This afternoon the phone rings and it's a nice man calling about the starter shaft I need for the Douglas flat twin I bought from Paul Swindell on E-bay and had advertised for in SEM. Not that he had one (naturally!), but he did have another complete engine for sale & was I interested?
Well, I might be ..........
So it was that I discovered what can only be a very late show engine. The heads are aluminium and all the fittings, exposed SV tappet blocks, throttle & governor linkage etc, etc are bright chrome plated, the exhaust stubs are cut off at a neat diagonal and painted red inside. The crankcase is polished as are the exposed surfaces of the head fins which are curvy and streamlined in a manner reminiscent of the OHV motorcycle heads. All the black painted bits are gloss black, chipped, certainly, but originally very smart indeed.
I bought it, of course, and for a very reasonable sum. Interestingly, it has a gas carburettor. The flywheel has little stubby fins on the rim and apparently they were never close cowled in service. Most of its not inconsiderable mass is provided by a very normal-looking coil spring car clutch. As it is all aluminium apart from barrels and flywheel, it will be quite light when divested of the clutch, an important feature for me!
I've not looked into it, but I strongly suspect it has never fired in anger. It rotates readily enough, but has little compression & I suspect the rings are stuck fast in their grooves with ancient oil.
It comes complete with a starting handle and has the cross shaft I was looking for, but that's no help as it would be criminal to rob this very complete example. Life is fun, but never simple ............
The vendor is a gentleman of mature years and used to work at Douglas' just after the War. He used to build engines of this type and told me they were fitted to the Douglas Auto Truck. He was also a motorcycle tester and showed me photos of the prototype 500cc Mk V on which he did some 20,000 miles clipped to a sidecar. It would have been the making of the company post war, but they couldn't afford to tool up for production.
He also had a couple of Edgar Westbury 80 watts, an EEC version and the Douglas version. He remembered them being built by women sitting at a bench backed by a moving belt. It was a proper production line and each operative did a single task. If there was a problem, the part-built unit was lifted over the beltway and put on a shelf that was accessed from the other side. A "snagger" came along regularly and fixed these so as not to hold up the line. I've got a couple of these neat little engines and he had a very useful tip. He'd replaced the original armoured petrol pipe with some modern plastic pipe. The original is rubber lined and whilst it is OK for a while, it is perished and the rubber lining swells with fresh petrol in it, slowing and eventually blocking the supply. This of course explains why both of mine run for about ten minutes, then slowly lean off and splutter to a halt. If you have a fifty year old armoured flexible petrol hose on an engine of yours, you might like to check this out.
I'll take some pictures tomorrow
regards,
Kim Siddorn.