Calming Effects Of Recalled Processes

[Hugh Janus]

Technical Editor Kevin Cameron shares his wealth of motorcycle knowledge, experiences, insights, history, and much more. (Cycle World/)

Ordinarily I’m not much for ­nostalgia. At vintage meets, I see bikes that I saw for the first time in the showroom. In the 1980s, in response to a story I’d written about a 1965 Yamaha TD1-B 250 production roadracer, a kind reader wrote to ask me if I’d like to have the parts to build such a bike. I had owned a used one for $500 in 1967 and had ridden it in a few novice club events. I drove to Maryland to pick up the parts.

For 35 years, those parts rested quietly in boxes in my shop. I made occasional gestures toward restoration. I bought pistons, seals, and gaskets while Yamaha still listed them, and a friend painted the chassis and swingarm. The parts in their boxes winked at me with some reproach. I had plenty of ­other things that needed doing.

For no reason that I can assign, this June I went up to my shop, found my trove of TD1-B crankshaft parts, and began (after much finding and cleaning of necessary tools) by pressing the center main ball bearings into their center block. I had rebuilt many of these cranks for Boston Cycles in the mid-'60s at $10 apiece. Each step called up ­detailed memory of the process.

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I was pleased with that. ­Another day, I found my best used crankpins and rods, and with new big-end roller sets, I pressed together and aligned the right and left crankshaft halves. I liked it. I liked discovering that my hands were still comfortable in this work. And I was surprised too. Too often, shop work has consisted of finding and fixing the tool I need for the job—something I dislike because it inter­rupts the typing that has long been this family’s livelihood. It also reminds me that I’ve let my shop ­become lawn-mower storage. So, while I was searching out the things I ­needed, I cleaned up. Although I didn’t know why, this didn’t annoy me. I just kept at it, gradually making myself a fresh work area. I was methodical, completing A, then tackling B, without urgency or impa­tience. The shop was soothing.

I counted gear teeth and identified parts to make a complete gearbox.

Pressing the two halves of the crank together was important, for it left me with something to look at—a complete zero-time crankshaft, ready to go into the crankcase. The TD1-series engines were based on the production ­YDS-2/3 streetbike engine, which had die-cast ­cases, but for some reason a few early B cases, including this one, were sand-cast. This bike had been raced at Daytona in 1965, ’66, and ’67, so only vigorous cleaning could remove the age-hardened Castrol R30. I found that I liked very much to lift those case halves out of their final hot-water rinse and just stare at their shapes and fine-grained gray finish. Over many years, I’ve learned a lot by such staring.

Motorcycle engine (Cycle World Archives/)

The coming of the virus and its anxiety made the silence and expand­ing order and function of the shop an antidote. Part of each shop session consisted of putting things where they belonged, and of long-neglected maintenance such as “reforesting” drill indexes depleted by years of child users. I didn’t mind doing these things; ­gradually, I learned where everything was, and the clutter receded. As the bike came together, the circles of laid-out parts shrank, then disappeared.

Beginning each assembly task, I could feel the space that should have been filled with irritation and hurry, but they were missing. Oh, one of the lower fork bushings—a thing of metering holes and O-ring grooves—was missing. I would have to make one. It took several days, but I hardly noticed. Each night, trying to sleep, I found myself planning the next operation rather than turning over useless thoughts. And then actually going to sleep. When it was time to assemble the fork, I played back an operation of making and fitting dowel pins that I’d last carried out in 1968.

When the fork was together with damping fluid in place, I was pleased to find that each leg compressed easily and rebounded ­slowly—as fork legs should.

With new gearbox bearings in place, I installed the shafts and gears, closed the cases, and mounted the shift forks and mechanism. Everything turned, and it shifted five speeds. Another step.

These bikes had big drum brakes made just for racing—not shared with production. When Boston-­area racer Andres Lascoutx came in from the first Vineland, New Jersey, practice on a B model in 1965, he was grinning.

“If I want to go faster, I just turn the throttle more! If I need to stop quicker, I just pull the lever harder! Nothing like a streetbike!”

He won races, and whatever wins defines beauty. Even though drum brakes are long gone, their grace affected me now as I handled the parts I was cleaning and assembling. It was a return to the ­beginning—the satisfying complexity of their shapes and their aura of potency. Former emotion, long quiet, inhabited me. The grand old man of tech editors, Gordon ­Jennings, built a 250 Ducati single to 25 hp and wrote about it in ­Cycle magazine. But the TD1-B’s 35 hp was almost unfair. When ­Lascoutx showed up at Mosport Park in ­Ontario, Canada, local champion Charlie Ingram put his Ducati back on the trailer and went home. The proper way to pass the Ducatis, I was told, was to pull out of their draft and, as you sped past, sit up and pretend to adjust your goggles. The US two-stroke revolution—love it or hate it—began in those years. US bike sales doubled from 1965 to 1970, and doubled again by 1974.

To modern eyes, bikes from that era are spindly and archaic, but then, they were locomotives—long and charged with power. The mass of fins on cylinders and heads told the tale, looking just like those of the factory RD-56 twin on which Phil Read won two world championships, in 1964 and ’65.

The engine is now in the frame. The fork, swingarm, and wheels are on. A new fairing hangs ­nearby, ready to mount. Lots of tasks remain, but this is now a bike on its footpeg stand, up on the build ­table. Like a proper race machine.

What will I do once it’s done? I’ll start the engine so my hands can remember being put to sleep at Harewood Acres, Ontario, by its terrible vibration. No vintage racing—racing requires endless fresh cylinders, pistons, and rings. Then I’ll empty the fuel system and put the bike on its stand in the house. It will remind me that we have ­become partners in existence.

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[yen_powell]

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reforesting” drill indexes depleted by years of child users