Well it’s pretty cold down here in the ‘sunny’ south but I’m guessing it’s colder in Auld Reekie… I wrote a fair bit about Jock Porter and the Edinburgh-built New Gerrard on here a few years back ( posts New Gerrard News and Happy New Year – oh, ah don’t tap on this thinking it’s ‘a link’ – that’s too com-puter-licated for me,  you’ll have to look them up!) but a recent question from John Fergusson about manufacturer and works…

Readers of this month’s Classic Bike magazine (November 2024) may have noticed that I’ve bought another bike… It’s a Henley Blackburne and came from the same stable as a fearsome Zenith, fitted with a 1000cc JAP vee twin, that recently sold at Beaulieu autojumble – you may know that bike if you follow the ‘Shed Racing’ youtube programme. Both the Zenith and the Henley looked like fantastic original/unrestored barn finds and I’d have jumped at either bike but the Henley…

Where would BBC Radio 4 be without ‘The Archers’ it’s decades long running saga of rural life? Who cares? I’m talking about Sturmey Archer gearboxes…. You see, I’ve only realised the value of the humble gearbox since running up and down the road trying to start my single speed Blackburne ‘Scarlet Runner’ Brooklands racer replica. Thing is, veteran era single-speed race bikes have no clutch or kickstart. To get them going you had either to pedal them or run alongside…

Well, the nice weather is here again and I decided to take my Gold Star out for a ride. If you are a fan of Goldies you may have read my tale of woe, regaled here as ‘A Star is Born’ a few years ago, since then what’s happened? Well I was just looking something up on that previous post and I realised that I had committed that deadly internet sin of not saying how it all turned out so…

Well, Peterborough isn’t really ‘up north’ for most residents of the British Isles,  I’m talking about Grimsthorpe Castle near Bourne in the East Midlands.   That’s where we spent the last weekend of August, swaggering around the picturesque Grimsthorpe Castle, home to the Grimsthorpe Speed Trial  and I have to say it was bloomin’ great to be back at a riding event again – remember them? We’d not heard of this event until it was mentioned in conversation by CB…

Great isn’t it? You spend a bit of time fixing a few niggles on a bike, start really enjoying riding it and then disaster… Well, if I thought the authorities have been scaremongering over this last year I soon learned just how dangerous it really is to venture out during lockdown – even a genuine shopping trip on my bike ended me up in hospital! Yes, it’s always worth remembering the unexpected. I had already noticed – and mentioned in…

What a year! I’ve been fortunate in having plenty to keep me busy – but that combined with a long running broadband problem kept the site quiet for most of the year. However, I’m now able to post pictures in seconds rather than hours so we’re good to go again. If you’re a ‘Classic Bike’ reader, you may have seen my Lockdown Projects already but with magazine space tightly limited, I thought I’d expand the story here. I hope you…

Well, my bikes may be a bit scruffy but that’s a bit much… No, the title is a feeble play on words intended to tie into the theme of a previous post (Elementary, my dear Watson…) about destructive squirrels. You  may recall over New Year something strange happened in one of my sheds. Well, since then, of course, something strange has happened to the World as a whole – but here in the workshop there has been a further development….

I  mean,  how hard can it be? It’s one of the last details I am doing on the current Classic Bike project Excelsior Universal and for those who don’t read the magazine here’s the back story… The speedo had had it, the glass was broken and the innards had suffered accordingly and the drive gearbox was missing its drive pinion. Ferret, the King Rat of motor cycle electrickery, kindly came up with a speedo for us but the drive was…