Forty Four Years of Family
Sidecars by Colin
Atkinson(2022)
Having
just parted with what is probably my last sidecar outfit I thought that I would
put down in words my thoughts on my experiences of sidecar combinations and driving
(never riding) them. So, here is the story of how and why I got to know them.
As a child my family never had a car and so all travel was normally by bus or
train. However I had an occasional experience of a ride out in my aunt and
uncle’s sidecar outfit as a child and enjoyed it greatly, although once on a
bike of my own all thoughts of sidecars disappeared. What on earth would I want
something like that fixed to the side of my bike for, not only would
it take all
the fun out of riding
but it was engineered all wrong it seemed. They were my views as a young rider and I quite often made them
known. Later on though I was to change my mind completely and regret those
words spoken in ignorance.
I
married in 1972 and we moved to a bungalow with the luxury of a garage. Pam (my
wife) accompanied me on the bike to various runs out, rallies and visits to
friends etc. After four years or so of this and getting to enjoy it, it was a
shock to realise that the birth of our son would bring it all to an end and
that joint visits out in the future
would have to be by car. I had reached that
common motorcycling crossroads and I didn't fancy the option of the usual route
taken by many motorcyclists,
that of giving up the bike completely. The obvious answer, once our son had reached about two years old,
although not without a certain amount of misgivings on my part, was
to fit a sidecar to my 1954 500cc BSA
Star Twin plunger sprung A7(and thereby following in my uncle's Footsteps as his sidecar was also fitted to
a BSA Star Twin). The misgivings this time though were not
really because I still didn't
fancy driving a sidecar
but because of the amount of space it would take up in my
garage, as the garage had filled up in the five years since we had moved
in and things were getting a little "tight" in there.
Anyway,
eventually a suitable sidecar became available from a motorcycling work
colleague and with it bolted to the BSA (a task which sounds a lot
easier than it actually was as
the sidecar had previously been
fitted to a Panther motorcycle and none of the
fittings were the same as needed for the BSA and strange as it might seem these
fittings weren't as easily
available then as they became later on in my sidecar career). I launched
myself into the world of sidecar driving, only frightening myself a couple
of times in the process, including one incident on a road near to where I live when coming
up behind a car. The driver
suddenly decided to change direction.
In taking avoiding action my text book knowledge of sidecar driving
disappeared as I frantically tried to wrestle the outfit out of the way of the
car. Coming to rest, eventually, with
the sidecar wheel bumping up on to the edge of the pavement, I then indulged in
much "engine peerings" when a head
popped up over the garden wall, eighteen inches from where I came to
rest, to see what all the noise was about.
After all, I had to give the impression that I had just casually pulled
up there deliberately, as you do, just for an inspection. I wouldn't, of course, want to panic anyone
with the realisation that I had been out of control in any way and in possible
danger of demolishing his wall.
Our first sidecar outfit, BSA Star Twin
and homemade (not by me) sidecar
I
straight away enjoyed sidecar driving, despite one or two more ‘panic moments’,
fortunately when nothing was coming in the opposite direction. Its
peculiarities and driving techniques demand more concentration that just about
any other vehicle and the satisfaction of "doing it right" is great.
It is no substitute for a solo but is totally complimentary in my opinion and
it changed my previous views completely. Mark (our son) took to it right away
and it never failed to send him pleasantly off to sleep on a longer journey.
However, with our climate being what it is, I felt that a saloon child/adult
sidecar so that Pam could travel in the sidecar with Mark so that they could
both keep dry was a better bet than our current single seat open type. So I purchased a brand new Briggs
child/adult saloon and together with it, another bike, an MZ TS250/1. A 250cc
motorcycle might seem small for pulling a child adult sidecar, even a small
one. But we had met an owner with just such a bike on a new Briggs Swift sidecar
while on holiday in the Isle of Man in 1980 and he was pleased with his new
outfit so I decided that we would have one the same. I ordered a new sidecar
from Briggs, a firm near Redditch, bought a secondhand MZ locally and rode it
up to Briggs for them to fit the sidecar for me. I then rode the completed
outfit home from there and all seemed fine.
