BRM

............Me on the right and my mate marshalling at Brands Hatch in the summer of 1966 .....note the old flask......Well after thrashing along with this set up you decide you have got used to it and want more .....so the next step was...............
Carburation

At this particular time (although the pic is `66) early `65 the very scarce tuning people for scooters were using the Amal 1" 3/16th bore variable jet, it is called the mk1 now,but of course we now have a mk2 etc.etc. But i did not want to go that way ...i wanted something completely different....So one Saturday morning my mate jump on the back of my bike and we go to London. At New Cross just before the one way bit opposite the station used to be a bike shop called something like "Sweezzoes" they had a very long narrow forecourt full of scooters. We asked in there what he had in the way of carbs. but i was not interested.....So off we go again ...i had seen an advert about a fuel injector but had no idea what it was about....eventually we arrived up the New Kent Road ...No.116a....a large fronted warehouse with a big wooden door..we stepped in and there were all office type tongue & groove boards waist high with old window frames sat on them with glass in we looked through one open one and there on all these shelves must of been about a hundred brand new Wal Phillips Fuel Injectors...We talked a bit and i came out less a fiver with a 1" 3/16th bore injector....Apparently the GT200 one was 1" bore ..but i did say i wanted something different or something nobody had on a bike.. ...this one was only 27mm some 2 or 3 mm larger and thought that what i had done so far to the engine that it would be OK. .....The inlet manifold came with it so no big deal for fitting.
Drove flat out all the way home as i couln`t wait to get it on the bike.

Dropped the suspension ....took a paper template of the port on the barrel....put it against the new inlet manifold.... hooray.....not much in it...got the b&d drill out and the emery paper and wooden dowels and ground away just a small amount to more or less match it up.....then bolted the whole thing together....When new they are set up to run rich, so at least it ran, flooded a few times then quickly got the hang of starting it.

Went for a run,of course no panels, sounded a bit raughty, but had to warm it up properly....that`s one thing i have always done before i opened it up. Went down station and put in my favourite juice.... 5* 101 octane leaded National Benzole...it smelt like it at times as well...but it was at the time a super fuel....well then i opened it up and what an induction noise and the whole bike just went smooth as anything and literally took off......all the same all through the gears......i think i had struck lucky no missing or backfiring.......... ..nothing but sweet harmony. Of course we had to read the instructions , and after some time really did perfect the mixture setting.
I have no idea of what power it was developing, but we were supposed to have 10.75 as standard if lucky......the head converting maybe 2bhp..... the injector they say worth 8bhp , that equals 20.75...but i don`t believe anything like that it was more like a total of 18bhp....The 0 to 50 was about 11 secs with the bike stripped down no carriers or spare wheel or panels....It went right off the clock good and proper and the needle one day took ages to come into view again..it must of been good on the flat for 75mph with a back drought. Had a race with another GT one time down the M2, i was actually challenged to a race as nobody could keep up with me. This other GT thought that if we both peaked about 65mph that we would both then be stuck with one another and either would not be able to pull away ....well i am glad to say he was wrong and over a 4 mile stint i must of beat him by 1 mile, and i was sitting on the wall at the motorway service station when he turned up.

On tuning of the engine ,the porting was not really in the news so didn`t know anything about it, like how far to go or whatever, also i did not want to up the primary compression, by using the cork and araldite.....yes i had read about that but the bottom end was fine and didn`t want to disturb it all...so i had two minuses about that....the first minus was the fact that the injector was about 5 1/2" long and together with the length of the inlet manifold the air velocity was so great, more fuel was already getting into the crankcase because of this speed so more was being compressed. After all this was a road going machine which was used as general transport all year round ,not like today .....summer is here we will get the bike out. So if i overcook the engine can`t get to work.

Please don`t tackle me on this again, what i write is what i have learned and have learned the hard way. The famous sixties flyscreen did not only catch the flies....Yes they were bigger than what you get now, but in a normal driving position when it was raining and that was the primary use of them, the rain was deflected up and just over your head, you never got wet while driving. Don`t forget we did not wear crash helmets then as it was not law, so the rain used to really sting. I used to experiment to see what area the airflow actually covered, and if you moved to the left slightly you got wet ,to the right you got wet and if you really straightend your back you got rain in your eyes which was painfull at 60mph. So i think that old screen was not just knocked up to any size it was purposefully made that size. Well what i am going to say is that screen was worth about 4mph so it either saved you money on petrol cruising along or on a thrash you could go faster without crouching or laying down, you could still be in a comfortable position while racing around. They were really worth having.

If i wanted my panels on i could just downtune by putting the carb back on, it still performed not too bad. I too did not want holes in my panels.

