| Renaissance of a scrambler: fathers, sons, and old bikes by John Saxby (before he went to S.A.) |
| Ottawa Section CVMG |
On the first weekend of September, my son David and I launched “57 AJS”, my 350 cc 16MCS. This, after a
gestation longer than that of the great woolly mammoth. This bike had not run since 1965. Here it is in July
2002: [“after” photo goes here]
And it looks bloody marvelous, all twinkly in the sunshine, that burnished Lyta tank against the greenery, and
framed by the silver birches. AMC got the lines and proportions right—it really is a handsome bike. But it was
not always thus…
My part in this story begins on a raw March day in 1981, on Long Island. A friend was moving to Chicago, and
said he had a British bike, a scrambler, his wife had said that if the bike went to Chicago she wouldn’t, so would I
take it off his hands for a dollar. I said sure, why not, so out we went to the garage. It may once have been a
scrambler, but it didn’t look like any scrambler I had ever seen: [“before” photo goes here] Once painted
Ghastly Maroon, it was now Shabby, Cracked and Peeling Ghastly Maroon, so rather against my better judgment
I handed over my dollar and carted it back to my lady’s apartment in New York. The Puerto Rican guys who
maintained the building were tickled—what was this thing, who was this guy—and I didn’t know quite what to tell
them. I thought I had a cooking single, but I scraped away the crud, looked in the books and learned that–lo!—I
had the shortstroke high compression alloy competition job. I knew nothing about the bike or the marque, having
been raised on Japanese twostrokes, though Jim MacIlvena, my dealer in Peterborough (Ont.) all those years
ago ran G50’s and 7R’s on the track, and Ajays on the dirt.
Seems my friend had bought this bike with a mate in Vermont in the mid-60’s, and said mate had run it at high
RPM down the freeway, with results no less dire for being predictable: valves met piston, and cams met
pushrods going the wrong way. But Berliner was still in business then, so my friend replaced the pushrods and
cams, and regularly squirted oil into the cylinder and kicked it over, for fifteen years. So its innards were free, but
the rest of it slowly corroded in the damp Long Island air.
With the bemused encouragement of the maintenance guys I did a preliminary stripdown and reassembly, using
BMS’ excellent reprints to check as best I could what needed renewing or replacing; joined the club and got an
encouraging (but sobering) note from Bob Boaden, who remarked with British understatement that I “had a lot of
work there”; sent the seat to Earl Hungerford in Florida, who did an extraordinary rebuild in ten days for the
modest sum of $85.00; bought that one-off 2.5 gal. alloy tank for a pittance by today’s standards; and then left it
all in storage while we got married and went to Southern Africa for nearly seven years. In the midst of all that, I
had the privilege of visiting Chopper at Hamrax, bless him, with a huge list of parts, found them all, and was
treated to a fish-and-chips lunch on the firm.
And eventually returned to Canada, and deposited the bike in the basement workshop of our new house. And of
course all the usual paraphernalia of married life took over: work, hockey (for David and myself), renovating the
kitchen, stuff at the kids’ school, hockey, voluntary work, hiking and canoeing, and did I mention hockey?
The Ajay, meanwhile, languished in the workshop, and became known as a bit of a folly. Friends would ask, with
a quiet snicker, “How’s the bike going, John?” Well … it was in large lumps, and mostly, nothing much happened.
Until one evening in the workshop some three or four years ago. David, by now a teenager, said, “Dad, if you
don’t fix this bike, I’m going to be”—he chose an impossibly distant day—“twenty-six before it’s done.” So I asked
if he’d help me with it, he said he would, and we set to work rebuilding the Ajay from the ground up.
