Sanglas of Barcelona first produced a 350 single way back in '42 and remained with this design, updating and developing as they went along until '81 when Yamaha bought out and closed their factory. They did make a 300 for a while in the early sixties and in the same period built some machines using Spanish made Villiers two stroke engines, but their main sellers were the 350 and later 400cc singles for police and military use.
The culmination of their production run of forty years was the 500S2 V5 which is probably the least rare of the Sanglas models in the UK. Various stories surround the appearance and subsequent disappearance of the Sanglas marque over here. A few 400 singles were sold but superseded by the 500 S1 and S2. There was also a 400 Yamaha twin motor carrying the Sanglas logo on the engine casings. This was the machine that spelled the end for the company, sales in Britain were not successful and financial problems did nothing to aid the Spaniards drive to exploit new markets.
Consequently, these machines are few and far between and can't be regarded as a practical proposition for someone looking for a used bike to get around on, however the odd one crops up in the classified ads from time to time and seems to sell, so there must be some people willing to have a bash at them.
Most were imported into England in '79 when several of the bike mags tested and reported on them. Probably being spoilt by big Japanese muscle bikes of the time, the Sanglas was treated as a tarted up old dinosaur with chronic vibration. At that time I was looking to buy a larger machine than my thrashed old CD175 and was quite keen on this Spanish bike but at around £1250 it was out of my price range so I bought an Honda RS250 and forgot about the Sanglas for a few years.
The next time it cropped up was on a journey through northern Spain on an XS650. It was a newly surfaced sweeping downhill and we rode helmetless at between 60 and 90mph when two soldiers passed in the other direction waving at us. I waved back and accelerated away. Around a mile of two further these two bikes swept pass and pulled me over. They were the feared Guarda and wanted to know in Spanish why my helmet was strapped to the rear of the bike. Pleading ignorance and being English got me off the charge but I didn't like the way they had kept their hands on their pistols.
What did impress me was the way in which these Sanglas 400 singles had managed to catch me up when I wasn't hanging around. When I later saw one for sale, it was worth a long journey to see it. The machine turned out to be a 500 S2 with a Squire child/adult sidecar attached, loads of accessories and a recorded mileage of only 12600. When the owner tried to start it the motor would not turn over, no amount of pushing or shoving helped. I made a low offer and it was mine.
Back home I removed the barrel and spent a long time honing this before replacing the rings, which were in the spares kit, and decoking the top end. The machine was on the road in a few weeks and I took up combo riding in earnest. The engine is a pushrod OHV design, slightly oversquare at 90x80mm it'll rev to around 7000rpm, breathing through a Spanish made Mk.2 Concentric carb which seems well matched to the softly tuned motor.
Compression, though, is quite high at 9.3:1, helping to produce 30hp and 5kgm of torque (as much pulling power as an XS650). It's reminiscent of the Panther, it just keeps on pulling whatever you do. There's an electric starter on one end of the crankcase, which operated a gear bolted to the crank flywheel, the other end of the crank operating the oil pump - the engine a sort of wet sump design using the crankcase and gearbox to store oil and pumping it up to the head via an external oilway. The oil pump also operates the points. On the other side primary drive is by duplex chain with a spring loaded cam type shock absorber, driving a nice alloy multiplate clutch.
A separate chain operated the large 260W alternator which lives in its own compartment behind the cylinder barrel. The gearbox is a five speeder and has a removable cover. Everything can be got at without removing the engine bar the big-end, so maintenance and work can be completed easily excepting the problem of acquiring parts. In around 28000 miles it has needed new 5th gear pinion dogs and some valves, the latter I had made by a mate.
The engine may appear to be roughly made as the alloy castings are sand cast but thick and well machined. The internals show a reasonable standard of engineering, although the gearbox parts would seem a bit small for this size of engine. Certainly, the change is slow, similar to an MZ 250 but with only the one neutral. There is no idiot light to indicate neutral but with practice who needs one?
The cycle parts also show the same quality of build, nice welds, allen bolts, lovely alloy castings and strange looking GRP panels and tail with its chromed rack. The electrical system works off a 12V car battery (same as in a Marina), the switches are crude but efficient, a 65W halogen lamp lights up the night across the motorway and the electrics always work whatever the weather.
Front and rear suspension is from Telesco and very good - large 40mm fork tubes work really well and have gaiters. The wheels are five or seven spoke alloys and brakes are cast iron discs all round with twin piston Brembo pattern calipers (same bits as a V50 Guzzi). Braking is of the hitting a brick wall type.
Well almost, braking on a left-handed humpback bridge resulted in hitting the brick wall at its side, mashing the wheel, crumpling the fork tubes and bending the steering stem. An XS650 front end went straight on with a spacer and kept us going until we were able to obtain new parts. The flyscreen was cracked as well, but as this only keeps rain off the clock faces it didn't matter.
