Sunday, June 28, 2009
This blog is a bit of motorcycling miscellania that should prove interesting......
Left click on images to enlarge....
When the automobile first arrived on the scene, they had really no dashboard and primative instruments.
The three following photographs are of what you did in 1910 to tell the time while you were driving...remember you were out in the open, suitably rugged up for an English winter and access to your watch was pretty difficult.
You purchased the brass holder, screwed it to the firewall, slipped your watch into it and fitted the cover over it....
The watch incidently is a 1918 Waltham.....
I had an email from Barrie James in the UK...he'd just purchased a Dodkin "Special" from Geoff Dodkin, who had built it in his retirement.
Geoff Dodkin was the well known London Velocette dealer in East Sheene.
When he took delivery of it in February this year, 2009, Geoff produced a special clock which he gave to Barrie and mentioned that I had given it to him sometime in the 1980's...I then recalled building it in my shop...both are pictured below....
Always time for a cartoon.....
This little Smiths booklet comes up on auctions from time to time and is well worth having...
A few pages from it follow.
Of interest because they tell you how to determine the speedo ratio of your motorcycle and compare it to your speedometer. Only Smiths speedos had the instrument ratio on the dial, and even then not on prewar ones. It is the three or four digit number following the dial code.
Examples are 1600, 1584, 1610 etc, or 900, 1000 if a kilometre version....
Japanese motorcycle speedos are ALWAYS 1400TPKM or 2240 TPM.
Finally, I often get asked after the name of my business.... KTT Services..... well I was and still am a KTT enthusiast, although I no longer have one...
The logo I un-ashamedly "pinched" from the 1959 edition of "Motor Cycling" Sports Road Tests....
The car was my then 1970 Rover 2000 TC.
This was taken a while back...
Did you look closely at the dial behind the rider, who incidently is the late John Griffiths, a "MotorCycling" road tester and journalist aboard the Veloce factory licenced Venom Clubman, licence number SOX-631.
SOX-631 appears on road test machines a lot...Vipers, Venom Clubman, Venom with Steib sidecar and so on...
It indicates 100mph a figure that was held in "awe" at the time....
But the dial is a 120mph version, altered by the art department at Temple Press to show 100...look where the 60 is halfway down the dial...