Don Hale leaves the sandpit. You can see the original LD bodywork
and seat support above the engine.
This will be the place to find Scooter Scrambling memories, and it's open to everyone. It's still under construction at the moment, but here's a few topics to start us off. If you have any memories of going to Elstead (or any of the other locations), either as a spectator or a competitor, and you'd like to share your memories or photos with us, then please contact me for further details.
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Don Hale leaves the sandpit. You can see the original LD bodywork |
When I described my bike in the feature, I said it was based on a Lambretta 150D... but that wasn't strictly speaking accurate. It was originally built by Don Hale and his SS Scooters colleagues, and sharp-eyed viewers will have noticed that in the earlier pictures of Don riding it, the bike is clearly not a D, but an LD. The difference was that the later LD models came from the Innocenti factory with full bodywork enclosing the engine — the removable panels hooked over a centre pressed-steel section that ran from above the back of the footboard to behind the rear wheel, supporting the seat. This was the most popular model in the UK, and was far more readily available.
Me almost at the same spot, at my first meeting as a rider. |
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But although the pressed steel section was durable enough for road use, it didn't have the strength of a full round chassis tube for scrambling, and mine was looking its age when Don sold it to me. I managed to source an old D frame where the rear end was straight — the main tube was the same on both models — and got someone (probably Demon Welder Ted Winn?) to weld it in. So yes, it looked like a D, but was actually 'born' as an LD.
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A few years later, the pressed-steel LD seat support has been |
This gave an interesting situation when I came to register it for the road. The DVLA needed to check the engine and chassis numbers before they would issue a licence. On the LD the chassis number was stamped on the seat support bracket... but that had gone. It was elsewhere on the D, but not on the bit that I had incorporated, so I had a frame with no visible chassis number at all.
When the inspector called, my father (I was already away training for my Belfast posting) took him down the garden to the shed where the bike lived. When he couldn't find a number, his response was "Well, no-one who was up to no good would choose to ride on a thing like that!", and agreed to pass it. Shades of "You must be bats to ride one of those!"
The bike was issued with the number DLT38C, and I often wondered if the BBC Radio 1 DJ Dave Lee Travis would have been interested in it as a personal number.
Getting the bike to Belfast created something of a problem, as it was my first posting, and my employer wouldn't pay removal expenses for first postings. All my possessions had to be forced into a Triumph Herald Convertible, and ferried across the Irish Sea in a number of trips. On the last one the Lambretta went too — the car's passenger and rear seats were removed, and used as padding around the bike, which had its front wheel in the passenger's footwell, and the rear wheel in the boot space, with the handlebars turned sideways. Very versatile, Triumph Heralds!
It was brought back to mainland Britain courtesy of a removal firm — my employer would pay to move for subsequent postings — for a while it was in store, and then kept under a tarpaulin in the back yard of my grotty flat in Middlesbrough for a few months. It was at sometime during this period that someone removed one of my precious ball-end levers, but to make sure I wouldn't notice they did have the decency to put a plain one in its place so the bike was still useable. By the time I noticed it was too late to do anything about it. An honourable thief, but a thief nonetheless — modern villains would probably not even bother!
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Although the LD Lambretta was an excellent basis for a starter scrambler, the exhaust system was always a problem. The standard configuration was for the exhaust pipe to leave the front of the cylinder downwards, to a box that was carried athwartships low down under the very centre of the chassis. This was perhaps one of the most unsuitable positions you could think of for a machine that was going to be taken off road fast. So it was always important to try to do something about the vulnerability of this component.
Matters weren't helped by the fact that the whole engine and rear axle were one unit, so the engine moved when the wheel rose and fell, and the exhaust silencer needed to move along with it. But it proved very difficult to achieve this in any way — some people attempted to mount the silencer rigidly to the frame, using flexible piping to link it to the exhaust port, but this was rarely very successful. Others tried to mount the box elsewhere on the engine unit so that it was less vulnerable.
When I first acquired Don Hale's machine, the exhaust was the rectangular box seen in the pictures of the machine on the DVD, but it was mounted on a single curved pipe coming from the exhaust port, with the box outboard of the flywheel cover, and resting on it. This was fine, except that it was equally vulnerable as the widest part of the bike on that side. Also, when you needed to get into the flywheel magneto in a hurry to (say) adjust or clean the points, the exhaust port locking ring had to be slackened off, and the whole box hinged upwards. Inevitably this constant loosening and tightening of the locking ring meant that it didn't stay locked up, and the exhaust would come loose and fall off halfway through a race. Even if it stayed on, it would hammer the flywheel cover into contact with the spinning flywheel underneath.
LD Exhaust Box
Graeme Aldous examines one of the problems of using the LD Lambretta engine.
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Exhaust Box Mk2. |
My own solution involved Ted Winn's welding skills. I decided that the best place for the exhaust box was alongside the cylinder and above the flywheel cover, and I asked Ted to devise a new pipe for me. We decided that bending a round pipe was too difficult, so he made up out of 4 flat strips the box-section pipe that you see in the picture. The welding needed to go to and from the round-section pipe at each end was quite ingenious. I managed to provide further support by welding on an additional bracket, which secured to one of the cylinder head nuts (having first cut away some fins to get it in place). This worked very well, but it meant that the hot pipe ran very close to the LH foot peg, so the heel of my left boot soon developed a groove burnt into it.
Ted had originally made the box with a double skin — the inner one was perforated, and the space between the two was filled with rockwool to absorb some of the sound. There were no internal baffles. It must be said that after some time this lost its effectiveness, and the box became largely cosmetic, for the benefit of the scrutineers! It wouldn't have satisfied any sophisticated noise-reading meters.
