1963 BSA 650....(1968) By: Patrick Inniss Having survived the experience of my first motorcycle, it was a lot easier to persuade my parents that a replacement was in order. Aside from my mere continued good health, the fact that this first machine had not cost them any significant additional investment for repairs, insurance or hospital bills made the entire concept of the motorcycle as a credible means of motorized transport much more credible. So in October when I spotted a 1963 BSA in the want ads I was soon whisked to the seller's home by dear old Mom. What I found was a sickly red, single carb, unit-construction, more or less stock motorcycle. Modified only by the addition of the then-ubiquitous megaphone mufflers, this bike was not so nearly as attractive as the BSA Spitfires and Lightnings that graced the colorful ads that year, often accompanied by a bikini-clad model.

But it sure looked like a capable machine, and sounded even more so. Taking the bike for a quick spin up the block and back (the first time I had ridden anything other than my Allstate), I was suitably impressed with its power and ride. Four-hundred and twenty-five dollars later it was mine, complete with a cheap helmet and fiberglass saddlebags. I rode it home that night, from suburban Florissant, Missouri to the northside of St. Louis. I felt like Genghis Khan must have upon receiving his first horse.

Riding at night soon turned out to be a problem on the BSA, however. The electrical system was, of course, supplied by that venerable English firm, Lucas, whose founder, Joe Lucas, has been aptly referred to as the "Prince of Darkness." It seemed like a good system, certainly for 1963. The A65, as this series of bikes was officially designated, had debuted in that year. They represented a generational advance over the previous A10 650cc machines, the primary distinction being their unit construction, which combined the engine and transmission into one neat, compact unit. The engine itself changed significantly by adapting a barely oversquare bore of 75mm as opposed to the long stroke engine of the A10. To cap things off, so to speak, the cylinder head was now aluminum instead of cast iron. A couple of years later I was to become familiar with the A10's owned by a couple of friends, Buzzy and Gant, so I am able to make informed comparisons between these two generations of BSAs.

While the A10 had gotten by with a weird but effective magneto (with the "breaker cam" actually being a drum with a ramp on the inside that spun around the points) and DC generator, the A65 was updated with a fixed-magnet alternator and battery/coil ignition. Unfortunately, this charging system, especially in its early, 6-volt versions, was seldom up to the task. My BSA was an unreliable mount for night riding, and even during the daylight hours developed the troublesome habit of going "off song" as the battery slowly went flat. A new battery failed to make any difference, and soon I was looking into replacing the alternator stator itself. The expense of such a replacement, something like $40, I think, delayed this acquisition. In the meantime, I kept a charger close at hand, and gave the battery an electron infusion anytime night riding was on the agenda.

The BSA opened up new aspects of motorcycling for me, aside from learning to get everything done before sunset. While the Allstate certainly had seemed big and powerful relative to a bicycle, the British machine gave the same sense of acceleration and speed that you could experience in a fast car, for which it was a good match. While the little Allstate was close to the bottom of the road wars pecking order, the BSA stood near the top, announcing its superiority with a menacing snarl from the two megaphones that each employed only two perforated plates to impede the escaping gases.

The Allstate proved to be a fine little machine for unpaved country roads, where traffic was light and its meager power were offset by its low-slung stability and comfortable seat. The BSA, in contrast, longed for the highway. On rural highways it was a pleasure to use the BSA's power to gobble up huge chunks of slower traffic.

The BSA turned out to be a real education in a number of areas. Its mechanical qualities were somewhat crude, but not really bad for that era. It was up to a talented mechanic to refine this assemblage of parts into something that would perform well and reliably. Unfortunately, at the time, I did not possess that sort of talent. Beyond the charging system, the machine had several other faults that proved difficult to address. Setting the ignition timing was a real nightmare. There were no timing marks, so you had to use a degree wheel. Just setting up the degree wheel was a headache. The first
task was to somehow affix it to the side of the crankshaft opposite the points (after removing the primary cover, of course). This wouldn't have been too difficult, after hogging out the center hole on the degree wheel to accommodate the end of the crankshaft, but at some point you discovered that the wheel could not be fitted directly against the alternator rotor because the alternator stator protruded too much. You would need to fabricate some sort of spacer. By then you're cursing the designers who were not considerate enough to at least have inscribed timing marks somewhere, but then that would have involved the cooperation and planning of the Lucas Company, and it was a previously established fact that they were out to make life just a little more challenging for anyone who happened to own a vehicle that employed their components. I could go on in detail about the design of the (Lucas, of course) breaker points in early A65's, and how, after everything was finally set up, actually adjusting the timing became an exercise in frustration without one person to watch the disk and another to adjust the points, but you get the general picture. Needless to say, one didn't fiddle casually with the timing.

