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I employed, at considerable expense, professional assistance to get my BSA back into shape. I had the worked performed by E & M Motorcycles on Jefferson Ave. in St. Louis. They replaced the pistons with .040" overs, bolted the cylinders firmly back to the cases, welded a frame downtube, which had broken just above the front motor mount, and charge me (or, at least, my father) about $200. I rode away confident that my major motor problems were behind me. I should have known better.

I managed to make it through the winter of 1970 with only the normal (for me) hassles, such as an epidemic of flat tires and the ever present electrical worries. This season can be pretty brutal in the Midwest, so although I continued to ride throughout the worst of the weather, the mileage figures were modest. Mostly it was to school and back, ten or twelve miles a day, sometimes in bitterly cold weather. When I had an early class I would take a shower, hop on my bike, tool to St. Louis University, and walk inside a building with my helmet still on because my fingers were too numb to undo the d-rings. Occasionally when I got my helmet off I would have clumps of ice in my hair.

Relative mechanical security was short-lived. In the beautiful St. Louis springtime I was enjoying a sedate ride around town when suddenly a loud banging arose from the depths of my motor. After pulling over to check for obvious clues regarding the cause of the cacophony, I proceeded onward in the grim certainty that the end was nigh for my motor, driving slowly only trying to restrict the distance that the parts would be flung when the doomed machine finally met its inevitable fate. To my surprise, I was able to limp home before anything dramatic happened. Once back in dry-dock, I proceeded to tear into the machine with the certain expectation that I would soon find bent and torn metal to explain the rude mechanical noises. I was astonished when I removed the head and cylinder block to find only a pair of fresh-looking pistons still solidly affixed to nice, straight connecting rods, which in turn pivoted smoothly on a crankshaft whose bearings seemed as tight as they were on the day the machine was built. Somewhat befuddled, I hoped for a miracle and put the parts back together, foregoing the use of any fresh gaskets in the unacknowledged certainty that I would soon be taking it all apart again. This, of course, was the case, as upon completion, the same hammering sounds were repeated the instant I fired the motor.

This time I was resigned to taking apart every nut and bolt until I found the source of the problem. I removed the head and cylinders, then pulled the remainder of the engine from the frame. I unbolted the case halves and, with an increasing sense of astonishment, found nothing amiss. The last thing to do was to remove the nut on the right end of the crankshaft. This nut held on the gear which drove the oil pump. I grasped the crankshaft in one hand, and with the other used a wrench to remove the nut. Suddenly it seemed as though the impossible was happening as the beefy crankshaft just came apart in my hands like an old, rotten branch. I stared unbelievingly at the shorn metal, at least an inch and a half thick.

I later found out that some BSA's manufactured about the time mine was did have suspect crankshafts. A couple of weeks before mine failed I'd had an incident in which I had somehow started the engine with the top of the carburetor loose. It revved madly (I can't give an exact number since I had no tachometer) until I grabbed the ignition switch. Could have been a factor.

After placing an ad in the paper, I found a disassembled twin carb BSA engine that I bought for maybe $100. It had pretty good, high-compression forged pistons, but since the cylinders were slightly rusted, I stuck with my almost new .040" overs. I did use the twin-carb head. When I put the crank together, one of the big ends seemed kind of tight, but, seeing no easy fix, I closed my eyes and hoped for the best. Otherwise things went back together fairly quickly, and I had for the first time assembled my own motor. It was a different feeling, knowing all the intimate functions of the motor, and not completely reassuring. In the realization, the engine performed quite well, although the pair of Amal monoblocks could not be made to idle. But the additional carburetor seemed to add just a little to the performance, and shortly thereafter I boosted the power even more by adding a set of offset rocker arm buttons from Webco. These little gems exploited the fact that BSAs and Triumphs used removable pads (the "buttons") on the ends of the rocker arms engaged by the pushrods. Offset rocker arm buttons moved these pads closer to pivot points, effectively increasing valve lift, although not duration. The extra lift was no problem on my motor, with its low-crowned pistons.

The BSA ran well that summer, except for the by-now expected electrical problems. Toward the end of summer I sold it for about $400 to get a Harley Sportster a friend (Tommy Jacobs) was selling. Soon after I sold the BSA, it threw a connecting rod. I helped the new owner perform the repair, which was not too expensive due to all the extra parts that I had thrown in. The rod had separated at the big end and damaged the cylinder skirt. The extra barrels worked fine after they were honed, and the high compression pistons delivered spirited performance. The cause of the failure? I suspected it might have been that tight bearing, but I had ridden at least a couple of thousand miles on it. Then when I was working on machine I noticed something. "Hey, those oil lines are supposed to cross!" The proud new owner had seen fit to remove the oil tank for cleaning, but had been a little careless in its re-installation, assuming that the oil lines connected in a manner that would have been dictated by a more well thought out design - in other words, without crossing in their short path.

This article among others published in the UTMC were originally published on "The Pat Inniss Website", they are reprinted with the permission of Pat Innis. Pat is an accomplished journalist and has had his works published in a great deal of print media including: Tri-Communities Newspaper in Seattle, The Examiner: the newsletter of the African Americans for Humanism, Secular Subjects (where he eventually served as president). He also produced the local access cable TV program "Freethinking 101".