of an eye, the world appeared to be flashing before my eyes! Round and round and round and round and round! At one stage I see a policeman falling on his bum on the ice. Now I'm in trouble! Nothing I can do. Round and round and round! Suddenly the ice came to an end, the tyres gripped and the outfit commenced to roll over, sidecar over the bike. My years of Stunt Riding training (see below) somehow caused some sort of an instant reaction that allowed me to bring it under control at an angle of about 60 degrees, execute a neat figure-eight with the sidecar up in the air all the way, and then finally flopping back onto its wheels facing the opposite way to the way I had come from and parked neatly beside a police car. The policeman's first comment: "Beautiful! If only we had a movie camera on that! It could be set to music and would sell for millions!" The other officer, the one who had fallen on the ice, came up and said, "I didn't have my camera ready ... do you reckon you could do that again?" I hopped off the bike, suddenly realised I was so dizzy I had almost no sense of balance, and staggered everywhere before falling against the police car. They offered jokingly to get out the breathalyser, but got out a thermos of coffee instead. I drank coffee sitting in the police car while barricades were set up on all four streets and a big yellow workman's truck with flashing lights all over it was parked on the ice in the centre of the intersection. By the time I had finished my cuppa, there were about half a dozen policemen all crowding around and suggesting I should do it again! One policeman said the outfit had rotated seven and a half complete turns on the ice, while another insisted it was eight and a half. They asked me what I thought and I didn't have a clue. I didn't have time to count the rotations! I apologised to the policeman who had fallen on the road and he responded, "Wasn't your fault mate! I was laughing so hard when I saw your motorbike doing the waltz, that I started jumping up and down and lost my footing!" Some of the police escorted me to college just in case I might have had any after-effects from my spin, but I got there in one piece, thanked them and then tried to settle down to an ordinary day at college.
The day I learned about rubber boots: At one
stage while I had this bike, I was silly enough to listen to somebody who told me that
ordinary rubber boots from a hardware store (like the ones the dunny cleaners wear) were
the best way to keep your feet really dry while riding in the wet.
I soon dicovered that my Belstaff pants wouldn't fit over the top of the boots, so I
tucked them inside and headed off to ride from Ballarat to Morwell in the pouring rain.
By the time I had ridden half a mile, my socks were already drenched and my toes did all
kind of squishy things as I wiggled them inside my boots. By the time I reached Ballan, my
feet were bloody frozen.
At Bacchus Marsh, I made a petrol stop and after filling the bike I parked it under cover
right beside the restaurant. I pulled off my helmet and placed it on the nose of the
sidecar. Off with Belstaff jacket and I was still dry as a bone underneath it. By now
quite a few of the restaurant patrons are watching me. Undid my Belstaff pants and pulled
them part way down and then realised that the boots had to come off first.
I grabbed an empty bucket, took off my right boot and ... after a brief pause to be sure
all the diners were watching ... emptied at least a litre of rain water into the bucket.
There was much laughter inside the restaurant, which made certain that everybody was
watching as I took off my left boot and emptied at least another litre of water into the
bucket.
Then I took off my Holeproof Explorer socks one at a time and and wrung out each of them
over the bucket getting at least half a cupful of water out of each.
I walked barefooted to the gully trap and with a great flourish emptied about half a
bucket of water into it. As most of the restaurant patrons were still watching me I took a
little bow before rummaging in my sidecar for a spare pair of shoes which I put on with no
socks. Garbage bags went over the shoes and then my damp jeans and Belstaff trousers were
fitted over the garbage bags. On with the rest of the wet gear and helmet and then, with a
final wave to my audience, I started the outfit and headed back out into the pouring rain.
I eventually arrived at Morwell pretty dry underneath all the wet gear and with dry feet
under the garbage bags.
Garbage bags 1: Rubber boots 0.
