A 'Triless', a motorcycling story of the 1960s.

A ’Matchless G80’ based ‘Triumph Speed Twin’-engined ‘TRILESS’.

(A motorcycling story.)

In my youth back in the early 1960s, like many young lads I hankered after a Café Racer. I had completed my indentured engineering apprenticeship as a toolmaker, and had recently joined the RAF as an Aircraft Engine Fitter. With my low pay I decided the only way I would ever get to own a decent bike, was to make one myself. It was done over a couple of week ends with the assistance of a friend John Brown, ( who took the photos.)

On one weekend on leave I had gone over to Bletcheley to Arthur Mayles motor-cycle shop just to browse. I chatted to his son with whom I had been to school with about motor bikes in general; ( alas I have forgotten his first name.) He took me out to the back of the workshops and there showed me a very rough 1954 Matchless 500cc single, one of the G80 ‘jampot’ models. They got this name because Matchless made their own rather podgy rear suspension units for a while. I had never been into the workshops before, and the sight of motorcycles being serviced and on stands in various states of assembly was fascinating. Like most chaps those days I grubbed about on the cold, wet concrete floor of the back yard to do most of my repairs and servicing. Since the 1940s AJS and Matchless had been selling almost identical models simply wearing different badges. This 500cc model in front of me was very tatty, but complete. The engine ran, though it smoked a little. They only wanted ten pounds for it. I paid up and it was delivered that afternoon. I had a feeling they were glad to be rid of it, the receipt had that well-known phrase ‘Sold as seen’ on it.

I set too cleaning the bike up. Its black enamel paint came up well, the wheel rims were reasonable, rubbing a little aluminium paint into the rusty bits made them look quite good. The bike ran, and the tyres were not too worn but the tyre walls were crazed as they were obviously old. I polished up the aluminium forks and after a day spent cleaning it I eventually had a really good looking machine. I got my father to give me a lift back to RAF Wittering and during the week arranged some insurance cover. The following Saturday saw me with the bike at Blanchard’s garage in Woburn Sands, and I left with a valid Mot. I posted off the road tax application the same day, ( you had to apply to your local Council Offices in those days,) stuck a bit of paper with ‘Tax in the post’ in the tax disc, and rode the Matchless back to Wittering on the Sunday afternoon. I remember it was a nice sunny, but cold day. During the week I purchased some motorcycle gauntlets from the motor cycle shop in Stamford. As always I rode in normal shoes, not riding boots. My old red and white second-hand helmet was in use again, along with my RAF goggles. I had to ‘register’ the Matchless on the camp, but I delayed this until I had a tax disc to show the RAF Police.

The next Friday evening I rode the Matchless home again, and on those two journeys the bike used all the oil in its tank. As it was only a 100 mile return journey this was serious. It smoked badly upon acceleration, so I suspected worn piston rings. It was certainly not the fastest bike I had been on either, and the conclusion was that the engine was worn and might need a rebore. I removed the tank and cylinder head on the Saturday, and then pulled off the cylinder. I heard lots of bits fall out into the crankcase. Then I saw the piston. It was of a ‘wire-wound’ type, the idea being to control expansion and reduce piston-slap then common on long-stroke, big capacity single cylinder bikes. The high-tensile-wire had unwound itself and fallen to bits, the bore was a mess, the piston useless, the rings were in little bits and most of them were now in the sump. I checked the valve guides and found both of them were very worn. My ‘new’ bike had proven to be a lemon, though only a ten pound one!

My father again gave me a lift back to Wittering on the Sunday evening. I was dejected and chatted to the others on my shift in the crew room the next day. I was then working on the nuclear ‘Blue Steel’ stand-off bomb. This fitted up under the Handley Page ‘Victor’ bomber, which was supposed to fly over Russia and lob this huge stainless steel, eleven ton missile at Leningrad, or somewhere similar. All these Victors eventually ended up as in-flight-refuelling tankers. I was the only ‘mechanic’ on the shift, the rest were technicians, being corporals and sergeants. On hearing my tale of woe over the G80 one cpl said he had an old Triumph engine in his garage, did I want it for free? He would throw in a good rear tyre as well. The garage apparently needed tidying up and the instructions from his spouse were to get rid of all the old stuff. He brought them both into work the next day, and the tyre proved to be almost new. The engine was an early 500cc cast-iron Triumph Speed Twin pre-unit type, complete with carburetter, magneto, engine plates and dynamo. My mind went to work on the problem, would this engine fit into my Matchless frame?

