The Bikes and Riders: Part 1, the Some-assembly-required AJS

This is the first in an occasional distraction about who we are and the machines themselves. Basically, I've got a bunch of pics that don't really go with a specific event, so it seemed the best thing to do was to give them their own classification. I'm starting out with the bike I'm currently running, the Mongrel 20. In the current chronology of the posts on here, its some moons ago and I'm still on the old Triumph 500, but as the end of the 2010 season approached I decided I wanted a project. I sometimes justify my projects with dodgy logic and long winded explanations of "why it makes sense". Truthfully, I just like projects. So decided I wanted to build a competition AJS. I was particularly fired up by this little gem I saw a couple years back at Barber,

Of course, there's no shortage of inspiration for an off road AMC bike, but I was particularly drawn to the trials frames. They just looked right to me, as well as....how shall I say...not nearly as heavy looking as the beefy roadster based T100 I was currently on. There are, however, a couple problems with the all welded trials frames. Number one on the list is that they are hard to find and un-friggen-holy-hell expensive. Number two is that they prolly aren't quite strong enough for Cross Country. Problems combined, the idea of spending a small fortune for a frame I would likely have to cut, weld, and generally ruin seemed...poor. I saw some replicas, but they were also un-friggen-holy-hell expensive. Being in the mood for a project anyhow, I decided to throw brains to the wind and construct my own purpose built frame. "How hard could it be?" I asked no-one in particular and set to work at a leisurely pace. To make life somewhat simple, I built my assembly jig based on a standard road frame to ensure when the time came all the major bits would drop right in. Then, with the help of many photos of the real deal, I began bending and adding tubes. I upped tube sizes and wall thicknesses as appropriate to, hopefully, allow it to take the abuse of CC.

I changed a couple things, like the swing arm drop outs (couldn't get my head comfy with the idea of a flattened tube) and after much discussion with George and Max, the spine/headstock geometry. At first, things moved slowly, with a component being added and its problems hemmed and hawed over.

And eventually I got to the point where I could loosely pile things together and make a bike-ish looking...erm...thing

Still, a long ways to go. In the above pic, I had tried piling as much on as possible so I could get an idea of where I was weight-wise. I was still missing a few really important components, like the engine I wanted to use. I was slowly acquiring the bits for a longstroke alloy motor, but at this stage I just had a bunch of roadster stuff, so threw an iron head engine in to up the component weight.

 Then, something happened that brought the plodding pace to a pretty quick end: at a Lost weekend soon after the last race of the 2010 season I blew up the Triumph...properly. The two options were to either rebuild the Triumph for the spring, or finish the AJS. I'm a moron so chose the latter. In a stroke, this meant the single motor would have to be abandoned, there was just no time to gather all the missing bits. In its place, a model 20 road bike I was slowly building would donate its complete engine and gearbox for what I thought was going to be a short while til I got the alloy single done.

This meant new engines plates, but thanks to the near universality of AMC bits, very little else. You'll notice the sad donor bike lurking just behind in the above pic, poor thing.

It was beginning to become apparent just how much work is required to build a bike up from scratch. When you start you think about the big fun things: frame, engine and whatnot. I was pretty aware of all the other pieces I would need, and in many cases had decided what I had wanted, but when I suddenly gave myself a ridiculous target deadline it quickly dawned how much work I needed to get done. It didn't help that everything was bespoke, from the oil tank and massive airbox, designed to nestle neatly into the frame, to footpegs and chaincase. Even the kickstart was a project, with the top half of a Triumph folding item grafted onto the lower half of the Burman lever. The primary side in particular was a world of fun. I had made the decision to make alloy covers in place of the hateful leaky steel items (if its gonna puke oil it might as well weigh less)

as well as to put a chain tensioner inside to allow me to fix the gearbox in position for ease of chain tightening

Despite all that, it some-damned-how began to look like a bike

And with pretty much no time to spare before its first race, it was on its own two feet