That Yamaha just kept on keeping on. I would lift the heads to give her a decoke now and then, but it virtually never needed it as the engine ran so cleanly. I would just replace spark plugs at appropriate intervals and keep on riding. I would replace the gearbox oil at regular intervals and just keep on riding. At something more than 60,000 miles (and a lot of that hauling sidecars) I decided to rebore the cylinders and fit new oversized pistons, not because it was rattling but because everybody else told me that's what you ought to do when your bike has done more than 60,000 miles (that's around 100,000 kilometres in today's terminology). Once the rebore had been completed, the engine ran amazingly quieter. Those pistons must have been slapping around a bit in those bores and I had never really noticed because it had worn so gradually. I have forgotten how many miles it had finally done when I traded it in on a Triumph TR6 at Pratt & Osborne.
The one major failure it had over the years, was the total instantaneous destruction of the clutch, which had a lot more to do with the stupidity of the owner than the design of the clutch. It happened like this: my 1936 Harley and sidecar had broken down not far from home. I walked home and picked up my YDS3 sidecar outfit, a tow rope, and my mate. We hooked the two outfits together with my mate on the Harley and me on the Yamaha. With a downhill start, the towing went okay until the same corner on Scott Street where I had lost the Yamaha on my first day of sidecar riding many months earlier. There my mate hit the brakes as he thought the Harley would flip on the adverse camber corner. This of course instantly stalled the little 250 and I kick started it, put it into gear and let the clutch out. Now this part of Scott Street was a steep uphill slope. As I let out the clutch the Yamaha never moved; there was a brief shrieking sound from the bottom end of the engine and with the clutch fully let out I was going nowhere. I looked down and noticed smoke pouring from the point where the clutch cable entered the engine casing. We pushed both outfits home that day ...
Another minor failure resulting
in a major rebuild occurred when the swing arm bushes wore out resulting in some somewhat
erratic handling while cornering solo. This occurred mainly, I think, because I had
never greased the bushes. Photo at right shows the bike stripped down on the
verandah at Buninyong in September 1967 while we were awaiting new bushes from the dealer.
Memories from the YDS3 era:
Here are a few notes of memories that come flooding back when I think of the YDS3:
- My first sidecar! (see above)
- False Fire Alarms (see above)
- Countless trips up and down the Midland Highway ... and the Western Highway ... and a
lot of other highways.
- Many trips couriering drunken motorcyclists home in the sidecar after parties ... and
the inevitable phone calls the next morning to find out where their motorbikes were.
- Most of my experiences with the BRMCC (see below)
- Riding to Stunt Team shows at Bendigo, Avoca, Saint Arnaud, Castlemaine, Kyneton,
Geelong, Shepparton, Kyabram, Horsham, Kaniva, Mount Gambier, and a host of other places,
each with their own special memories.
- towing two Harleys, one behind the sidecar, one behind the bike, I can't remember why
that happened or where it was from. When I do it will probably become its own story
somewhere above.
- A bunch of beautiful rides out of Morwell through the bush to Dumbalk North, where I was
Headmaster of the local school.
- Many trips to visit Grandparents, relatives and friends, and of course the other
memories that come with them.
1966: Mick's Scrambler: An AJS
500cc single OHV engine fitted into a Triumph frame and running gear of unknown vintage.
While our family was located in Ballarat and we were active in the Ballarat Rovers Motor Cycle Club, my brother Mick bought an elderly Triumph bike that had been fitted with a 500cc single AJS motor. Both items were of unknown vintage, but the package ran well. The frame had a rigid rear end (which sounds dreadful as I type this page in 2005, but such bikes were still very common in those days), but a well-sprung solo saddle and telescopic forks in the front. I went for a few rides on this bike myself. It was very reliable and Mick raced it at a number of scramble meetings, including at least one that I can recall at Korwienguboora. I cannot remember whether or not he won any races or titles. I haven't seen Mick now since about 1991, but I really want to get in contact with him again. Apart from riding it in scrambles, Mick also practised some stunt riding on it and I seem to recall that he was really the best member of the team at performing the Backwards Ride.
1967: 1963 Honda Dream CA77 305cc 180º OHC Parallel Twin
The photo at the right was taken the day my sister Karen brought home her 305cc Honda
Dream CA77 to our home in Warrenheip Street, Buninyong in 1967.
Those of us who rode it all thought the Dream was aptly named. It was a very
comfortable bike to ride even for quite long distances. I sat on that comfy red seat
for a great many miles and Karen covered a great many more than I did. The engine
was an overhead-camshaft parallel twin with the cranks offset at an angle of 180º.
