Just as I was about to scream off the line... er, move away in an orderly fashion from the junction... the fuel ran out. The engine coughed and died a death. Grabbing for the tiny reserve tap, I whirred the motor over on the starter but in the seconds it took to catch my ears were assaulted by the massed ranks of enraged car drivers playing with their horns (down!). My hands were too busy to give them the usual reverse Winston (and my body probably too frail to take the likely retribution, in these increasingly violent days).
I pulled the choke lever on to encourage the engine to fire, knocked it back off, finally let the clutch out and only just avoided doing a wheelie, such was the sudden-ness and ferocity of the take-off. This kind of shit happens too many times, even in these days of modernistic endeavour. Preferring to ride singles and twins doesn’t help matters, even if the time for the motor to fire up again is just seconds it seems like a fraught age, and the electric start makes the whole manoeuvre relatively painless.
In one of the more optimistic moments of my youth, which were then surprisingly frequent, I actually designed a device that before the fuel ran out totally would sound a siren, making sure that there was enough time to hit the reserve switch before the motor stalled. It seemed like a good crack at the time, save that when tested on an ageing XS650 a few minor teething problems arose.
It has to be said, that as much as a worthy machine as the big vertical twin represented, especially for Jap iron that was usually so neutered as to be as bland as a Morris Marina, the XS had one of the most vicious engine cut-offs when the fuel ran out that was known to man and beast in the whole wide world. The motor died a complete and utter death without the slightest of warnings and then often refused to start again for five minutes.
It really was bad. One time I'd been riding along, really getting into playing dodgems in the London traffic, which back then wasn't so bad that a 60mph pace on a motorcycle could not be maintained, when the engine died a death just as I was about to complete an overtaking manoeuvre. Two converging buses, an ever narrowing gap and a bike that was rapidly losing momentum. Only whacking on the choke achieved a brief burst of startled power, that allowed me to clear the buses.
If anything, slow speed stalls were even worse as there wasn’t enough momentum left to fire the motor. There was no chance of using the electric starter back then, for though it might manage to turn over, albeit reluctantly, a hot engine, its construction was such that when worn out its clutch mechanism could mangle the crankshaft! Sometimes, even riding down a steep hill, the fuel ran out and the motor went completely dead. The XS needed an almighty lunge on the kickstart; temperamental starting was all too common on this bike (it'd sulk for days sometimes) and it used to drive me so crazy that my brain was forced to come up with the Fuel Alarm!
The device was, by necessity, constructed from readily available components using such high tech aids to engineering as Araldite and a plastic box that was supposed to contain a circuit board rather than my Heath Robinson inspired float mechanism. Various ideas were thrown out as being too expensive, complicated (if you stick to the maxim, simplify and add lightness you end up right about fifty percent of the time) or too dangerous (| doubted if the average motorcyclist would be too amused to find sparks, from an electrical short circuit, running through his fuel and his bike turned into a raging conflagration). After spending a week during my overtime hours kindly paid by someone else but which I usually spent in a more interesting way drawing up motorcycles, I soon had a prototype sorted.
lt was several times larger than it should have been but if it worked then it could soon be down-scaled. The XS would be useful for destructive testing; if it survived the vertical twin’s numbing primary vibes then it'd survive just about anything else, short of a combined earthquake and tank attack (newer XS650’s might be tolerably smooth but a hard used 50000 miler was another matter).
The first test resulted in failure. The electronic buzzer had fallen apart despite being cushioned with two layers of old inner-tube. As a temporary measure I wired the device into the starter's relay and then connected that to the horn, as there was no way I was going to use the electric boot until the engine had done a 100000 miles and deserved to die a worthy death. This was quite amusing, as I’d be trolling along in a marginal state of contentment only to have the horn blast on and off in a thoroughly unpredictable manner. But the fuel would still run out without any warning, one time just as I was halfway through my usual drag race start from the lights.
This confused the driver behind no end, judging by the stream of invective thrown at my contorted body as | valiantly tried to make the bugger start. I also made some young cop jump out of his skin when the horn went off just as he’d reached the safety of the pavement. I didn't stay around to argue the toss; the tyres were in a permanent state of baldness and the tax disc was lost in the post.
After several minor adjustments I finally had a working alarm that would sound thirty seconds before it was necessary to hit the reserve tap. All I needed to do was miniaturise the thing and sell them by the millions to grateful motorcyclists. This seemed a minor hurdle at the time, that I could easily fit in between the 60 hour week in my main job and the two part time enterprises that I was supposed to be operating.
Having read several books on mail order that was obviously the way to go. The most obvious and efficient way to judge the market reaction was to stick an advert in one of the glossies and gauge the response. This was 1982, a time when the government tended to knight people who successfully launched products mail order and hadn't actually finished the development. A time when even some of the Japanese motorcycle companies were letting the customers do their research and development work by launching short-lived bikes that needed a full engine rebuild before the guarantee ran out.
Mail order, I was later to find to my cost, is as difficult an area to get right as it is extremely expensive to get wrong. The Fuel Alarm garnered the massive response of two out of a potential 120000 readers! Luckily, I'd been completely sidetracked between getting the prototype working and the advert appearing, so abandoned the idea without too much loss of time or money.
It was perhaps just as well that I did. I had the thing fitted to the XS for about 250 miles when it started leaking. The first I knew about this was the flames licking my jeans. After riding the bike straight across the bows of some entombed nutter, thence straight up a pavement, | slung the beast on the side stand, whacked the fuel tap off and put out the flames on my jeans by whacking my leg through someone’s prime bit of hedgerow. The XS survived the experience with a few singed components. The plastic casing had developed a few hairline cracks. The strongest component, I found whilst relieving my angst with a large hammer, was the Araldite that had sealed the two halves. I could just imagine the enraged riders beating a path to my door with tales of burnt machines and limbs.
I still think the basic idea was pretty smart and valid even for modern machines. At that time I was full of various ideas that were at the very least going to make my fortune, but usually ended up involving a deal of hassle, the merest hint of a financial return and lots of potential trouble. In Shit City, at that time, you could almost smell the money in the air. Nothing was as easy as it first seemed and only a vast amount of perseverance, including an outrageous excess of time, eventually got things together to the extent that I could give up my erstwhile engineering career.
Bill Fowler
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