We were helped on our way by exemplary service from the Club Spares Scheme, and from Russell’s and Armour’
s (nice upswept exhaust, eh?). Dave Lindsley rebuilt the mag and the dynamo. Gary Courville of Gary’s Custom
Cycle in Ottawa did a superb job of rechroming the wheels and small bits and enamelling the frame; Rob Roy of
Nepean rebuilt the engine with care and precision; and Fred Crawford of Delta, ace machinist and mechanic,
took time out from a friend’s Indian to overhaul the transmission and outwit a few badassed gremlins. David and I
did the assembly, and the painting and the endless polishing—David did every single one of the 80 spokes, and
with his sure hand painted the cast “AJS” in the magchain cover. But the pièce de résistance belongs to
Domiracer in Cincinnati, who sold me an unused plus-040 piston!
And of course we learned a lot, about ourselves and about these bikes. David learned the lore of the Prince of
Darkness, and all the savagely accurate jokes about the Brits drinking warm beer because Lucas makes their
refrigerators. (I make these with impunity, born in Dorset with family roots in Sussex that go back a thousand-odd
years.) I found things that bordered on the mystical and bizarre. A “Patent Pending” decal for the pressed-steel
primary case—what on earth were they thinking?? That someone might copy the wretched thing?? At first we
couldn’t fit the repro spindle-and-bearing assembly into the front hub. The outer bearing race didn’t fit over the
caged taper bearings because—I swear this is the truth—one of them had been fitted back to front! Rob and I
figured out how to take off the cage, reverse the offending item, and reassemble. (For a modest sum, I’ll explain
the secret to readers with the same problem, or to the merely curious.) While I patiently chamfered the head of
the lower rear crankcase through bolt, to make the necessary clearance to attach the oil-line union, David,
astonished, said, “Dad, this makes no sense at all…” “Ah, my son, this is why the Japanese now make
motorcycles, and the English do not.” Near the end of it all, I hooked up my speedo and headlamp, only to find
that the drive cable of the former fouled the switch of the latter and I had to rotate the speedo 45 to turn the
blessed headlamp on—Dear god! Are they all like that, or is it just me and this bike?? And sometimes good
sense prevailed in spite of everything: when I was polishing a deep gouge in the magchain cover, David said,
“Leave it, Dad—it adds authenticity.” Smart kid.
Of course it all took much longer than we had expected. There were unforeseen misalignments—this bike had
been seriously pranged in its murky past, and both the lower fork yoke and one of those footpegs you could use
for fishing-boat anchors had been bent. There were always odd bits to be found, and allconsuming hockey
schedules intervened (David took time out to help his team win a couple of championships), but this July, with the
help of some strapping teenagers, we got it up the basement stairs, through the renovated kitchen (!!) and into
Ontario’s brilliant summer sunshine.
But of course we couldn’t start it – there was a nice fat blue spark, but I had the ignition timing wrong, and only
with the help of local fundi David Makin did we get it to fire. And then we heard a Mysterious and Possibly
Terminal Clank, somewhere between the primary case and the gearbox. But Fred Crawford’s ministrations
sorted that out, and he resealed the primary chaincase so that it didn’t leak. (Barely, anyway…) The gremlins
had one last card to play: my pattern front spindle was several thou too large for the hub, and that was why it was
so difficult to adjust the front wheel bearings properly. But Fred skimmed a few thou off the outer bearing races
and—voilà!—problem solved.
There followed some weeks of low-intensity skirmishing with several bureaucracies here and in Vermont to get it
appraised, insured and plated, all with the help of Felix Gaim and his merry elves at Cycle Salvage. And then, in
early September, at last – it moved!
We’re privileged to live in the Ottawa Valley. Justly famous for its canoeing and winter sports, it’s also great
motorcycling country—at least between April and October, with farmland and rolling hills on the Ontario side,
steeper twisty bits in Western Quebec, hundreds of rivers and lakes, and the whole lot sprinkled with pubs and
country inns. So I’ve put a couple of hundred miles on the bike this past month. The engine is loosening up, and
has lots of oomph. And, it’s oiltight—Rob did his work really well. The gearbox is smooth and positive, and the
brakes are adequate, just. The exhaust note is “healthy”, so we’ll try to modulate that over the winter. Of course
there’s an electrical problem (with my generator), but the Ajay starts easily and is a treat to ride. Twenty-some
years back, who’d ever have guessed it?