This gave it a characteristic offbeat firing interval. In each two rotations of the
engine through 720º one cylinder would fire at 360º while the other would fire at
540º. Thus at slow idle the engine had a most peculiar sound: "di-dit ...
di-dit ... di-dit ... di-dit ... di-dit" kind of like a Harley and yet the
sound was different again because the Harley has a different peculiar firing interval.
Parallel twins in those days such as Triumph, BSA, Norton, etc. all had a 360º
firing angle so that there exhaust beats were evenly spaced. And what was the great
difference made by this peculiarity I have laboured to describe? One word.
Smoothness! As soon as it was above idle speed the engine pulled with an incredibly
smooth and vibration-free burst of power whereas the Triumphs I borrowed in those days
vibrated fiercely and shook themselves apart in no time if you weren't constantly all over
them with a spanner.
The Honda had a pressed steel frame and leading link front forks. A peculiarity of
the front forks was that when you braked hard, the front of the bike would rise rather
than dipping down or nosediving as the contemporary telescopic fork bikes used to do.
In this respect, it behaved very like the BMW Earles fork machines of the fifties
and sixties. The front fork springs were all covered with a clean-looking pressed
steel shroud. Although the machine was four years old when Karen bought it, it had
been well kept and was in superb condition. Because of the extensive use of pressed
steel, the bike was very easy to clean.
The 4-speed gearbox was very smooth to change and the gears were very well spaced.
This machine was always a delight to ride.
Ballarat Rovers Motor Cycle Club.
If any current member of BRMCC reads this page, please contact me by e-mailing smithp AT ics DOT edu DOT hk , as I want to try to clear up some of my hazy memories about the club, especially if someone like George Langley or Alwyn Sobey is still about.
When I moved from Gippsland to Ballarat in about 1965-1966, someone introduced me to the Ballarat Rovers Motor Cycle Club. I had never been a member of a motorcycle club before, but I soon found that I fitted right in. The first clubrooms were located near an intersection overlooking Skipton Street. Later on we moved to premises shared with a Carpet Bowling Club above shops in either Doveton or Dawson Street. After I had left Ballarat, the club moved to its present clubrooms in Hut 25 out at the Ballarat Airport. I only attended one or two meetings out at the airport.
It was really good to hang out with other guys who loved motorbikes. After our club meetings every Thursday night we would all ride around to a shop in Mair Street near Lydiard Street where we would all have milk shakes, Pizzas, or whatever. Some of the guys sometimes liked to drink something stronger than milk shakes, and more than once somebody needed to be carted home in my sidecar ...
Events conducted by BRMCC in those days included the annual Kangaroo Rally, which was conducted in the showgrounds at Learmonth. Apart from the sheer joy of all camping out there together and listening to all the motorbike stories which got taller and taller, and the movie shows which were put on and the gymkhana type events that were conducted there, the biggest highlight was when we would get a police escort and ride along Learmonth Road all the way into Ballarat City, right down and up Sturt Street and around Lake Wendouree and back out to Learmonth. To be part of more than 800 road bikes travelling together in one procession was always an incredible and unforgettable experience. I am not sure of this, but I think the Kangaroo Rally was actually the first major camping rally organised for motorcyclists in Australia. At that time, the Elephant Rally in Europe was a famous meeting place, and someone at BRMCC caught the vision to organise a similar event.
Another annual event was the motorcycle Scramble Championships held out at Korweinguboora. I still recall an incident when organizing this when "Bozo" (The late Brian Bowes) was heard to state in a meeting that if it rained before the Scrambles were held, then he would personally jump into the Korweinguboora Creek. This was duly noted in the club minutes, and as his weather forecasting ability was not of high accuracy that year, and the rain came pouring down turning parts of the track into a quagmire, many members joined together to throw him into the creek after the Scramble meeting. It was at Korweinguboora that I first enjoyed the thrill of riding various Scrambles bikes.
The BRMCC Stunt Team will be covered under its own heading further down the page.
