Zenith Bi Car
That other image of the Zenith Bi Car was too hard to read, but I found this one in an old Floyd Clymer book tonight. Click the pic to enlarge it.
Enjoy.
Identify that bike
Greg S. in Australia submitted a request via the OcchioLungo page on Facebook, and asked if our readers can help to identify the bike in the photo below:
Maybe is a ladies model, with that shape to the petrol tank… It is pretty early, with the AIV and updraft carb. I thought the tank emblem was like Rex, but is too round and not pointy enough. If anybody has any ideas, send us a note via the “Comment” button.
It looks similar, but different, to the 1910 James with hub center steering, center stand and single sided hubs:
Thanks Geert and Charlie! They both commented that the bike was a Zenith Bi-Car, from about 1906. I found an ad from the 1907 Australian Coachbuilder and Wheelright magazine:
The First Mono Shock Rear Suspension
Front suspension has been commonly fitted to motorbicycles for the last 100+ years. And some old bikes also featured rear suspension with one or two springs and a swingarm. While Yamaha is remembered for their rear Mono Shock suspension, the idea was certainly not new in the 1970s. 30 years earlier, H.R.D. / Vincent had used a spring under the riders seat to provide travel to a swingarm pivoted on bearings behind the motor. And Vincent did have some novelty to the design, but it wasn’t the first manufacturer to use such a layout. In the years around the Great War, several bike featured rear sprung wheels. The Matchless Model H used a design with two coil springs and a swingarm that would be very familiar to riders 50 years later. Indian famously had their rear wheel sprung via two leaf springs. But the use of a single spring, mounted centrally under the rider’s seat is what we’re after. If you’d like to read about wheels with springs mounted inside them, click this link.
Flying Merkel had a very interesting rear suspension setup in 1909 using twin springs captive in the seat stays of the frame. This one is a later version from 1913-1915 using only one spring unit under the seat. Two struts take the spring force down to the rear axle, which mounts in a swingarm. The pivot can’t been seen in this photo, but it is under the cylindrical oil tank.
Earlier, in 1910 the Perry Vale motorcycle, also known as the PV, used a swingarm that was sprung via compression and rebound springs that attached to the saddle tube. The swingarm pivot was just ahead of the rear axle, so a small amount of wheel travel translated via the long lever arm to a big movement of the springs under the rider’s seat. This photo is from the excellent book; Encyclopeadia of Classic Motorcycles by Richard Rosenthal of The Classic Motorcycle. (It is the best old bike magazine in the world. Buy a subscription!) PV claimed to be the Pioneers of Spring Frame Design. But if we travel back in time a bit further…
One year earlier, NSU introduced their version in 1909. This one was restored by Stan Dishong. So, by 1910ish, we have sprung frame swingarm motorcycles being made in the USA, England and Germany by multiple companies. But did they all create these things in parallel? Were they all independent inventors of the design, working without knowledge of the others?
The English BAT chose a slightly different route, and suspended the rider’s seat and footpegs on a subframe that was sprung via tension springs that allowed movement relative to the bike’s main frame. Ixion wrote in his column that even the very best sprung seats still forced the rider’s legs to dance around on the rigid footpegs. But the BAT rider could float somewhat above the undulations of the chassis. It didn’t help to keep the rear wheel on the road surface, but it must have provided some comfort to a weary Pioneer rider. This was a very interesting idea for the time, but it didn’t feature a swingarm… (Another notable feature on the BAT is the magneto placed in the gas tank! Be careful of leaks mixing with the sparks)
Still, we can go back further into the history of motorcycles and find earlier inventions for a rear swingarm: The initials A.S.L. stood for Air Springs Limited. And we can guess, they used pneumatic springs in their motorbikes. Keeping the air in via the rubber seals was troublesome though, just as Dowty found out with their air spring front forks just after WWII. Modern seal materials might allow for a good air spring system, but the ones used in the old days didn’t last very long. Some books claim they introduced their very novel springing system in c1906, although the first reference that I have been able to authenticate is June 10th, 1908, with the following text in The MotorCycle, writing about the M.C.C. London to Edinburgh Run:
The competing machines represented almost every known make of motor cycle. Several machines made their debut in open competition; the 4 1/2 h.p. A.S.L., ridden by Mr. A. Sharp, fitted with a 4 1/2 h.p. JAP engine, and possessing a distinctly novel feature for a motor bicycle, namely, a pressure fed JAP carburetter; the machine was also suspended fore and aft on Sharp’s patent air springs.