Not that it was the slightest bit ready. It had a few compromise features, like the fiberglass tank originally meant for god-knows-what and made by god-knows-who and bought for god-knows-more-money-than-the-piece-of-crap-was-worth which began to dissolve almost immediately. And it had some, we'll say, oiling issues. The return to the tank seemed...off, and the engine puked from every seam and seal. It really needed another month/year of working the bugs out, but I was entered for Gatorback and by golly I was gonna run. In the end, it was a near complete disaster. The sighting lap quickly showed some of the more glaring problems. Aside from nearly killing myself from the shift pattern being the opposite direction from the Triumph, the gearing was hellaciously off, it was shockingly incontinent and it was reeeaaallly hard starting. Happily it got worse for the start, patently refusing to fire up on the line

and finally ending with a push out of the woods with a dead mag that thankfully stopped play before it could pump all its oil out.

So began a steady process of de-sucking. The mag was sent off for a rebuild, and the strange oil return was due to a piece of rolled up paper someone had stuffed in the sump return pipe at some point in its past. When you blew through the oil line, it would pass, making it seem like it was clear, but when oil was getting sucked through, it would drag the paper along until it lodged on the back of the pump carrier plate. I finally put a head steady on, which combined with some attention to cylinder base surfaces and a better seal on the dynamo blanking plate began to make headway on the oil loss

 It's forks were overhauled, and the awful, awful, crummy, awful fiberglass tank was replaced with an even pricier AMC item

It was beginning to be almost useable, almost

But I still wasn't really racing, the bike still needed a lot of fine tuning. The gearing wasn't really right and carburetion was proving a major annoyance. In the above pic at Diamond Don's in Texas, it just ran out of revs and fuel/air, but it did survive a whole race. It was running, just not quite racing. In the end, some expert advice from the nice folk at Rebel Gears got me on the right track with my final drive ratio, and a conversation with another rider led me to ditch the concentric for a monobloc. The combination transformed the bike.

Since then, its slowly become more of a mechanical play set, fixing this, changing that, sometimes just for the helluvit. It had been running fixed ignition, having originally been a manual advance bike, but that made hills a bit funky and so I made it an auto advance.

I had to repair a slight hole when the kickstart return stop tore loose

Improved engine breathing and modifying the oil tank is continuing to decrease oil loss. Its had fitted an oil cooler in order to avoid some of the nastier heat related CC issues, like keeping the oil acting like oil, instead of turning into black water over the course of a race, and keeping the carb from getting so hot it leans out and boils its gas which makes running erratic and late race hot starts tricky. With the Triumph, if you stalled it near the end of a race you'd have to frantically try to restart it as quickly as possible.

And most recently, a clutch modification because, being a big fan of AMC's product, I've always thought the Burman job a bit odd for supporting the entire clutch pack on the inner circumference of the last steel plate, which seems to lead to slipping and shortened plate life as the plot gets toasty during a race

The bike is certainly getting quicker, and being 50 pounds lighter than the old T100, is much easier to ride. The last couple times out its been a pleasure to ride...until something breaks, which in its line of work isn't terribly out of the ordinary. Its still very much a work in progress, the main thing at this point is that it finally feels like I'm making progress. Now, with the 2012 season starting up in about a month back at Gatorback, its finally where it should have been last year at this time for this race, so we'll just have to see if it'll become a solid racer. Should be fun.

Ohio Will Always Mean Slimey Glop And Moonshine To Me

Yes, moonshine. We may have been in Ohio to race, but one of my favorite memories of Jeepskool 2010 will always be watching Tara, Max's soon to be Mrs., getting ploughed on some home made spirit we were given because we seemed nice, or something. It could also be that its one of my favorite memories of this weekend because otherwise it was a bit of a horror. At least we got to share the pain with good friends. Aside from Max and Me, there was the aforementioned Tara, Queen of Moonshine, as well as two of the North Carolina boys: Alex, the Flying Bratwurst, who had managed to break or tear or generally ruin himself and wasn't racing this time so was Designated Team Chauffeur

leaving the riding for "Team BSA Power! Yeah!" to Chad, the Buckeye Brisket.