Both
Pam and Mark declared satisfaction with the new sidecar (the other outfit was
still kept, just for the time being you understand!), but on our first few
journeys I realised that I had made a mistake with the MZ. I had
bought it because the only other
Briggs saloon I had seen previously was also attached to one and the owner had declared himself satisfied with it. However, he only carried
a small dog in his, whereas I had one and a half humans in mine and the MZ brakes
were just not good enough. While toying with disc brake conversions etc,
the chance arose to purchase a Suzuki GT380 two-stroke triple at a bargain
price, complete with disc brakes. So
very soon it became mine and that was when I got to meet Keith Wash. A work
colleague had just bought a house from Keith in Chelmsford and he told me that
the person who he was buying the house from was moving to Sible Hedingham to
start his own business making sidecars. This was ideal for me as I needed
someone to fit the Suzuki to my sidecar, so I took a trip up to Sible Hedingham
to meet Keith at his new firm of Unit Sidecars and he fitted the bike to the
sidecar for me. (I still kept the MZ as a solo, of course. You can see why
garage gets filled up!). To fit a sidecar to the Suzuki meant removing the two
left hand silencers as they got in the way of the fittings. Unfortunately the
only suitable exhaust system I could get for the bike was a very loud Piper 3
into 1 expansion chamber exhaust. Keith and I often laughed about it later as
he said that when I collected the outfit from him he said that he could hear
every gearchange between his workshop and Wethersfield (the next village)
several miles away. I soon managed to fit an extra baffle box to that exhaust
to cut down on the excessive noise level. I also later on had Keith make up a
set of his leading link Earles type Unit Forks to the front of the Suzuki.
Meanwhile
I had started using the previous BSA Star Twin outfit for commuting to work in
bad winter weather when to use a solo bike would have not been a good idea but
a sidecar outfit could cope with adverse conditions such as snow also better
than a car. However in 1982 I took a job in London, where commuting had to be
by solo bike in the better weather and a combination of bike (to the station)
then train for the rest for the worst three months of the year. So the BSA
outfit was sold to a new owner in Suffolk and I had one last run on it in the
summer of that year when delivering it to his home. It was a really good run
and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
While
the 380cc two-stroke Suzuki might not seem the ideal choice for pulling a
sidecar it in fact served us very well for three years, giving no trouble at
all during that time. It was eventually bake to Keith for it to be changed for
another Suzuki, a GT500 two-stroke twin this time, for no other reason than an
expectation of more performance, which was not entirely realised. I didn’t need
a new set of forks this time though as I just changed the front end of the two
Suzukis. The Briggs outfit took us on two holidays to the Isle of Man and it
was while on the second of these, when the weather was not so good, that Pam
and Mark both realised the fact that as he had now outgrown the child portion
of the sidecar it meant that one of them was going to have to get wet on the
back of the bike. This didn’t go down too well with either of them.
Dissension
in the ranks could not be endured and the obvious answer (to me) was an even
bigger sidecar. As the BSA outfit had
been sold when I went to work in London and no longer needed to use it
for going to work in the winter I thought I would have room if I got rid of the Briggs outfit plus a couple of
solos. However, before I had got rid of anything I was attracted by an advert
in the sidecar club's magazine and before I knew it I became the owner of a
most enormous treble adult saloon sidecar attached to a Suzuki GS850G shaft
drive four cylinder “tug”. No problem with carrying anyone or anything in this
- but I still kept the other one as well, just for the time being, you
understand!. Meanwhile the garden was also filling up with bikes as well as the
garage.
As
I now had the big Suzuki and sidecar for the long runs I no longer needed the
Briggs for that role. Pam had mentioned that the vibration from the GT500 used
to give her headaches at times and fancying having an old and plunger sprung
bike on a ‘chair’ again it was once more off to Unit Sidecars for the GT500 to
be removed and a 1957 BSA M21 600cc sidevalve to be fitted. This time I never
bothered with leading link forks as the performance was quite low, but I did
fit the larger 8 inch BSA front brake to the bike. In this form it served us
well for quite a few club runs. However although its performance was a
disappointment when compared with my old Star Twin I would probably have kept
it longer except that a friend kept pestering me to sell him the BSA on the
grounds that I no longer really needed both outfits. In the end I did so but
soon regretted it as he never kept the bike for long in any case. I still had
another 250cc MZ so I fitted the Briggs to that, but it was a four speed model
and the engine just did not have the power to bridge the gap between gear
ratios like it could with the five speed gearbox. So I split the bike from the
sidecar and sold them separately when I admitted to myself that my collecting
extravagance was getting out of hand.