Other events were regular weekend rides. Sometimes we would go to Road Races or Scramble Racing somewhere, and other times we would just go out for a ride for a picnic or just for the sheer joy of riding somewhere together. As lots of our members could not afford to purchase new bikes and some of the bikes that members used for riding around on the roads were considered "geriatric" even way back in those days, it was almost inevitable that somebody's bike would break down along the way. I can remember one member (although I have forgotten his name) who put together his AJS just in time for a weekend run somewhere. This was after I had fitted the sidecar to my YDS3 yamaha and when the sidecar body was the famous white "Fish Box" (see above). We all soon started to wonder about this member's toolkit and his mechanical ability or lack thereof. If I recall correctly, the first portion of the AJS to be added to my sidecar was its centre stand. Some miles further along one of its mirrors fell off and was added to my sidecar. The headlight came adrift. Then the muffler fell off and was placed in the sidecar. The front mudguard fell off next and was added to the sidecar. The taillight fell off. Then I think it was the back mudguard shortly after that. Then the pillion saddle. The toolbox fell off. The horn fell off. Then the front exhaust pipe. By the time we arrived home in Ballarat that night, there was more of that AJS in my sidecar than there was still on the road! He was by then riding a bare frame with fuel-tank, engine, gearbox and two wheels: long blue flames spurted directly from the exhaust port on the cyclinder head!. The rest of the bike was in my sidecar!
Many weekends we had official or unofficial "meetings" in Alwyn Sobey's back shed at 611 Ligar Street. Sometimes these were organised so that club members could perform regular maintenance on the Stunt Team bikes which were kept garaged there. Other times members just ended up congregating in Sobey's shed because there was nothing else planned for that weekend and nothing much else to do. I remember one incident which occurred when Sobe had an old motorbike magneto on his workbench and some new member had arrived for the first time that day. Now to put things into perspective, one of the things we used to do to show that we were tough was to kill the engine of somebody's pride and joy by short circuiting the spark plugs by simply placing the fingers of one hand on the spark plug and the other hand on a metal part of the bike. We were all used to letting that 15,000 volts go surging through our bodies and were pretty good at staying perfectly still as we did so. Now on this particular day, a bunch of us formed a human chain by holding hands and somebody at the end of the chain was idly turning the magneto over and letting the charge go surging through all of us. Then somebody on the chain shook hands with this new guy and he nearly jumped out of skin from the electric shock. Someone else shook his hand and the same thing happened after four or five shocks from shaking hands with blokes who somehow managed to remain poker-faced without letting on that anything unusual was happening, this poor bloke panicked and crashed out through the back of Sobe's shed straight through between the sheets of corrugated iron in which the shed was clad. The sheets had to be nailed back on later. By then everyone was rolling around on the floor laughing. Looking back it seems to have been a mean thing to have done to that poor bloke, but it sure seemed funny at the time.
Many years later, I made use of this "skill" when a bloke who owned an A-Model Ford which had recently been restored had the bonnet open and was really going to town crowing about how wonderful the motor was and the fuel system was so good and the ignition system was so good that the motor, once it was started was absolutely unstoppable. I listened to him blowing his bags like this for a while and then without saying a word, I leaned forward with two hands and placed two thumbs and two index fingers firmly on the top of his four spark plugs and just held them there. the "unstoppable" motor died instantly and someone said, "well, Phil sure stopped it didn't he!" as everyone went rolling on the ground laughing.
I guess somebody ought to write a book one day about the BRMCC. Those were some of the best years of my life.
1966-1969: The Stunt-riding years.
I cannot leave my time with BRMCC without discussing the Stunt Team. I am not sure exactly when the BRMCC Stunt Team began, but it was certainly in full swing before I joined the club in about January 1966. Elsewhere in the 1960s there were a couple of Army troupes which used to put on precision riding and stunt riding displays at, for example, the Edinburgh Tattoo. These were filmed and shown on the Movietone News as well as on television. The films were also borrowed and shown at motorcycle rallies. No doubt someone in the club looked at these and caught the vision to do likewise.