I phoned my father on the Friday and he came all the way up to Wittering to collect the engine, the tyre and me. Dads can prove very useful sometimes, and he knew I was trying hard to become independent with my own transport. I did not smoke now, and very rarely visited a pub or bar being more interested in getting some decent transport. I was also studying very hard during the week for my ‘Junior Technicians’ exam. Technicians were very well paid, (eleven pounds a week all found so my pay was simply pocket money) and I was about to be one of the very few who took a ‘direct board’ for the rank. If I made it my income would have doubled in two years. Once we arrived home late Friday, I commandeered the garage so I could work on the now abandoned and engineless Matchless stored there.

Saturday I removed the Matchless gearbox and the engine plates. The Triumph engine was slightly wider than the single cylinder Matchless one, so I needed to make adjustments for this. I could use the gearbox plates as templates for the rear half, and the Triumph plates as templates for the front half. I visited the scrap yard by Woburn Sands railway station that evening, and ‘borrowed’ two bits of quarter-inch thick mild-steel plate. I then conned my friend John Brown into letting me use his heavy-duty vice in his shed, and I spent that evening and nearly all Sunday cutting and filing, and drilling those plates. I painted them with hammerite and began assembling the lot after tea. As it was early summer time it was light until about nine in the evening. It was easy to assemble the lot but I hit a problem with the lining up of the engine and clutch sprockets. I had the cylinders leaning forwards a little to get the crankcase into the gap between the gearbox and front down tube, it looked like the later Norton Commando. The engine sprocket was about three-eighths of an inch further out than the clutch. I ground off as much as I dare from behind the shock absorber on the engine, moving the sprocket in about an eighth of an inch. The only cure for the clutch was to space out the back-plate. I did this with a quarter-inch thick washer. Then I made up a simple chain guard for the primary drive to keep my trousers out of that revolving primary-chain. The gearbox obviously fitted easily as it was the original. I fitted the carburetter, the Speed Twin engine already had a dynamo and magneto. On went the tank, a bit of fuel pipe to the carburetter, and after setting the ignition timing I started it up. What a lovely sound a parallel twin Triumph engine makes. It was not ready to ride yet, as exhaust pipes and silencers were needed so my father again took me back to Wittering very early Monday morning.

The cpl wanted to know how I had got on, and then magically produced two exhaust pipes he had found from his garage, for the Speed Twin. These pipes saved me lots of money, so I was very pleased. I told him the ‘TriLess’ as it has now been dubbed, might make it back the following week. I just wanted to get home again to fix it all up, but the week dragged by.

Friday I thumbed lifts from motorists down the A1 to get home, cadging lifts all the way to Woburn Sands again. Imagine doing that today in a RAF uniform! Saturday I went to Arthur Mayles and brought two Triumph silencers, a pair of clip-on handlebars, some from fork gaiters and some alloy mud-guards. These along with the exhaust pipes and rear tyre I fitted on Saturday. Sunday was the day of the first run. I took it up and down the road outside the house and it seemed fine. It certainly went better and now looked nothing like an old Matchless, though the jam-pot rear suspension units were a good hint as to its parentage. I had painted the tank white, and during the week at Wittering had made up my very own ‘TM’ tank badges in red ‘dayglow’ adhesive tape. These I stuck on the tank sides. At last I had my very own ( highly unusual) café racer, total cost under thirty pounds.

Sunday afternoon I showed off my ‘new’ bike to the village lads. They were amazed, though John Brown just grinned as he had seen me working away on the engine plates the weekend before. It really did sound nice as one accelerated, but it was only a 500cc Speed Twin engine, not a 650cc Bonneville. It lacked the low down pulling power of the Plumstead single. The gearing of the Matchless single was about right if possibly just a little high. As the bike was still 500cc the insurance was the same, and I only had to inform the Council tax office of its new engine number for the log-book. Sunday evening I rode it back to Wittering. Pulling away from the round-a-bouts was fun as it would accelerate quite well up to about 70mph and sounded great. So the bike came into regular use, I even purchased a new ribbed Avon front tyre for it from my Mum’s club-book, ( pay one shilling a week per £1 cost of the item.) On one trip I lost the rear lamp and number plate. I had simply reused the Matchless one made of steel, and the light alloy mud guard must have vibrated and cracked, and it all fell off somewhere between Wittering and the Black Cat round-a-bout on the A1. I had two rear wheel punctures, but being resourceful and carrying the necessary puncture kit, tyre levers and spanners, I fixed them both whilst parked in various self-service filling stations on the A1. The A1 was by then being made into a dual-carriageway, and there were road works everywhere, these I blamed for the punctures.