Clutch performance was always a concern with the BSA, a trait it shared with many contemporary machines. On the one hand, the clutch tended to "drag," so that when you came to a stop, it took so much energy to shift gears that it was difficult in the extreme to shift down from second or up from first into the half-stop at neutral. It taught you to deftly feel your way into neutral before rolling to a stop. You might think that with all that unwanted clutch friction, there would be no problem with grip when the power was rolled on, but then you'd be forgetting that this was the '60s. Applying liberal amounts of power frequently resulted in equal portions of acceleration and clutch slippage, although I can't necessarily say that the latter degraded the former. With only four speeds, a little clutch slippage - and the accompanying RPM - was not always a bad thing. It worked like a slipper clutch on a dragster, except it didn't lock up when it should.

I caused myself problems sometimes when I tried to fix things, sometimes even when I succeed. I did manage to improve the BSA's clutch performance, with an unintended side effect. Following the prescribed treatment for this common malady, I purchased new clutch springs and roughened up the metal disks with course emery paper. This did seem to help, maybe a little too much. A couple of days later I was at a gathering point across the street from a friend's house. There were about a dozen bikes parked at an angle against the curb, and I decided to leave with my female companion. I departed smartly, for the first few feet, anyway, when I was astonished to discover that moving the handlebars had no effect, the only possible explanation being that the front wheel had somehow come unstuck. My clutch fix, plus the rearward weight of my passenger, had produced one of my first wheelies! This was a novel experience for me, but before I could compute a course of action, the wheel touched down again, unfortunately still turned at an angle that did not match our direction of travel. The accompanying low speed high-side was very minimally injurious (a minor scraped elbow for the girl) but maximally embarrassing.

But I was used to falling off the BSA. My first spill was on the parking lot of a Sears store, when I gassed it a little early while turning on damp asphalt. For that spill I had an audience of a proper looking lady and her young son, the woman seeming at first startled and then a little disgusted. I wiped out the beautiful plastic tank emblem, which I always found too expensive to replace. Sometime later I managed to run over a curb (fortunately it had been lowered somewhat by all the other traffic that had run over it) in a sweeper while doing maybe 30 MPH or so. The bike barrel-rolled, landing on its headlight nacelle and destroying the light, speedometer, ammeter, and pulling loose the wires from the ignition switch. The flat "drag bars" I had originally fitted to the Allstate now had an extra bend. The front rim wasn't even dinged, but the tire was flattened. Since it wasn't too far from home, and I suffered no debilitating injuries, I counted myself lucky and just started pushing. A passing motorist who witnessed the fairly spectacular get-off seemed incredulous that I was apparently unscathed, but it was wintertime and I was shod in a heavy jacket and gloves. I only banged my knee a little and jammed my wrist - an injury that resulted in a very slightly reduced movement in that joint. When I got home I dug out my catalogs and started figuring out what parts I'd need for a repair. I didn't care for the stodgy looking faired-in headlight, anyway.

The crashes I had in the summer were more painful. I had a nice one while riding a lightly-traveled two lane blacktop in Illinois one Sunday afternoon. I had the misfortune to encounter a large oil patch early in a left-hander. The front wheel wiped out instantly, and I was deposited directly to the asphalt, sliding first this way then that, on stomach and back, before my heels somehow dug in and I ended up in one of those long-strided, 15 MPH runs. To have captured that one on video! For this get-off my attire was entirely inappropriate, since I was dressed for a blazingly hot Midwestern summer. Even though I was only wearing the standard T-shirt and jeans, however, I made out OK, with the most serious damage being about two square inches of road rash on an elbow. The bike suffered about the same amount of damage. Once again, I managed to impress an appreciative audience, this time consisting of a couple who were approaching the turn from the other direction. With matching expressions of awe, they considerately inquired about my well-being after such a tumble. To reassure them I more or less acted as if such events, including the blood dripping from my elbow, were all just a part of a normal day's ride, saying something like, "It looks like I must have hit a patch of oil."