The Stunt bikes... The club had come to own the following bikes which were used for the Stunt Team by the time I joined: Three Harley Davidson 1942 WLA model 750cc Side-valve V-twins, One BSA OHV parallel twin (used for ramp-jumping), One Norton OHV single (also used for ramp work), and a couple of Matchless or AJS bikes used for general stunts. The club also owned a trailer built specifically for carrying the bikes carrying three bikes in channels parallel to the direction of travel (usually three Harleys), one bike in a crosswise channel in front of the three Harleys, and one in a crosswise channel at the rear of the trailer. If other bikes were needed for specific shows, they were either towed to the venue or carried in a ute. I should mention that there were other Harleys used for parts to keep the main three going and that the other bikes were taken out of service for maintenance or put back into the pool again when they had been reconditioned and were running well.
The Stunt Team were hired by the organisers of other events such as the annual Agricultural Shows which were put on by the Agricultuaral Societies of most country towns and many regional cities in those days. We performed as a drawcard event on the centre of the main oval in the showgrounds.
Disclaimer: Don't try this at home: The members of the Ballarat Rovers Motor Cycle Club Stunt Team spent countless hours in preparation and practice. All of the stunts were very well choreographed, planned and thought out so that they would be spectacular and yet safe. The riders wore special safety equipment, often out of sight underneath their outer clothing. The team always had qualified first-aid officers standing by. Every new stunt that was designed had to be passed by the leaders at practice sessions as being absolutely safe before it was permitted to be incorporated into a show.
Some of the stunts we performed were as follows:
The Wall of Fire: A pinewood wall about 6mm thick and 2 metres wide by
2 metres high was set up, splashed with kerosene or diesel and set on fire. Someone
riding a bike would then go crashing through it.
The Human Battering Ram: somebody (usually the late Jim Colligan - Jim
and his passenger Ian Thornton were unfortunately killed in a road racing outfit crash at
Bathurst many years later) lay face down along the top of the bike with his head and
helmet ahead of the front tyre and his legs around the waist of the rider. A wall
made of pine boards about 6mm thick, 2 metres wide and 2 metres high was covered with
diesel and set alight. The bike would make a good fast approach and Jim's helmet
would be the first item to smash through the burning pinewood wall.
The Hoop of Fire: A steel hoop about 2 metres in diameter was elevated on
some drums and bundles of hay or straw had been tied all around the hoop in advance.
A ramp was set up, the hoop was sloshed with diesel and set alight. One or
more riders would then ride at high speed up the ramp and jump airborne through the
burning hoop. As a variation to this, on at least one occasion, two ramps were set
up and two bikes raced up the two ramps so close to the same time that both bikes were
airborne at once and passed through the burning hoop extremely close to each other,
although one was always slightly ahead of the other. Unfortunately, during this
variation one day in Ballarat, the first bike snagged one of the wires that held the
burning straw onto the steel frame of the hoop and the hoop was knocked off its supports
and commenced to fall by the time the second bike was passing through it. The hoop
fell over the rider like a quoit over its stake and the rider (if I recall correctly it
might have been Russell Czynski or perhaps Ron Thomas, but I could be mistaken) found
himself surrounded by furiously burning straw and diesel fuel. He grabbed the hoop
with his hands and lifted it off over his head, and in doing so received minor burns to
his hands. As far as I recall, this was the only injury received by anybody during a
public performance during the years I was with the team.
The Progessive Ramp Jumps: A ramp was set up and a rider on a bike would
leap over it and land on the ground where a puff of dust would be kicked up by the back
wheel of the landing bike. Either bikes or other vehicles, or bodies would then be
stretched out on the ground beyond the ramp, extending to a position that was clearly
beyond the dust cloud that had been kicked up in the first jump. At this point Jim
Colligan was often the last fellow in the line-up and would be lying on his stomach on the
ground facing the ramp with his legs splayed wide apart. This time the ramp jumping
rider would land the rear tyre of his bike clearly between Jim's legs. Now the crowd
can't see that Jim's legs are apart and everyone is quite sure that Jim has had the bike
land right on him, and furthermore that the bike has landed on a particularly sensitive
and painful part of his body. The commentator at this point would make some remark
about "Jim's wife won't be too happy tonight when she gets her husband home..."