A 1913 advert for an A.S.L. single cylinder bike.
We’ve traced the mono shock swingarm back to 1908, but Lurquin-Coudert offered a really nice bike in 1906 with rear suspension, but it was plungers, not a swingarm. Still, that might be one of the very first plungers. Here are two picks from the excellent French website Z’humeurs & Rumors and a link to the page.
And going back even further, to 1905 France, we have the Stimula. Not much information is available on these bikes. But they did feature a mono shock type rear suspension in addition to the early Traffault front end. Here are two sides to a collector’s card that I found on eBay. The bike is missing a few things (belts and pullies), but the suspension can be seen.
And that 1905 Stimula is the earliest bike that I have found that featured a solo rear spring and a swingarm. Did it spawn ideas that were eventually modified and copied in the UK, USA, Germany and elsewhere, eventually even Japan? Or was there an even earlier example? I think that our readers may know of other early bikes that featured such a setup. Please comment via the little Comment button and we’ll revise the article or write up a new one with any new content that can be found.
And of course we can dig a bit deeper and find that pedal cycles had suspensions in 1888, if not earlier. Here is a Whippet, and an amazing step by step build up of a replica by Paul Brodie (he of the OHC Excelsior repops) can be seen at this link.
And while I was looking through old magazines, I found this great article from 1911. Enjoy:
And a letter to the editor of The Motorcycle magazine, in which the writer describe the modifications he made to his Triumph to equip it with rear suspension. It looks like the PV design, but using ASL springs.
2012 Velocette Spring Opener
May in AltaCalifornia is a busy time and place for the old bike crowd. There are multiple rides, shows, and events each weekend to choose from. But the one that we never miss is the Velo club’s Spring Opener. 100 miles of quick riding through the quiet backroads, dicing with the Thruxtons, KSS’s and occasionally KTT’s. (Not much dicing is done by the family sidecar, but we do our best and always wave as the faster bikes fly past us). The event features at least three John’s each year, sometimes four. And we always get three Pauls. This year we were joined by a half-dozen hot air balloons that lifted off from the bottom of the hill. They were even slower than the sidecar!
No flat tires this year at our first stop, and then a quick blast along Lake Berryessa up to Pope Valley to drink some juice and kick tires.
Kent and his MAC. He has recently got the bike on the road, and had no troubles all day. He enjoyed riding at the comfortable pace that we were subjected to via the sidecar.
Pope Valley Garage
Here is a closeup of the plaque. The small print at the bottom of reads “E. Clampus Vitus”. That is the pig latin motto of the The Clampers, who are a group that is hard to describe. From their own website:
“It is claimed ECV is a historical drinking society; others claim it to be a drinking historical society. The debate continues; it has never been solved.”
They place plaques like this one at places all over California and Nevada. Sometimes they are pretty straightforward like this one. Other times they are placed in random locations such as on a rock next to an official State of CA plaque, or by the door of an old store, or glued to the sidewalk in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, with somewhat fictional text printed on the plaque. So the plaque might honor a real place or event, or it might be completely made up, but tells a good story. From what I can gather, it is a bit of a joke, but a bit serious too. Check their website if you have a few minutes to read some stuff.
We spotted this Clampers plaque in Volcano last fall after the 2011 Girder Fork Ride.
Rambling back to our story, here is a pic of the usual suspects telling lies outside the old Pope general store:
Not all Velos are black and gold. Red, blue, white and green bikes also show up…
John Ray. Velocette rider, racer, general enthusiast and long time club Chairman. Here is his mk7 KTT, with more photos here.
Rambling a bit further, Kim and I went up into the hills on Sunday and scouted for hotels and roads for the 2013 Velocette Summer Rally. Mark your calendars, 3rd week of July. Places like Mt. Lassen, Nevada City, Rough-and-Ready and maybe even Smartsville. To finish the weekend, we spied the solar eclipse from Spanko’s Rancheria.