The strong and rigid frame is excellent for hauling a sidecar around although I have been caught out by the sidecar a few times. I've bounced the sidecar mudguard off a few vehicles in my time. The sidecar wheel bearing went after one crash, but no great problem as a Mini item went straight in. It copes with two up travelling and loads of luggage, although acceleration is on the poor side. Once it gets up to 70mph it will stick there all day. Top speed is around 85mph but takes ages to get there.
Still, it's far nicer just to trundle along taking in the scenery lulled by the lovely thump of the engine and numbed by the constant vibration. It's the sort of outfit you could ride for a long way if there was time and the roads weren't so clogged up with other vehicles.
The engine seems to settle down after about 10 miles and gives the impression that it will last forever provided it is not thrashed. A pointless exercise since the vibes at 7000rpm, like on the XS650, aren't worth sustaining. The tank holds four gallons and at around 60mpg there's no need for frequent stops. A down turn in my finances meant that something had to go so I decided on the bike and sold the chair. Afterall, it kept bumping into other vehicles and hasty getaways were a bit awkward unless there was enough room to slam on the brakes, do an abrupt about turn and disappear in the direction from which I had come.
The loss of the sidecar unleashed the solo's wonderful handling. On my favourite trip down to Kent I had to stop several times to await the 850 Yam which was following....all this on tyres best suited to sidecar use. Performance was improved by a new set of tyres and an almost straight through Goldie silencer. Coming down that famous hill on the A20 I held the throttle wide open until the speedo needle hovered around 120mph. It couldn't have been that fast, but with the noise and vibes it certainly seemed like it. The Yamaha was nowhere to be seen. It was great fun flying past all the chops and Harleys like a crazed maniac, keeping it up around 90mph for the length of the A20 until we turned off to the show site.
I took up despatching again, from Birmingham using a 400 four at first but when that needed work I used the Sanglas. This showed up its shortcomings. It's just too tiring to use around the city centres and for hours in the saddle at high speeds. One day I picked up a job in Liverpool and dropped it in London, returned to Liverpool only to have to ride back to Birmingham. Stupidly, I rode past a service station as it went on to reserve and six miles further was out of petrol. The RAC man found me fast asleep on the embankment reluctant to travel any further.
The despatching treatment wasn't doing the bike much good, so I took it off the road and bought an XS850. This seemed ideal for distance work but proved a costly mistake, just about everything was worn out or almost worn out; averaging 35mpg meant I was working for very little.
The Sanglas was taken apart. I had most of it cleaned to bare metal and repainted the cycle parts with Smoothrite. The tank and GRP work was still good so I just polished that. The engine casings and all other alloy I had polished. The bike went back together very easily, now looks lovely and goes just as well. The original paint had peeled off the frame, allowing it to go rusty, the calipers seize if the machine is not regularly used but are easy to overhaul.
Other problems are usually to do with the lubrication system. At low revs, and it will tickover at 350rpm, the oil light flickers and at high revs the oil leaks from the rocker feed pipe banjo but this could be due to overfilling as its dipstick is a little inaccurate. The oil filter is a small round canister in a separate chamber fed by rubber hoses. This will probably have to be changed for another unit as I deplete my stock of filters. The master cylinder was replaced with a Suzuki one and the kickstart return spring broke. Not too many problems in 28000 miles. It's still on the original sprockets!
I like the unusual, it's still a good handler with a strong but lazy engine, easy maintenance and almost classic looks. I'm going to keep the bike and ride it when I retire.
Kev Petford
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Given the choice of spending the winter freezing to death or lounging around in the sun on the Costa Blanca, it only took a few moments of thought. Ideally, I should've ridden the XT500 down there, but its piston was rattling and some nutcase kept pestering me about selling the Yam to him, so he could go harassing sheep in the Welsh hills. I gladly accepted £750 off him and gave the travel agent £400 for the flight and four months rent on a studio apartment.
The Costa Blanca is rather like Brighton in the sun and didn't require much adaptation on my part. Days quickly became a ritual of drunken excesses with other expats, the women coming and going at an extraordinary rate, at least for me, the heat turning them hot in more ways than one. After about two weeks of this rampant self-indulgence, I decided the only way to redeem my liver was to buy a bike.
I could quite easily have hired some small trail bike, which would've been more than adequate for screaming around the coast but I don't really like strokers. I wanted something a little more serious and a slightly rat Sanglas 500 appeared ideal. A long stroke thumper that was heftily built and often used by the plod.
A car sized electric starter reluctantly churned the motor over, after some backfiring it throbbed into life, making a noise that would cause an EEC bureaucrat to run around like a headless chicken. Sounded good to me, anyway. The gearbox was as reluctant to work as the engine was to rev but that was expected as the engine has the same kind of agricultural feel as a BMW boxer.