At this point some additional people would be laid out on the ground to extend the
line 15 or 20 metres further. The crowd is sure they are going to see a bunch of men
get mangled. This time, however, the rider and the bike clear the whole length of
people and then leave some room to spare.
The Barber's Shop: This stunt involved a whole bunch of people on one
Harley. Props used were an enormous wooden comb, enormous wooden scissors, an
enormous wooden cut-throat razor, a thundermug (child's potty, for those who weren't
around when we called them "thundermugs"), an oversized shaving brush, and some
magazines. Sitting on the front mudguard of the Harley was a guy having a haircut
and next to him was the guy giving him the haircut, On the handlebars sat a guy who
was having a shave and on the fuel tank sat the guy who was shaving him. The rider
of the bike was next sitting on the Harley's saddle. Behind the rider were two or
three more people who were reading magazines as they waited to be next for their haircut.
Sometimes the guys near the back of the bike would stack on a mock fight over who
would be next to get their haircut.
The Pyramid: This also involved a lot of guys on a Harley. There
was a rider on the saddle who often had to get directions from above so that he could
drive. Several blokes stood along the bike at intervals. Other blokes stood up
on their hips or shoulders. And some light fellow got right up on top of the lot
with his arms stretched out straight.
The School Bus: for this stunt, members were spread out standing at
intervals right around the perimeter of the showgrounds. The Harley would be ridden
along to where the first bloke was and he would hop aboard as the Harley rolled past.
When they reached the next bloke he would hop aboard too. As the Harley
passed each person they would hop aboard as well. By the time the Harley had passed
the last person, it had maybe twelve or fourteen riders on board. I don't recall how
many was the largest count of people that we had on one motorcycle, but this was before The
Guiness Book of Records had become popular, and it probably never actually occurred
to any of us to count how many riders we had on board. I think we probably did it
with more people in practise sessions than we did in performances, because we would often
be short of several riders on performance days because their workplace would not give them
time off or other matters would intervene.
The Single Jimmy: Rider
stood with one foot on saddle and lifted his other leg high behind him. See the two
photos at the right where I am practising this on a Yamaha YDS3. My left leg should
actually be held considerably higher than is seen in these photos.
The Cossack Ride: This was usually done by riders on Harleys who would
climb over the bike so their left foot was on the right footboard and they would crouch
down beside the bike with their other leg stretched out in front just like the Russian
Cossacks used to do on their horses.
The Hollow Back Stand: This was done with one rider standing on the seat
with his back horizontal and his hands stretching down onto the handlebars. A second
rider lay on his back on top of the other rider's back with his legs pointing straight up
in the air and his arms grasping on to the other rider's arms to keep himself up there.
The Pillion Stand: The
lone rider stood on pillion pegs or rear crashbars depending on the model of bike and rode
standing upright with his arms outstretched. In the photo at right I am practising
it on my Yamaha YDS3.
The Saddle Stand: Like the Pillion Stand, except that the rider was
standing on the saddle of the motorbike.
The Swallow Dive: This was done with one rider in a position similar to
the Hollow Back Stand, but this time the second rider balanced face down on the first
rider's back with his legs outstretched and his arms spread wide in a typical swallow dive
position.
The Grecian: This involved one rider actually riding the bike in a normal
position while the second rider, who faced backwards, had his feet under the bottom bar of
the front crash bars, the back of his knees over the top bars of the front crash bars and
then leaned over backwards arching his back so far that his helmet almost touched the
ground ahead of the front wheel and he was getting an upside-down view of where they were
riding.
The Double Grecian: The same stunt as The Grecian above, except that a
third rider, facing forwards, placed his toes under the bottom bars of the rear crashbars,
the backs of his knees over the top bars of the rear crashbars and arched his back
rearwards over the taillights until his helmet almost touched the ground behind the back
wheel; he was getting an upside-down view of where the bike had just been.
The Double Grecian and Jimmy: This was done as the Double Grecian stunt
above but with the rider standing with one foot on the saddle, leaning forwards, his other
leg raised high in the air behind him.
The Totem Pole: This stunt was done with one guy (often George
Langley) riding the bike, another guy sitting on his shoulders with his hands stretched
out to each side, and another guy on his shoulders with his hands stretched out to eac