The worst spill came at the end of the summer of 1969. On that night a couple of friends and I had waited outside the now-defunct Fisher Body plant in St. Louis for an acquaintance who was working the night shift. I watched as a couple of these guys engaged in impromptu drag-races in the parking lot. Upon at least one occasion one of the riders was unable to stop in time and ran out into the street, fortunately at a time when there was no traffic. I had experienced, some ten or so years earlier, a somewhat similar "can't stop" situation on my first bicycle, and would have rolled out into that same boulevard had it not been for the thoughtful presence of a bread truck, against the side of which my head made violent contact, rendering me unconscious for some moments. The memory of that experience made me disdainful of the carelessness exhibited by my companions, but this sentiment would shortly prove ironic.

I was the last in a group of four or five bikes as we left the plant. A couple of blocks down Union Avenue there was a left-hand sweeper just before a bridge (tragically, a decade and a half later Janis Hart would lose her life at almost the same spot). I was feeling pretty good. We took off at a smart pace, but I was very familiar with this street - it was less than a mile from my home. As I entered the turn, suddenly my machine refused to bank to the left, and in the corner of my eye there appeared a huge shower of sparks. What exactly transpired next is a jumble, but I knew instantly that the kickstand was down, and that something unpleasant was about to happen. I apparently did a low-side (coming off the bike on the inside of the turn), then slid behind the machine until it impacted the curb, with my body subsequently impacting the bike. Not horrendous, as bike crashes go, but still it had considerable potential for seriously damaging my body. Once again, however, I managed to evade crippling injury. The list this time included not only minor road rash, but a couple of nasty lacerations to the chin and arm. I made a trip to the hospital on the back of Duck's Kawasaki 350 Avenger. A dozen stitches later and I was in a police car returning to the accident scene, where I found my companions had somehow wrestled the shredded Beeser to a less exposed position behind a low wall. At this point I made my first detailed assessment of the damage. It didn't look too bad - the wheelbase was, in contrast to the fashion of the time, several inches shorter than before, but the tank didn't appear to have any new dents, and the handlebars weren't even bent. It would be the next morning, when I returned with a truck, before I learned that my rear wheel was now offset by a couple of inches due to a weirdly bent swingarm and that the rear rim wobbled like an old Three Dog Night LP after spending all summer on the roof of the garage.

That was one crash that could, at least partially, be attributed to poor design. The BSA kickstand fit snugly on its pivot, so that when it ground in the extended position it immediately would begin to unload the wheels. Other machines (even old Harleys) typically have floppy kickstands which will, when they come into contact with moving pavement, be swept back before they can do any damage. On some Hondas the kickstand fits snugly, but there is a rubber tab that will fold the stand back before it can do any damage. I have no idea why BSA hadn't caught on to these simple but effective safety measures.

Three sobering crashes on the BSA kind of put me off spirited riding for a while, even though I wasn't really in the race mode when any of them happened. What I needed, going fast on a motorcycle couldn't provide. It was obvious that motorcycles could also be a great way to make the acquaintance of the fairer sex, and I was, with the able assistance of my biker friends, developing at least a small talent at such endeavors. But what I really needed be a bike that would be more inviting to potential female passengers, especially the spontaneous kind that one might meet at the park, or just on the street. The drag bars were a fashion no-no. I needed to go the opposite direction. Choppers were what was popular, and even Honda and Suzuki riders were adding sissy bars, ridiculously high handlebars, peanut gas tanks, and exhaust "stacks." While these creations often seemed absurd to even the semi-versed aficionado, the effect upon girls was generally positive. Who was I to argue with success? Would I rather have a good handling bike, or a good handling "chick?" Not a tough call.

I rode the BSA pretty much stock through the fall and winter of '69, but in the spring of 1970 the changes began to appear. Six inch "slugs" were screwed into the tops of the fork legs. Here was one of my closest flirtations with disaster. BSA forks were tapered at the top. There were no pinch bolts in the top triple clamps to hold the tubes. Instead. the holes in the clamps into which the tubes fit were tapered to match the fork legs, which were pulled tight by a large cap on top of the clamp. Using a six inch extension put the tapered portion of the tube right at the lower clamp, which could never be brought tight around that smaller diameter. In addition, the tapered part of the tube was necessarily weaker, but the joint was at a point where it was likely to sustain the maximum stress, the loose lower clamp acting as a fulcrum. I tried to patch this up by stuffing in odd strips of metal, but the vague steering feel left me with the distinct sense that a mechanically-induced tragedy could strike at any moment. After several months of tempting the hand of fate in this way, I finally fixed it up right by cutting "V"s in the tops of the fork tubes, having a liberal amount of weld applied to the joints, then grinding them down to a reassuringly snug fit in the clamps. Now I could ride with confidence.

