My son and I dug the bike out of the back of the garage. The old girl had told us it was a big BSA that we could have for nothing if we cleared out the rest of the accumulated junk in her garage. The BSA was right at the back, so it was not until we had loaded all the other stuff that we were able to see what we had just spent the morning working for.
It was the first time in my life that I had seen a BSA Beagle. It looked quite like those old Honda C100s (which were tarted up as the SS50 moped in the mid seventies). There was a lot of surface rust and an old logbook in a plastic wallet sellotaped on to the seat. One owner, first registered in 1965 and 75cc of four stroke single power.
The old dear reckoned the bike hadn't been run since her husband died, which was ten, or perhaps fifteen, years ago. I had been hoping for a Gold Star, or at least a WD40, instead of some horrible imitation of a Japanese commuter. My son wanted nothing to do with it, so it was slung in a corner of my garage until the winter, when I might have the time and energy to do some work on it.
When I eventually got around to the machine, I was amazed to find that the previous owner had filled the engine up with oil. I drained it off, put in some fresh stuff and fiddled around with the magneto points ignition. A new spark plug revealed that the ignition was working and a bit of petrol in the tank revealed that the tap washers had perished. A bit of drilling and Araldite fitted a decent Japanese tap to the tank. The carb had just a bit of mesh screen rather than a proper filter and no choke, it needed to be flooded with petrol as do most old British bikes.
The tiny engine had quite a lot of compression. Having grown used to the civilisation of the electric button, after ten kicks I was well knackered. My son turned up and he too was half dead after another twenty. The engine had started to make encouraging noises so I tried again. On the third kick the engine came to life with a terrifying roar. Next door's dogs started barking like the Baskerville Hounds.
I quickly turned the engine off. What sounded like a death rattle came from the top end of the motor and we were both choking on the oil fumes being burnt off by the engine. A look up the silencer revealed that it too had been filled with oil. I pushed the machine outside and tried again. First kick got her running and the smoke eventually burnt off. I got the usual screaming act from the wife who went hysterical when she found the sheets she had out drying had turned grey and the neighbour threatened to let his dogs loose if I didn't turn the damn thing off as the engine was interfering with his TV reception.
I set the valves - I had no idea what the real setting was but they seemed so loose that it would do no harm to close them up. That quietened the rattles a little but it was still a noisy bugger. I couldn't try it out as the tyres were perished but I was able to check that the gearbox still worked - the bike leapt forward a yard as the clutch plates had gummed up.
After buying some new tyres - really ancient things, 19 inch in diameter and almost as thin as those fitted to a heavyweight bicycle - I made up some cables, cleaned up the brakes and took off most of the surface rust. I wanted to check that it ran okay before pointing my electric spray gun in its direction.
The first ride was a bit frightening. The chassis shook from the vibes and wallowed from the vile suspension. The leading link front forks were so loose that putting on the front brake resulted in a series of wild lurches. The bike felt like it was running on a narrow strip of tread and about to fall over at any moment. After a quick run up to 45mph, I returned to the garage for further thought.
The coldest winter in memory saved the bike from being sold. It was impossible to ride any of my other machines, so I decided to work on the Beagle. I made up phosphor bronze bearings for the swinging arm and forks, took the cycle parts down to bare metal and sprayed them. The chrome on the bars and wheels had long since disappeared so they ended up gloss black. The pressed steel, spine type frame was full of rust on the inside, so it was hung up and poured full of rust killer before being sprayed.
This took about two months of not particularly hard work. I left the engine alone, I knew from past experience that once you started taking a British engine apart, you'd never get it back together again unless you replaced all the bearings and half the components. British engines manage to run with a large amount of wear as long as you leave them to their own devices. This is, perhaps, just as well as British engines wear rapidly.
Even if I say so myself, the reassembled machine looked pretty good in its light and dark blue livery. It needed twelve kicks to bring to life this time. I had reset the ignition timing but was not impressed with the flimsy nature of the magneto and points. Handling was markedly improved with the new bearings, but the machine was very light - around 150lbs in my estimation, making it very twitchy. It was rather like riding an old rigid framed machine.
If this directness of ride was disconcerting at first, I soon realised that the bike was not very happy going above 40mph, although on one or two occasions I gritted my teeth and got the speedo twitching around the 55mph mark. The small drum brakes were adequate for moped speeds but a 40mph crash stop to avoid a suicidal pedestrian revealed massive fade. It may just have been than they should have been relined and reshoed but past experience with British brakes suggested otherwise.
The machine was limited in speed because of the outpouring of vibration. The engine was especially vibratory when buzzed in third, changing up to fourth as soon as possible was a good idea. This enforced restrained riding showed up the Beagle as remarkable in one aspect - it was an incredibly frugal machine, doing anything between 150 and 170mpg. Why should such an ancient, worn out engine be so very good in economy - even a brand new C50 ridden at similar speeds won't do no more than 125mpg!
Not that the Beagle could be considered as a practical means of transport. The lights made it unsafe to ride at night. There was no battery, the lights were powered directly by the magneto. Below 20mph they were a faint glimmer, above 40mph the bulbs blew and in between you'd be better off using a bicycle lamp. The engine also had a habit of stalling at junctions just as the lights changed to green. I was often left leaping up and down on the kickstart whilst car drivers screamed abuse at me for holding up their progress.
The magneto and carb conspired to make the machine totally unreliable. The latter would occasionally fall off, more often it shed jets and mesh filter, whilst the former was pure junk. The timing seemed to change over the course of a journey. Set perfectly at the beginning, after 25 miles the engine would barely run, misfiring like half the spark plug was about to fall out. Still, I soon became a dab hand at a quick timing change.
Despite the new bearings, the bike didn't like to go around corners fast (as in 40mph). There was a disconcerting tendency to run wide and head into the bumper of oncoming cars. Anyone who has ridden an NSU Quickly will understand what I mean. Backing off the throttle caused the back tyre to leap around like a H1 in heat. I have never ridden a bike so frightening at such low speeds, but then it may just have been down to the worn out suspension. It looked so skimpy that time could do nothing but wear it out rapidly!
The bike could be hear coming from miles away. Doubtless whole areas of suburbia cursed it when their TV reception went awry. It rattled, roared and rang through the town, a huge rucksack full of tools strapped to the pillion perch. It was certainly a talking point. Every time it broke down some old duffer came out of the wood offering useless suggestions as to how to fix it and telling me they don't make them like that, these days. I always replied that, these days. you can buy brand new Triumphs and Nortons, which stuns those out of the game for a long time into silence. On paper the Beagle was probably a neat design, cheap enough to produce to fend off the Japanese commuter hordes. On the road it's a terrible heap, a quaint bit of British engineering malpractice. However, I've grown to like its idiosyncrasies and will keep doing a couple of thousand miles a year on it.
William Farnham