He's on the right, with fellow Ohioan and BSA-poker-with-stick-er Rich B at a meeting of the minds on the way to the race.
Once again we were plagued by rain, which took a Chicago Jerry course that would have been pretty nice dry and turned it into a 3 mile long Path of Earthly Torture. The rain held off for the race itself, but it was a gray, damp and crummy start anyhow.

 

There was standing water everywhere, and the woods sections possessed mud so slimey they became nearly impassable.

Despite that, Max managed to slither his way to first in class with Four Friggen laps of that hell.

I tended to emerge from the woods looking slack-jawed, spaced out and pretty kooky eyed

With all the spinnin' and sliding, Chad properly incinerated his clutch over the course of a lap and I fared little better, managing 2 Whole Laps in an Hour! I had managed to get around before the leader came through, so even though it was just after the hour I was informed "you can go again...if you want". I think I just kinda laughed and went back to camp for beer.
 The next day they shortened the course down to a mile or so and ran it just through the weird pea gravel in the quarry bottom, which seemed impervious to rain. It was an exciting development because the previous day that gravel had seemed like a break from the mud. Max treated it like a sprint and was having fun despite his chain continually getting thrown, prolly because gravel had been getting between chain and sprocket and gumming up the works.

For me, it seemed better than mud, and started off decent enough.

But I was just too sloppy going through the gravel and began getting bogged down in it. After what seemed like 400 short laps through that stuff I was wasted.
Chad put in a great ride, though it didn't start so auspiciously. Having borrowed some clutch plates and dealt with some water ingestion issues, he was able to get his bike to the line where it gave a fit trying to start at the drop of the flag. He got it going but by that point was 2 and a half minutes behind me. But! Just to show you should never count out a big meaty dude wearing sunglasses on a dirt bike, he ran solid and steady and passed me for the win. Fecker.

Racing squared away, it promptly rained and we left, as any wise person would. Hooray!

Super Quick ISDT Action! New Blaine 2010!

Pretty quick post, this time...with Gatorback in the bag the next race was one of the legs of the ISDT series, which are never very good for pics. It was March, and we were off to western Arkansas and scenic New Blaine. This time we had with us new friend and generally decent guy James Hogan. Hogan had brought along one of them fancy, occasionally operable two stroke things, a Bultaco Herpa or Shalpina or some such. I'm mostly gonna quote from my old race report for this one, because its easier than trying to remember these things:
"After a 463 hour drive, we (myself, Max, George, and Hogan) safely arrived, registered and tech-ed in, and retired to our camp to await the bad weather that inevitably was going to come, which is apparently our gig."

Being numbah 4 in our little band, Hogan was stuck on his own start time a bit ahead of us, leaving at 9:09am. Sadly, this meant we really only got to see him for a couple minutes at time checks an' such, but some incidental contact and general self abuse aside he seemed to be having a good day anyhow. One good side effect of this, however, is we got some pics of him setting off.

"our lil' trio of 5hunnert Triumphs departed on the 25th minute. Max, as per usual, tore on ahead en route to laying waste to the classic expert class he bumped up to as of this race, which left George an' me to carry on together which we did for most of the weekend, except for rare occasions when George held his bike's head underwater to try drowning it for having committed some trivial offense. In the end it was a good solid day with Max getting first and a gold medal; Hollywood a third and Bronze in PV Open Int.; Me 3rd and George 4th for bronzes in Classic Int. Then the weather rolled in. I can only ascribe the luck in finishing the day's riding before it got ugly to Hogan's presence, but when it hit, it was nasty. Winds kicked up and then the hail started....lots of hail....big hail for people not used to it. It looked like it had snowed for crissakes. Oddly, it was a short bit of hell, and unlike our usual luck, the worst stayed JUST either side of us, but how it would affect the course next day was a concern."