John Saxby
Ottawa, Ont.
October 2
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gestation longer than that of the great woolly mammoth. This bike had not run since 1965. Here it is in July
2002: [“after” photo goes here]
And it looks bloody marvelous, all twinkly in the sunshine, that burnished Lyta tank against the greenery, and
framed by the silver birches. AMC got the lines and proportions right—it really is a handsome bike. But it was
not always thus…
My part in this story begins on a raw March day in 1981, on Long Island. A friend was moving to Chicago, and
said he had a British bike, a scrambler, his wife had said that if the bike went to Chicago she wouldn’t, so would I
take it off his hands for a dollar. I said sure, why not, so out we went to the garage. It may once have been a
scrambler, but it didn’t look like any scrambler I had ever seen: [“before” photo goes here] Once painted
Ghastly Maroon, it was now Shabby, Cracked and Peeling Ghastly Maroon, so rather against my better judgment
I handed over my dollar and carted it back to my lady’s apartment in New York. The Puerto Rican guys who
maintained the building were tickled—what was this thing, who was this guy—and I didn’t know quite what to tell
them. I thought I had a cooking single, but I scraped away the crud, looked in the books and learned that–lo!—I
had the shortstroke high compression alloy competition job. I knew nothing about the bike or the marque, having
been raised on Japanese twostrokes, though Jim MacIlvena, my dealer in Peterborough (Ont.) all those years
ago ran G50’s and 7R’s on the track, and Ajays on the dirt.
Seems my friend had bought this bike with a mate in Vermont in the mid-60’s, and said mate had run it at high
RPM down the freeway, with results no less dire for being predictable: valves met piston, and cams met
pushrods going the wrong way. But Berliner was still in business then, so my friend replaced the pushrods and
cams, and regularly squirted oil into the cylinder and kicked it over, for fifteen years. So its innards were free, but
the rest of it slowly corroded in the damp Long Island air.
With the bemused encouragement of the maintenance guys I did a preliminary stripdown and reassembly, using
BMS’ excellent reprints to check as best I could what needed renewing or replacing; joined the club and got an
encouraging (but sobering) note from Bob Boaden, who remarked with British understatement that I “had a lot of
work there”; sent the seat to Earl Hungerford in Florida, who did an extraordinary rebuild in ten days for the
modest sum of $85.00; bought that one-off 2.5 gal. alloy tank for a pittance by today’s standards; and then left it
all in storage while we got married and went to Southern Africa for nearly seven years. In the midst of all that, I
had the privilege of visiting Chopper at Hamrax, bless him, with a huge list of parts, found them all, and was
treated to a fish-and-chips lunch on the firm.
And eventually returned to Canada, and deposited the bike in the basement workshop of our new house. And of
course all the usual paraphernalia of married life took over: work, hockey (for David and myself), renovating the
kitchen, stuff at the kids’ school, hockey, voluntary work, hiking and canoeing, and did I mention hockey?
The Ajay, meanwhile, languished in the workshop, and became known as a bit of a folly. Friends would ask, with
a quiet snicker, “How’s the bike going, John?” Well … it was in large lumps, and mostly, nothing much happened.
Until one evening in the workshop some three or four years ago. David, by now a teenager, said, “Dad, if you
don’t fix this bike, I’m going to be”—he chose an impossibly distant day—“twenty-six before it’s done.” So I asked
if he’d help me with it, he said he would, and we set to work rebuilding the Ajay from the ground up.
We were helped on our way by exemplary service from the Club Spares Scheme, and from Russell’s and Armour’
s (nice upswept exhaust, eh?). Dave Lindsley rebuilt the mag and the dynamo. Gary Courville of Gary’s Custom
Cycle in Ottawa did a superb job of rechroming the wheels and small bits and enamelling the frame; Rob Roy of
Nepean rebuilt the engine with care and precision; and Fred Crawford of Delta, ace machinist and mechanic,
took time out from a friend’s Indian to overhaul the transmission and outwit a few badassed gremlins. David and I
did the assembly, and the painting and the endless polishing—David did every single one of the 80 spokes, and
with his sure hand painted the cast “AJS” in the magchain cover. But the pièce de résistance belongs to
Domiracer in Cincinnati, who sold me an unused plus-040 piston!