Paint Job

The bike started life at Purley Way, Croydon, and i chose the green panel style on white. After a time the owner of "Medway Scooters" offered me a deal (he lived opposite me at Frindsbury) to spray the bike whatever colour i choose but to his design. So I took him up on it and i chose orange & black....the front mudguard was his design and although nearly every bike now has a similar one , this was a first in the "Medway Towns" and it got him a lot of work. We are talking the beginning of 1965.

The word Restoration did not exist in the sixties as they were mostly brand new bikes ......I was lucky to have been in that era....and i still cannot get over it, that is why i am here sat for hours. Sometimes i may appear hard and stubborn but it is frustration and also due to a replacement knee and fixed ankle ,after a car crash in 1969, that i can no longer ride a scooter...I still want to be part of the scene but don`t know how to cope with it, so i sit and try to only help those with what i have learnt, but of course i usually put my foot in it..... Sorry to of decieved you Sean , but yes I am 156 D

The Scene

I was born in 1948.....that makes me old!.....60 in fact, just got my free bus pass. So therefore in 1964, i was 16 yrs of age, and just ripe for the mod scene and scooters.
There was not much traffic then and no speed cameras.... in the Medway Towns there used to be two motorcycle cops which you had to look out for and that is all, the cop cars were few and far between and had better fish to fry.....so we were lucky ...nearly flat out every where with no prob`s. the M2 in Kent was only recently fully opened .....and was handy for racing the bikes and using as a test track.....the M2 was about 1 mile away. There used to be striped post`s in the ground, about 2 ft high, and at exactly 1/2 mile intervals, they used these for checking the speedo`s on cop cars...nobody knew what GPS was then..... so i did the same for my speedo .....i then knew how far wrong it was .....not all Lambo speedos are crap. The new speed limit had just come in and as you all know it is 70 mph but nothing to worry about on a standard Lambretta......Petrol was 7/6 for a tankfull of 2 stroke mix....pull up at the pump...set the lever to 20% or 25% and pull the lever to and fro and it all mixed it self up .....easy.

Margate, Southend and Hastings were all the rage in the summer months but you all have heard about that as well. But they did have there advantages as you could meet mods and talk about there bikes and what they had done to them.....Being in Medway 28 miles from London, we were always going there to see the latest scooter shops where they were mostly brand new Series 3 including the fairly new GT200. We also bought our clothes from Carnaby Street and Pettycoat Lane.

My GT200

I was mad on my mates GT200 in the summer of 1963 so mad in fact i decided to save up for one. By July 1964 I had my first scooter the green and white model GT200......I then could go to Brands Hatch as it was only about 10 miles up the road. My mate who had a series 2 1960 TV175 also used to go with me. We were saloon car racing mad. Before long we were getting all this knowledge of how to make an engine go faster..... it wasn`t long before i knew that the hemi-spherical combustion chamber was one of keys to BHP....the famous Jaguar XK engine and also the Aston Martin had this..... So of course i eventually took my engine to bits and lo and behold it had a hemi head....with a spark plug in the wrong place.....I was lucky to work at the Medway College Of Technology,Fort Horsted in Chatham. I was a Junior Technician in woodwork, but our worshop also had the engineering department as well, there were the old Colchester lathes and everything.....so yes you can imagine me putting the plug in the right place in the cylinder head, the old one remained as well as i could not weld the hole and not many had the ability then,to weld with alloy......This made a big improvement to the performance and together with smoothing and flowing all the ports. Of course all the joints where different parts were bolted on were matched as well,especially the exhaust manifold where the gasket fitted,always had to reshape the gasket to be a nice smooth flow for the gases. We never had Dremels then so i used and knackered my Dads old heavy Black and Decker drill, i had all the wire brushes ,emery cloth on sticks you name it to clean all the ports up. On assembly i left off the head gasket it is only 0.6mm, the compression ratio was 8 to 1 so i was on the plus of that .......wasn`t really interested exactly what it was so long as it worked properly and it did. ....Didn`t worry about what you call squish as we never knew of those things. If it did not knock you were fine if it did you put the gasket back. ......I used to cut the exhaust box in half every dinner time and weld it back up until i had it right. In the end it was a standard box but of course the GT one with no cluster of a baffle just inside the opening.....took all the glass fibre out.....but left the baffles in for the back pressure ...noise did not matter then...and added a 1" copper exhaust pipe to the end of the box....also just by there we drilled two 1/8th holes which also help adjust the back pressure, got this dodge from a magazine and it did help....and of course made a bigger clamp for the bottom bolt.......It sounded ace and the bike went as good as it sounded--------------to be continued

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