Yes, a terrible photo. That’s an annular solar elipse as photographed through a welding helmet. Google for better pics.
Next time we’ll get back to 100 year old junk and maybe finally post some more of the How-To articles on the rebuild of the 1913 Veloce…
Serpolette’s Tricycle
To my delight, a new magazine arrived in the inbox this morning. Written and published by our friend Leon Mitchell, Serpolette’s Tricycle is an electronic magazine published in PDF format. Click the link here to visit his new website earlymotor.com and download a copy. It can be copied and emailed to your friends or printed and read.
The magazine is 18 pages filled with photos, stories, questions and answers about early cars, motorcycles, three wheelers and motors in Australia, New Zealand etc. from the 1890’s onward to WWI. If you enjoy reading OcchioLungo, there will be some stuff in S.T. that will definitely grab your attention.
And if you were wondering about the title of the magazine, you can learn more here.
Hap Jones and Bernie Nicholson
How To: rear frame fabrication
More of the ongoing restoration of the 1913 Veloce. Here are some links to earlier articles.
The Veloce project had some damage to the rear frame tubes, just ahead of the rear axle. The rear stand pivots on the dropouts (the lugs that hold the axle) and the stand has two legs which pivot up to rest on the bottom side of the chainstay tubes. Starting the bike is done by pedaling while up on the rear stand, so the chainstay tubes see a bit of stress, and mine were crushed by the strain at some point in the last 99 years.
An advert for Reynolds tubes circa 1920’s, with D tubes and oval tubes and some combination stays:
While it would have been very simple to fill the dents with bronze and then paint over the repair, I wanted something stronger. Knowing that my kids will eventually learn to ride on this bike leads me to make it as strong and safe as possible. And the repair is fairly straightforward: remove the tubes, make new ones, braze them in. Except the tubes are not round, or square. They are D shaped in their cross section. These tubes are not easy to buy, but there are a few companies in the world that I found that make such tubes. And they were glad to quote the manufacture of tube to the correct dimensions, if I wanted to buy the minimum order of 2 tons of tubing…
So, to make some D shaped tubing: First step is to measure everything before cutting out the old tubes. I traced the frame onto paper and kept it as a reference, marking the paper with the measurements from the steel parts.
Then cut open the tube to measure the diameter and flat dimension of the D and the wall thickness too:
Buy some round tubes, and cut them with a slitting saw on the mill. Some other guys have done this also, and they cut the tube with a cutoff wheel and a grinder. That makes it tougher to get a good joint for welding, but it can work.
Buy some flat bar to weld onto the round. I used flat bar that was 2x thicker than the original D, as it made it easier to bend the tubing to shape after welding. Thank you to John Quirke in Ireland for this tip and the general fabrication ideas!
Bryan down at Advanced Welding TIG’ed these for me after I did a lousy job on the sample pieces with my MIG.
Then it was time to bend them into shape and the cut to length.
Here was when things went bad. I heated the tubing to almost red hot, and dropped it in my tubing bender and promptly crushed the tubing. Luckily I had made up several feet extra of the D tubing, so I could experiment a bit.
Eventually I found that I could fill the inside of the tubing with a solid steel bar of D cross section. They are available at steel yards and used for fabricating handrails on modern staircases. With just a touch of grinding it dropped right inside the D. I made it long enough to support the portion that was being bent, plus an inch or two on either side. Now those portions are essentially solid bar stock and are very strong. I did the ends too, the area that the rear stand support legs will hit against, so this exercise won’t have to be repeated sometime in the future.
Then the bending went fine. Fixture it all up and measure a few times to make sure that the dummy axle is square to the rest of the frame, and then brazing it all back into one big piece:
It looks easy, and it almost was. Not shown were the hours and hours of test cuts, test bends, grinding, welding, machining, making fixtures and the other fiddly little things are needed to make new parts fit old bikes.
And here is how the bike looked a few weeks ago. Still a thousand things to finish, but it looks like a motorbike.
Here is a whole different approach for making D tubing using a press.
More How To articles can be found at this link.