And of course we learned a lot, about ourselves and about these bikes. David learned the lore of the Prince of
Darkness, and all the savagely accurate jokes about the Brits drinking warm beer because Lucas makes their
refrigerators. (I make these with impunity, born in Dorset with family roots in Sussex that go back a thousand-odd
years.) I found things that bordered on the mystical and bizarre. A “Patent Pending” decal for the pressed-steel
primary case—what on earth were they thinking?? That someone might copy the wretched thing?? At first we
couldn’t fit the repro spindle-and-bearing assembly into the front hub. The outer bearing race didn’t fit over the
caged taper bearings because—I swear this is the truth—one of them had been fitted back to front! Rob and I
figured out how to take off the cage, reverse the offending item, and reassemble. (For a modest sum, I’ll explain
the secret to readers with the same problem, or to the merely curious.) While I patiently chamfered the head of
the lower rear crankcase through bolt, to make the necessary clearance to attach the oil-line union, David,
astonished, said, “Dad, this makes no sense at all…” “Ah, my son, this is why the Japanese now make
motorcycles, and the English do not.” Near the end of it all, I hooked up my speedo and headlamp, only to find
that the drive cable of the former fouled the switch of the latter and I had to rotate the speedo 45 to turn the
blessed headlamp on—Dear god! Are they all like that, or is it just me and this bike?? And sometimes good
sense prevailed in spite of everything: when I was polishing a deep gouge in the magchain cover, David said,
“Leave it, Dad—it adds authenticity.” Smart kid.
Of course it all took much longer than we had expected. There were unforeseen misalignments—this bike had
been seriously pranged in its murky past, and both the lower fork yoke and one of those footpegs you could use
for fishing-boat anchors had been bent. There were always odd bits to be found, and allconsuming hockey
schedules intervened (David took time out to help his team win a couple of championships), but this July, with the
help of some strapping teenagers, we got it up the basement stairs, through the renovated kitchen (!!) and into
Ontario’s brilliant summer sunshine.
But of course we couldn’t start it – there was a nice fat blue spark, but I had the ignition timing wrong, and only
with the help of local fundi David Makin did we get it to fire. And then we heard a Mysterious and Possibly
Terminal Clank, somewhere between the primary case and the gearbox. But Fred Crawford’s ministrations
sorted that out, and he resealed the primary chaincase so that it didn’t leak. (Barely, anyway…) The gremlins
had one last card to play: my pattern front spindle was several thou too large for the hub, and that was why it was
so difficult to adjust the front wheel bearings properly. But Fred skimmed a few thou off the outer bearing races
and—voilà!—problem solved.
There followed some weeks of low-intensity skirmishing with several bureaucracies here and in Vermont to get it
appraised, insured and plated, all with the help of Felix Gaim and his merry elves at Cycle Salvage. And then, in
early September, at last – it moved!
We’re privileged to live in the Ottawa Valley. Justly famous for its canoeing and winter sports, it’s also great
motorcycling country—at least between April and October, with farmland and rolling hills on the Ontario side,
steeper twisty bits in Western Quebec, hundreds of rivers and lakes, and the whole lot sprinkled with pubs and
country inns. So I’ve put a couple of hundred miles on the bike this past month. The engine is loosening up, and
has lots of oomph. And, it’s oiltight—Rob did his work really well. The gearbox is smooth and positive, and the
brakes are adequate, just. The exhaust note is “healthy”, so we’ll try to modulate that over the winter. Of course
there’s an electrical problem (with my generator), but the Ajay starts easily and is a treat to ride. Twenty-some
years back, who’d ever have guessed it?
John Saxby
Ottawa, Ont.
October 2
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To see the Phoenix rise,
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