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Kindred spirits

I enjoy The Basement column each month in CBG and I figured I'd send you some pix you might find interesting and entertaining.

My friend here in Green Bay, WI (land of eternal winter) restores BSAs and Triumphs and builds show cars. I thought you might like a look at some of his efforts as I think you harbour an affinity for all bikes British and Bultaco.

These pix are of a 1963 put back to 100 per cent stock for the original owner who has ridden it to all of the 48 contiguous US States. He is not in good health now and will use it for a conversation piece displayed in his living room.

I know, I know, you all like ridden bikes, but this one was ridden to death and put back together... enjoy.

Enjoy the pix. I may have to send several emails to get them all over to you. If you don't care to read unsolicited emails or are not allowed to do so by your boss... just mash on the delete button.

Thanks for an excellent column each month and an excellent mag.

Dallas E Auman, email

Dallas, at the moment we're still allowed free access to our emails and long may it continue as hearing from CBGers out there – whether they agree with me or not – is one of the non-motorcycling pleasures of this job. Nice bike by the way.

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Tongue in cheek – we think

How I enjoyed Andrew Wilson’s article a few issues back on how to deal with vibration. But there is an altogether simpler and totally foolproof way of combating the problem. Let me explain…

The whole problem stems from the materials we traditionally build our engines from – steel, aluminium etc naturally amplify any vibrations. What we should really be doing when stripping and rebuilding our bikes is have all moving parts replaced with new components made from the revolutionary new metal known as elastium.

This material is more than a hundred times as strong as steel, while being approximately one third the weight of aluminium. Furthermore, it is entirely immune from the effects of friction and therefore requires no oil, or indeed any other form of lubrication. (Hey presto, clean garage floor.)

Elastium also has the advantage that when used to make engine parts it totally removes all carbon traces from the combustion process and improves fuel economy and power output by somewhere in the order of 54.72 per cent.

As a by-product of turning base metals into gold, elastium should not be beyond the means of any of us hard-up motorcyclists. Just take your worn, tired pistons etc to your friendly local alchemist (look in the yellow pages under Alchemists Anonymous) and he will be glad to initiate the process. But remember, he keeps the gold.

Oh, and another point worth remembering, during the conversion process a fair bit of the original metal is lost - owing to technical reasons best understood by alchemists. You will therefore require a rather large amount of spares to invest, in order to end up with what you will require to rebuild that totally smooth, oil-tight bike you’ve always wanted, and to this end I would recommend you start buying up everything at autojumbles, though this would of course, deprive other old bike nuts of their source of old bike nuts - and bolts. Get the vibe man.

Reg Cox, West Cork, Ireland

Now then Reg, elastium eh, never thought about that. Of course, coming from a steel making area the alchemy process is remarkably familiar – chucking basic ingredients into a huge melting pot and getting a new metal out of it. Unobtanium too can make a significant impact on the motorcycle manufacturing process… TB

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