A friend from the '70's and I are discussing this bike on Facebook - it's a rare Triumph 500, it has the close finned T100 barrels, but a cyl head like a 650 Bonnie...I suspect they used the 650 casting and used smaller ports and valves. We didn't know about them back in the day, but another friend found one of these heads, thinking it was an 8 stud Bonnie, and fitted it to his T'bird which had good cams and pistons....we gained bottom end and lost top end and we were a bit puzzled until told it was a 500 head. In our discussion he posts up this photo of a bike another of our circle built up, and we see it has T100 barrels and what looks like a Bonnie head. But I thought you might be interested just to see what was in this shed - check out the crankcases, gearboxes and complete engines. It might give you an idea why I was into old British bikes back then, this sort of stuff was just lying around to be collected. He must've been one of the first guys to actually start restoring in a professional way, specialising in 650 Triumphs. I used to collect Lucas magneto stuff, and swap with him for BTH stuff which I preferred, but he didn't want because of originality. I used to take the unit 500 stuff of his hands too.
Is that the 1960 twin downtube frame that they initially missed the cross brace? Took Triumph a while to mount the swing arm properly. I like those pre unit bikes. You need a shed full of parts as most of them are flogged out in some way, Brit stuff is so under engineered ( in retrospect). I've got an 8 stud Bonnie head somewhere on a shelf...best place for 8 stud stuff as they crack. I pulled my 59 T110 apart when my youngest was born.....he's 18 now...have to wait till they do one of those" We Rebuilt Our Dads Bike" videos. Probably come back as a taped exhaust, sideways number plate, chopped guards, digital speedo, chunky tyred, leather solo seat pos.... ( did I leave any Hipster clitches out)
The twin down tube frame had a steeper head angle, and I didn't like the way they handled. Triumph mounted the swingarm to that vertical seat tube, it was like a torsion bar and flexed real bad...and I liked that. They would flex and snap back, good fun, and never dangerous. Yeah, a shed full of parts - if you weren't a shed full of parts person you didn't ride a British bike. If you rode a Jap bike in the '70's you had to go to the dealership to buy brand new parts, if you wanted to hot up your old T'Bird you swapped an AMC gearbox for a 9 stud top end. It was a world of barter, the pile of parts you had wasn't so much to keep your bike running, but to swap for the parts you needed to keep it running.
now we have Ebay and Trade Me. The days of the Bloke in Shed must be numbered.
The bloke in the shed is still there, but he doesn't have to deal with unsavoury types coming up his drive. And he only sells what he wants to sell, they don't have people picking around saying '' hey, what's this? I'll give you 10 bucks for it.'' Or swaps, it may be called TradeMe, but you don't swap a BSA gearbox for a Triumph crankshaft on TradeMe.
Check this out, http://www.trademe.co.nz/motors/moto...-752470313.htm Not an unreasonable price I would have thought
$14,500? The guy with all those parts built one, he called it the $3 bike, because all it cost him was the paint. I had that bike in my possession once - he gave it to his girl friend for her 21st (he was in his 40's) and I found her again on Waiheke Island, now a dyke and mowing lawns for a living, I looked after her mowers. One day she rang me in a panic, someone else I knew from Auckland had the bike, and was now being evicted from his property. I went up to his 10 acres of gorse in an Escort with trailer (all the SJ410's were on hire) loaded the bike on and took it back to work. I had the engine and box in a rolling frame, and then lost my job at Rental Cars, I'd known it was coming, and had set up my own business fixing bikes and mowers in an adjacent unit. But they kicked me out of my unit too (conflicting businesses on the same site), we had just moved into our new house, built on sticks in a paddock with no shed. With nowhere to put the bike, her in Wellington, I took it to one of my old residents where her friend lived, and left the bike there....and never seen it since. The TR5 had that high left pipe...but I don't know about the sprung hub, it was an off road bike. They are also selling a T100 - have a look at the barrel flange, that little kink was on the 500's, but the very last of them had the same barrel flange as the 650. That's a BTH mag too, better than the Lucas.
talking about sheds full of british bike parts Motu, as I was re reading some old posts the thoughts drifted to Mr volty and his recent haul of british hardware...