The BSA might have been shaped into a passable chopper, but it refused all efforts to be made into a paragon of reliability. Admittedly, some of the problems were of my own making. For instance, after replacing the alternator stator, and riding about happily for over a week with a satisfyingly vigorous battery ( it would actually be warm after a ride! "It's alive!"), I was brought back down to earth by a snapped primary chain, which did a good job of chewing up my fine, new alternator. You see, I had been careless when replacing the primary cover screws. It seems that one of them was used to check the primary oil level (the BSA designers weren't completely thoughtless), and I had not put it back into its proper hole, resulting in a leak (hell, it always leaked) that soon spelled doom for the chain. After struggling to remove first the nut holding the clutch, and then the clutch itself, I effected a repair with a new chain and a stator soldered back together with a few coils from the old, faulty unit. Was it any surprise that I was soon back to riding in the dark? To add to my woes, my clutch for weeks thereafter didn't want to stay on that tapered shaft with the single wimpy little key. This created a couple of interesting episodes, as I was forced to do serious mechanical work on the road, sometimes at weird hours, but without these memorable experiences I am sure I would have never grown to have become such a sterling, if somewhat frazzled, example of Western manhood. It was months, actually, before I finally put this problem to bed with a liberal application of Locktite. Apparently the British designed it so you'd have to use that stuff to keep it together.

My knowledge of mechanics grew exponentially while owning the BSA. The first major malady to befall me occurred in about October, 1969. While riding with a college chum (Tom Thovorides - Yamaha 250 DT1) in south St. Louis County, the cylinders suddenly started jumping up and down. All of the nuts along the base had come loose. Since the pistons on the BSA, like all good British twins, rose and fell together, each revolution caused the whole top of the motor to first lift off the crankcase and then come slamming back down, producing a unique and totally unpleasant jackhammer effect throughout the entire machine. This combination of misfortune, poor maintenance and questionable design could have been nipped in the bud had I merely brought along the appropriate tools but, despite my by then almost one year's ownership of this English beast, plus more than a few years experience with bicycles of similar nationality, I had yet to acquire a single Whitworth wrench. In any event, by the time I noticed the problem, several of the critical nuts around the cylinder base flange had evacuated the premises. I was left to struggle with the meager tools Tom and I could muster, tightening the few remaining nuts as best we could, then staggering on another mile or so until the increasing commotion from the engine room forced another stop. At one point I found some wood and absurdly wedged it between the frame and rocker cover, to no avail, of course. These efforts were finally brought to a halt when the continual movement of the cylinders broke the single mounting point of one of the exhaust pipes. Tom claimed that when the pipe fell off, it took a nice bounce and he almost ended up wearing it for a necktie, but I always believed he exaggerated that part a little to add a touch of slapstick to what was otherwise a pretty unenjoyable experience.

The mechanical problems of that morning were compounded by unwanted attention from a police officer. As a young black man on a motorcycle I was used to this treatment, and had, in fact, been stopped earlier that same morning by cops in a different municipality. They, however, were not as insistent in their efforts to find some reason to bust me, while virtually ignoring my white friend Tom.

We occupied this police officer for at least a half hour while he looked at my paperwork, asked me questions ("Where are you going?" "Have you ever been arrested?"), and talked on the radio. Your tax dollars at work. This encounter was postscripted a couple of days later when my father and I were driving in that unfamiliar area trying to locate the service station where I had left the bike. My father was driving in his usual, indecisive manner (he was 71 years old) when we were suddenly set upon by a St. Louis County police car. After my experience of the previous Sunday, I was disinclined to watch some cop give my father the same treatment I had received. When my father pulled over, I got out of the car, too, to join in the discussion. As soon as I exited, however, the cop, standing beside his patrol car, snarled at me to get back into the car. Since he was halfway into his gunfighter stance, I did what he said. After a brief discussion with my father, I was permitted to emerge, to learn that this "county mountie" was familiar with my encounter with his over-zealous partner, not that he was apologizing for anything. Apparently the episode was for some reason worthy of discussion among the local police community. Maybe I was as close as they ever got to busting a Black Panther.

Part 2