The brakes were nothing to write home about, I think the word ‘adequate’ was on a road test I once saw for a 500cc single Matchless. I know the Mot chap did not expect too much, he told me the model was known for its poor brakes. I decided to improve them. I had seen café-racers fitted with twin-leading-shoe brakes, and an air scoop to assist cooling. The tls idea was a non-starter, as there were few old bikes about one could ‘graft’ a back plate from. So I decided to fit a scoop. It was easy, I just drilled a few holes in the alloy back-plate and riveted on a little aluminium scoop. It was probably my imagination but the brake did seem very slightly better, in the dry. As I was always roaring up and down the A1 in both dry and wet weather, it was not long before I had to drive through pouring rain. The scoop did its job beautifully, scooping up loads of water spray and directing it into the front brake. I found out as I approached a round-a-bout just how useless a water soaked set of brake linings are. As luck would have it I was not travelling at any speed, and decided then and there to fill in the drilled holes to keep the linings dry. I shoved a bit of newspaper into the scoop, ramming it in hard. I then drove for ages dragging that front brake till it heated up enough to dry off. I went back to using both front and rear brakes in unison. It always worried me that the rear would lock up in the wet, though it never did. Another lesson was to not meddle with a design, unless you know what you are doing. I did see quite a few big machines using Honda tls front brake assemblies, and the newer British bikes had them fitted. Very soon the majority would have disc brakes.

By late summer I was running back north up the A1 one Sunday evening on one of the new bits of dual-carriageway, at about 80mph, ( note there were NO speed limits in those days other than the 30mph in built up areas, and there was no law requiring one to wear a crash helmet either.) Suddenly the engine suddenly revved up very fast. I looked down to see why and saw that the primary chain had made a bid for freedom. It had shot off in front of me at a very high speed, ( remember it was an ‘open’ primary chain.) I never found it. I had cut corners on the assembly and then in the excitement of the moment forgotten my bodges. I had used a bit of fuse wire instead of a proper chain link spring connector on the split-link. It had obviously given up, the link disintegrated, and the chain escaped. I was lucky it had gone forward, as any other way it would have chewed a hole in my shin, or even locked up the clutch and caused me to come off. I coasted to a halt and pushed the bike the few miles to Wittering; good job I was pretty fit in those days. I cadged a lift into Stamford and purchased a new chain with a proper new split link. As I had made the original chain up for the modified bike, I knew how many links long it was. It took only a few minutes to fit. I had the engine breather pipe exit onto this chain to lubricate it, so my jeans often had oily spots on.

Then in the Autumn another ‘bodge’ caught me up. I had spaced out the clutch back plate with a quarter inch washer. This meant the securing nut for the clutch centre was only on three-quarters of the threads. As it was a huge nut this was not too serious, but I had not refitted the locking tab-washer to stop it undoing. It did just this as I passed over the Brogborough M1 bridge, ( then unbelievable only a small country road, no traffic at all. Today it is one huge 24-hour gridlock of vehicles from Milton Keynes and Bedford known as Junction 13). The clutch centre came off, and all the ¼” roller bearings escaped. I found nearly all of the bits, but had to push the bike the four miles home to Wavendon. I purchased some new roller bearings at the cycle shop in Woburn Sands on Saturday and made a new locking tab washer. Another lesson learnt. As the Triumph parallel twin has some awful vibration periods the engine often lost its rocker cover alloy nuts. These were about two inches diameter and were the access to the rocker adjustment. I got fed up with losing them, though they were cheap enough to buy, so I drilled them and wire-locked them as per aircraft practice. But I had drilled right through them causing a little oil stream to escape. I purchased some after-market ones with fins on, and drilled the fins to wire lock them on; this cured the problem. The parallel twins vibration would cause my finger to go white and tingle if I held the speed at 60mph for long. ( My current Hinkley 2001 Bonneville has counter-shafts for balance, and it really is smooth to ride.)

With the wind behind me, on a good long dual carriageway straight, I could get 90mph indicated on the speedometer. The instrument was probably very inaccurate, but it certainly felt good. The slightly higher gearing helped, but killed the acceleration a little and meant third gear was needed on some hills. The speedometer was driven from the rear wheel hub. Matchless brakes were never very good, and I had tried for ages to improve them, eventually using front and rear brakes together ( as current practice,) though I had been taught to use the front one most. The front hub looked as if it was a full width one, but this was just an alloy sheet with corrugations pressed into it. Underneath was an ancient seven inch single-leading-shoe, narrow single sided steel drum. In those days it was a function of gearbox use and brakes to reduce speed, and quite successful if mastered. Today everyone drives on their brakes alone, right to the limit and they are lucky cars and bikes now have disc brakes, often servo assisted. To ride an old bike in such a manner would kill you at the first hazard.

By Mid 1968 I was posted to RAF Bruggen in Germany ( RAFG) having successfully been promoted to ‘Junior Technician, ( JT). I sold the ‘TriLess’ to an airman at Wittering who no doubt found it a good buy for £15, and it was taxed. It was registered as ‘OMJ465’.

I doubt very much if it still exists. Today in the 21st Century, my garage once again houses two bikes from Plumstead. One is a 1953 AJS 18S combination, and the other a 1952 18S, I will not be modifying them at all!

Neil Cairns.