Quite
a few
years has passed since then
and Mark no
longer travelled with us as passenger. He had his own transport and
family and when he went to events with us he used his own bikes. However, Pam
liked our big "bungalow on wheels" sidecar and would not let me swap
it for a sports single seater. So we still kept it, although with hindsight it
would have been better to have kept the smaller Briggs instead as we no longer
needed the two seats for very long after I got rid of the Briggs and it would
have been both smaller and easier (weight wise) to manage as I became older,
although I never thought of such things at that time. The thing about sidecars
though is that I never seemed to settle on what bike I wish to be permanently
fitted to them as I always got tempted by bikes which I think might be better
but yet often proved to be disasters. The Briggs had The 5 speed MZ, then the
two Suzukis and finally a BSA M21 600cc side valve pulling it (the later 4
speed MZ hardly counted as it only made a couple of journeys) and the large one
came with the Suzuki GS850, which I later changed for a Harley Davidson
Sportster and then a Moto Shifty and to me the changes were always made for
seemingly logical, if misguided reasons at the time, as was the case with both
the Harley and the Shifty which both turned out to be disasters. I changed the
Suzuki GS850G for the Harley because the four cylinder air cooled Suzuki used
to get hot and bothered very quickly when caught up in traffic. I figured that
the Harley would be better for this and I was right. However when I went to
collect it from Keith at Unit Sidecars he said, ’Jump in and I will take you
round for the MOT’. As soon as he started the engine I knew I had made an
expensive mistake as the noise an vibration was terrible. I could never let Pam
travel in it like that So I never took her out in it until I had rubber mounted
the body from the chassis using six BMC Mini engine mounting rubbers. This did
make it tolerable, but never really pleasant. Even so, it pulled the sidecar
for about three years.
One
thing I have found through these experiences though is that I think plunger
sprung motorcycles make the best sidecar “tugs” as not only can the rear
mountings be fitted right at the back, by the bike rear axle, but the limited
rear suspension movement means that there is much less risk of the sidecar
wheel lifting on left hand bends. This all makes for a more “taught” feeling
outfit which can be “hustled” around the bends in a more “spirited” manner and
without the wallowing which can be experienced when bikes with greater rear
suspension movement are used. The downside is, of course, that you do feel more
bumps with the plungers, but I am willing to live with that and to my mind my
original plunger BSA Star Twin gave me the best handling outfit that I have yet
owned and the most enjoyable to drive.
As
the Harley did not prove to be the success that I hoped it would be the sidecar
was then attached by Unit Sidecars to the Moto Shifty 900 that I had seen
advertised in Old Bike Mart magazine. Remembering a favourable road test of
this rather strange bike powered by a Fiat car engine when it first came out
that said that it should make an ideal sidecar ‘tug’ I just had to have it. So
with much more expense it was fitted to the sidecar and a set of Unit’s Forks
fitted to it. This also was not a successful partnership as the bike
transmission was not up to the task and the whole exercise proved a very
expensive and disastrous failure with us only travelling about 40 miles from
home on our first intended long run before the gearbox virtually exploded. When
taken apart it was obvious why the disaster had happened and there was no way
that the transmission would ever be strong enough to haul the sidecar. Italian
engineering at its very worst and what could have been a good sidecar bike
ruined for the cheapest production ‘quick fix’ of what was a very expensive
bike. So the bike was removed and the sidecar sat sadly in the garage (in
disgrace?) for 5 years while I sulked over the Shifty experience. Then I
suddenly felt the need to be driving a sidecar once again and so along came the
BMW 1100GS from Ron Pauley of Unit Sidecars (and yet more expense, as fitting a
“chair” to a bike always costs a deal of money) which was successful enough for
us to keep it like that for 18 years. Which was longer than the other three
bikes that had hauled it put together. For the first ten or twelve years it got
a fair amount of use going to various events and rallies of the AJS &
Matchless and British Two Stroke Clubs. After 2007 Pam could no longer travel
on a pillion and so it was the only way that we could still share motorcycles
together and therefore it took on a new relevance to our lives. However as we
have got older and both developed more aches and pains it was becoming ever
harder to push and pull the outfit about when needed (no reverse gear), which
was at least every time that I wanted to get another bike out of my garage. It
was also not getting used anywhere near as much by then either. So after
agonising about parting with it for some three years we got the final push when
our usual MOT tester had a serious illness and his shop was closed when the MOT
ran out. Also, when he returned to work his doctors said that pushing and
pulling something as heavy as our outfit around during testing was out of the
question. So with not a little sadness we decided that this was the time to
quit, while all out sidecarring memories were good ones. The complete outfit
with its unique Hedingham coach built sidecar has now gone off to a new home
with a member of the Hedingham Sidecar Club and I hope that he will get as much
enjoyment from it as we have over the 35 years that it has been part of our
lives.
So
I say, “Long live the sidecar outfit”, that strange beast that can become quite
a compulsion.
The BMW and
“Bungalow on Wheels” our last sidecar outfit at the 2007 Jampot Rally