Tales of Whoa! Pt.2.

Gaskets and ignition switches.

In spite of my mother’s accident, a number of years later, I became the owner of a 175cc BSA Bantam (D7?). It was purchased from a now defunct bike dealer in Steyning and was my first bike. So I sorted out my insurance and went to pick up this bike. They put the keys in it and started it for me and away I went.

The great thing about this bike was the essential simplicity of everything, you could do everything yourself: changing the oil, gapping the plug, tinkering with the carb, polishing the head. Of course, I did this with very little knowledge, common sense or caution.

So away I go; I’m going to take off the head, polish it, grind it, using a sheet of glass and grinding paste, to make it flat and increase the compression ratio (No, really, I believed it! I was young and foolish!). So I undo the 4 cylinder head bolts, whip off the head, polish the head and the piston crown using Autosol and cloths (DOH!) and then think about putting this all back together. Gasket, I need a gasket. I know, I’ve heard that you can make them out of cereal boxes. So I go and make a gasket out of a cereal box, load it with red Hermatite, slap it on the cylinder and bolt on the head.

At this point, a number of you will have spotted the mistake. For those of you as technically competent as me at that age who haven’t, the mistake is this…a head gasket is made of METAL! In slight mitigation, there wasn’t a head gasket there in the first place.

So, I’ve slapped it all together, put the plug back in and reconnected it to the HT lead; I turn the key, close the cold start vanes on the carb and kick the bike over. Nothing. I kick it over again; nothing except a funny sucking noise. Once more; the same sucking noise and its getting hard to kick over. I look for the sucking noise and see the space between the head and the cylinder where the gasket isn’t, ‘cos it’s been sucked into the cylinder! So I turn the ignition off, dismantle the head, clean out this disaster of a gasket and reassemble as was i.e. without a gasket. (I didn’t know! And  anyway, the bike ran!) I did eventually fit a proper head gasket, just to put your minds at rest.

However, the astute and knowledgeable amongst you will have spotted something non-standard about this Bantam, yes, the ignition switch. You see, Bantams of this age certainly didn’t have an ignition switch (I didn’t know!) but the humour of this after-market addition to mine was the it wasn’t wired in! It did nothing, well except make me feel like a prat when I discovered that it had no function…or wires.

Ah, the naivety of youth!