Later, when I registered the bike for the road and used it in Belfast in the early days of The Troubles, security forces manning checkpoints could usually hear it coming long before I actually arrived. I often wonder what they thought of it, because I was usually waved through without stopping.
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Li Exhaust Box on a Stingray. |
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[As a side note in view of Ted Winn's remarks about Ray Collins using Lambretta-based materials because they were readily available to him at the Lambretta dealership where he worked, it's noticeable that in the photos of Tony Hickmott's Stingray, the exhaust box is clearly based on a standard Li/GT unit, mounted on its side. Because the engine is carried rigidly in the frame, the silencer could also be mounted to the frame with no need for flexible piping.]
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Tony Franklin's reference in the main film to "hired vehicles which nobody really knew too well" was a sly dig at me, following a story I told him. My favoured vehicle for getting to Elstead was the Ford Thames 15cwt Van, largely because there was a company (in Streatham, I think it was) who were willing to hire a van to a trio of biking students for a weekend at a very reasonable cost. With 3 bikes in the back, we could split the cost and each get 'a good day's motorsport for a fiver'.
These vans were based on the Ford Anglia engine and 3-speed gearbox, with a steering column change. On one occasion when we picked up the van, it didn't seem to have as much performance as usual — in fact, we crawled down to Elstead, very disappointed. It was only when we tried to reverse into our spot in the paddock that we found a fourth forward gear where we expected reverse to be — Ford had upgraded the engine and gearbox, but the van hire hadn't warned us. The return journey was much more pleasant, but the increased fuel consumption from driving down to Surrey in third meant that our 'good day's motorsport' had cost us a little more than a fiver that weekend!
We stopped using that hirer after the debacle when they couldn't supply a Ford when we went to collect the van, but offered a Minivan instead. It was too late to make alternative arrangements, so we had to find some way of getting 2 Lambrettas, tools, cooking gear and food packed in. It was not a happy experience, and we had to leave the tents behind. Our thought that two sleeping in a Minivan would be nice and snug foundered when we discovered the obvious fact, that cold air circulates under a van, and there was only a few thou of BMC's finest steel between us and a very frosty night.
I had to find an alternative, and my very good friend Rod Buck agreed to provide his 200GT Lambretta, with its Watsonian Bambini sidecar. The Bambini bodywork was only held on with 4 bolts, so we removed it and built a wooden platform, with two holes cut in it to take the scrambler's wheels so it would travel securely. Unfortunately, in our enthusiasm for building a solid platform, with 4x2 rails and second-hand floorboarding, we didn't pay any attention to the weight. All the wood probably weighed more than the fibreglass sidecar body, and by the time we'd added the scrambler, fuel and toolbox, we were severely overloading the machine. I remember having a really tiring ride down to Elstead, until I discovered the sidecar-riders' trick of steering by using the throttle — if you power-on, the bike over-rides the chair and you steer to the left. Drop the throttle and the sidecar inertia pushes you to the right. By this use of the throttle, you didn't have to fight all the time with the handlebars.
Transport Troubles
Graeme Aldous remembers how he got to Elstead
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Rod Buck takes the chair down the muddy lane to Elstead. |
Incidentally, this bike was great fun when (in later years) Rod removed the complete sidecar, and went back to running it solo. To give it more performance for sidecar work, it had been fitted with the gear cluster from a 150Li. Top speed was low when compared to the standard 200GT, but the acceleration was phenomenal — from rest it would virtually do wheelies! This was very useful when 'challenged' at traffic lights by a parka-ed mod on an SS Vespa (we always rode in black Bellstaffs to confuse them) as you could afford to wait for the green to show, and still roar past him (idly scratching your left leg as though unaware of the effort he was making!) Naturally he would catch up again once the Lambretta reached about 40mph, but with a bit of luck you were already having to slow down for the next set of lights.
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As Dick, Tony and Ted say in the main film, serious injuries were very rare at scrambles meetings. I do, though, have my own lasting memento of a meeting that was held at Loddington on April 26th 1964. I'd bought Don's bike a week or so previously, but there hadn't been time to get in an entry and arrange transport, so I was at the meet as a spectator only.
My pictures clearly show that there was only single roping round the course, with the ropes suspended on 'pig-tail' stakes. One rider was (let's be charitable) 'a little inexperienced', and looked absolutely terrified, even when going down a straight on his own. At one point he rode at full tilt into the ropes near me, pulling them out of line and spinning one of the pigtail stakes out of the ground. It caught me a blow across my left fingers, and hurt enough for me to go and see the St.John Ambulance volunteers.
They examined my hand, and said that there was nothing obviously broken — just resting it would be enough. Difficult to rest a clutch hand when you're facing a ride back from Nottinghamshire to SE London, but I made it.
And I somehow think that their diagnosis was wrong — for years afterwards if I knocked my left little finger the 'wrong' way, the pain would nearly send me through the roof. It still happens from time to time, and if you compare that finger with my right one, it definitely veers off to one side at the top. And that was before I'd even entered my first race!
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There's a story that doesn't involve Scooter Scrambling directly, but it is about SS Scooters, and the 1968 World Cup Final between England and West Germany — the only football match (live or televised) that I've ever watched all the way through. Don Hale had taken a portable television in, and it was sitting on the counter so we could keep an eye on the progress of the game while we were serving the customers. In the event, only one came in during the whole of the match, and he stayed to watch it through to its incredible 'Boy's Own Paper' finish. I can't remember if he bought anything!
It was such a classic ending that I knew I would never see anything so good again, and so as not to spoil things, I immediately resolved never to watch another football match again in my life. 40 years later I've managed to keep that promise.
Finger Trouble
Graeme Aldous says 'Ouch!'
'They Think It's All Over!'
Graeme Aldous remembers a sporting highlight