Torque was the name of the game, get it into top as quickly as possible and just let the throttle do all the work. The test ride went okay, it was certainly just as good as the XT500. For 300 notes I couldn't go wrong and figured I might even ride it home in the spring. There seemed a lot of paperwork involved but I just ignored it all, gathered it up and dumped it in the flat. If I was stopped by the pigs, dumb incomprehension would have to suffice.
Spanish drivers are, of course, all mad. A lot of dilapidated cars driven by men who obviously hadn't passed their test. On a motorcycle I was an immediate target for their insanity. After being driven off the road half a dozen times I managed to work out that the cagers were suddenly swerving across the road not just because they were homicidal maniacs but because they were saving their clapped out cars from the punishment of the foot deep pot-holes.
I was a bit shaken up by the time I got back to the apartment but bright blue skies the next day persuaded me to head for Madrid. The traffic was heavy and mad all the way, but the Sanglas rumbled along at 70mph most of the way. I kept to the side of the road most of the time, that way I only had to worry about traffic on the one side. The Sanglas had a most powerful horn that nearly blew my brain away the first time I touched the button. This helped, as did the Spanish numberplate. Police in shades looked doubtfully at my white skin and pot-belly splayed over my shorts but I practised a bit of Zen by ignoring them!
Madrid took about six hours, with a few stops for fuel and food. The bike was doing 65mpg and I was down to a bottle of San Miguel every stop. It wasn’t boiling hot, just the right side of being too cold to ride without proper gear during the day. The nights were cool enough to make love for a couple of hours without raising a sweat. I have been on the Costa in high summer when it becomes a kind of hell populated by an excess of lager louts and grumbling grannies. No thanks!
Madrid was so chaotic that the only sensible reaction was to lock the bike away at the back of the hotel and explore the city on foot. Thieves abound in Spain, as likely to steal any old hack as they are to screw anything with a hole. Madrid's nightlife had emerged into the nineties with some dubious clubs with back rooms where anything went. The rate of AIDS infection was rising rapidly...
I took a long meandering ride back to the coast, using country roads from where I could see peasants toiling away and small villages full of old biddies in black, and white stone houses. It was a major hassle just fuelling up. I'd leap up and down, pointing at the gaping petrol tank, screaming petrol, fuel, gas, at a totally unimpressed old man. The only thing to send him into a frenzy of action was when I picked up the nozzle myself. He reacted like I'd made a rude suggestion. Food, except for junk from small grocery stores and the odd dose of fruit, was out of bounds - the one time I sat down in a restaurant I was completely ignored. It was just like someone's front room and the rest of the customers were part of some big family.
One other incident stays in my mind. Bopping along a road that was really nothing more than a track, quite happy at 35mph, I swung out of a bend to find the whole road blocked by a tractor and trailer, driven by a bovine youth who shook his fist at me as we came to a halt inches apart.
He indicated that I should turn around, but it was a four point turn job as the track was so narrow. I was halfway through the manoeuvre when he started inching forward. I hurried to complete the turn, but in the rush I overdid it, ended up falling off. The front of the tractor scraped the Sanglas forward as I rolled away. I leapt up screaming abuse but backed off when he waved a pitchfork at me. Somehow, I pulled the still chugging Sanglas up and did a runner, pursued by a flat out tractor and trailer. I quickly concluded that some people were not yet good EEC citizens.
I was relieved to return to the relative civilization of the Costa. Quite a few bolts had rattled loose and the battery was half dead, with the electrics playing up due to loose connectors. It just needed a good going over, oil change and full service. The manager of the apartment block eyed my grease covered hands with something approaching horror, clocking the perfect imprints of my hands on the door and lift. He was ex-army and marched around the block with a clipboard and hard eyes. The lift doors banged shut before he could go into a tirade.
One of the joys of motorcycling was riding along the coast, helmetless, with a near naked sixteen year old frail on the back. What a lovely combination of sensations. The primary vibes produced by the big thumper had her all wired up in no time at all. Spaniards in unlikely cars would blow their horns in salutation and cops would raise their shades to grab a proper eyeful. There is a very weird ambience on the Costa and I was getting off with girls who wouldn't even look at me back in the UK.
Despite its strange appearance the Sanglas didn't turn them off and I soon grew to love the old brute. Top speed was only 90mph, but the handling was stable and assured even on dodgy tyres. There were twin discs out front that were a bit antiquated but worked when a full bloodied grip was applied. Suspension was stiff, big bumps thumping through from the road.
The engine proved rugged in four months and 3000 miles of abuse. However, another expat offered me £600 (I'd cleaned, patched and polished up the bike) to take over the Spanish single and as I'd already paid for the return flight it seemed like a good scam. I don't know if I miss the sun or the Sanglas the most!
Dean Cohen