WILKINS WORKHORSE

Rod Ker breathes life into a tiny Tiger in a bid to convert its owner into a classic enthusiast. Did he succeed? Read on...

After 20 years of classic mania, there can’t be many more long-lost bikes lurking in sheds, waiting to be discovered. It’s also unlikely that your eccentric Great Aunt Maud will bequeath you a mint Brough Superior, the one she bought off that nice Mr Lawrence of Arabia in her flapper days.

Still, you don’t kick a gift-horse in the teeth, so Ian Wilkins was delighted to acquire the 1965 Triumph Tiger 90 that had been cluttering up his dad’s garage for 15 years. Basically in one piece, but inert since about 1985, there was a good chance of resuscitation (yes, I’m talking about the bike, Dad’s fine). Although the precise reason why the Triumph had originally been taken off the road was lost in the oil mists of time, a brief inspection didn’t seem to uncover anything seriously amiss. So, the bike was duly transferred between parents’ and offsprings’ sheds, waiting for a restoration to begin.
As it happens, Ian is involved full-time with motorcycles in his capacity as co-owner of a training school, spending his days instructing fledgling bikers. Understandably, after a solid week of CBT cone-weaving and on-road instruction, using the school’s fleet of Kawasaki 500s, his remaining free time tends to be occupied by things not connected with motorcycles!
So the old Tiger 90 continued to rust in peace for a few more years. Which is where I came in. As the former rebuilder/owner of two small Triumph unit twins, it would be easy for me to get this one back into service, the theory went. When the work was finished, the newly-gleaming steed would be pressed into service as an everyday hack, tearing around the countryside in radio contact with gaggles of L-platers.
As usual where old motorbikes are concerned, the master plan went pear-shaped almost as soon as it started and the resurrection took somewhat longer than envisaged! Yet, about six months after the Triumph landed in my garden it was finally ready for service. Bikewise, Stafford (01785 222111), became possibly the first training school in Britain mad enough to use a 38-year-old Triumph as a workhorse.
But we’re getting ahead of the plot here. To rewind a bit, as found, the Tiger was an unknown quantity. All the important bits - engine, frame, wheels, rust, oil leaks, etc - were present and more or less correct. That was the good news. The bad news was that the petrol tank, forks, headlamp and wiring were just thrown into place. As there were various superfluous brackets in odd places, my guess was that the bike had been sporting a fairing and crash bars, which had been removed in a hurry.
Hmmm. The Inspector Morose in me suspected that the usual motive for removing a fairing is for access to the engine, possibly because it’s broken! Further cause for concern was raised when I noticed that several engine mounting bolts were either loose or missing. On the positive side, the engine kicked over and showed signs of having compression. A prod of the gearlever and spin of the back wheel also revealed that the transmission felt normal. Maybe my pessimism was unwarranted?
Before I took possession, owner Ian had spent a bit of time trying to get an ignition spark, without much success. No proper motorcycle engine will fire up without a spark (Enfield Diesel fans should address all complaints to the editor – who will forward them on to you, TB), so fiddling with the electrics was the next logical step.
Plumbing in a battery - 12v in this case, as Triumph had discovered two-wire alternators and Zener diodes by 1965 - produced absolutely nothing in the way of action. No sparks, no lights; not even that traditional bouquet of fried Lucas. Much poking with a multimeter later, I worked out why the fuse had blown. No, just a little joke. Actually I’m not quite that incompetent. In fact, it transpired that there were about six reasons why the electrics weren’t electrifying anything. Listing them all would make boring reading, even if I could remember them now, but aside from the obvious things, like an absence of wires going to the ammeter, the ignition switch was the main culprit.
Having successfully rebuilt a Bantam ignition switch, not long before, I felt almost confident that the same procedure would fix the Triumph’s, hiding down in the left side panel. And so it proved. After prising the top off and waiting five minutes for all the tiny springs and widgets to return to earth (no electrical pun intended), the contacts were cleaned and lubed without too much trouble.