"Day 2 didn't start as pretty as Sat. It was gray, breezy, damp, cold, and generally meh. Hogan's bike responded to this dreariness by proving reluctant to start on his minute, but was soon running and on his way. Unlike day one, we would unfortunately catch up to him on the course. George's bike showed its anger at the weather by also proving a bit "hard start-y". For the most part, it was a good day riding, but on the way back from the second special test to the final time check we came upon poor, sad Hollywood, with a sparking plug hole that was stripped. Unable to get a plug in his hole, he ended up retiring, getting to ride back to camp in style while being regaled with the full history of the New Blaine region...the lucky dog. 

 Having stopped to offer moral support to Hogan, George an' I learned the valuable lesson of perhaps needing a time keeping device of some sort while riding in a time controlled event, arriving at the final control 4 minutes off our time and earning a fairly good penalty. After a break, with no sign of Hogan's return, it was down the road to the 4 lap grasstrack test, which I found pleasantly horrifying."

"That done it was back to camp. In the final tally for the day, Max beat stiff competition for another first and gold in Expert, I lost second and a silver due to my lack of watch/concept of the passage of time/brain, so George an' I finished as we did on sat with 3rd, 4th and bronzes."

The Start of the Big Dang Year: Gatorback!

And so begins 2010. As stated, this was to be a big year for us. Which means it was going to be a busy one, with lots of traveling. That wasn't the plan from day one, but as the season progressed Max an' I decided we would hit any races we possibly could and try to win our respective classes. I say "respective classes" because after this first race Max bumped up into Classic Expert, the writing being pretty clear on the wall that he was far beyond us Intermediate muddlers. So the season's first race at Gatorback was a milestone, being the last time Max would start on the same line as me and George. They grow up so fast. It was a pretty good sendoff, however, as we made up the entire line in Classic. There was Max, out for his first race on the Tr5t he had built over the winter. George, on his trusty Tr5t. Me, having sorta recovered from my broken leg, on the old T100. Jay on the Field Pig,

and Chad and Alex on their menagerie of BSA unit singles,

Max immediately dissapeared, which though not a surprise, proved he was even faster on the "little" Tr5t than he was on his old 650.

The rest of us lined up and proceeded to plod around the course at a much more sedate pace

That's us, politely lined up. I'm in the front followed by Chad, Jay, and Alex. George is hidden back there in the trees. I had no idea any of them were behind me until Chad popped around me in the woods. We kept on like that until I cleverly missed a turn and they followed. Jay wasn't fooled by my mistak....erm, clever plan. I think after I got turned around and bactracked to the turn I'd missed I got back on the course just in front of him...I think. Hopefully he'll refresh my memory on that. I do know he got past me, but I'm pretty sure it was further on. However, the Field pig sulked up going through the timing tent a bit later and I sneaked past. Max was, of course, beating us all to death, and lookin' good doing so,

I was mostly second, eventually holding that spot to the finish,

George finished 3rd because he ran a good, solid, trouble-free race, which is a statement that will be important as we get to the results of the other sad feckers.

And here we go. Let the tales of woe begin. Chad, seen here apparently crapping himself up the big hill,

and who had been running with us until the slight getting-lost incident decided to kill some time when his exhaust pipe fell off, requiring him to wedge it back in place with our favorite tool: "a stick". This dropped him back to Fifth

Alex, who had also been happily pounding along,

got caught up by George when he dumped his bike in soft sand, then got a bit confused and thought the white flag meant "surrender" instead of "one lap to go" and missed his last lap. He still managed Fourth.
And then there's Jay. Oh...Jay.... Monsieur Jay, who had gotten himself up into second until he stalled his bike, finished sixth. Soon after he got his bike restarted he lost his gas cap. This only became problematic/excruciatingly painful when gas began sloshing out of the tank and onto his crotch. To this day his campfire tale of dancing around with his pants off, scaring spectators while trying to get water to douse his, ummm, man bits is one of the most ridiculous things you will ever hear. If you ever meet him, be sure to ask him about it. As the tears well up in his eyes remembering the pain, you will thank yourself.