The Big Dipper, Days 1 & 2

One day into the restoration, the £250 Watsonian already started explaining itself. The image below, I should explain, is not the finished article, but the template.

The trouble with bringing home an old sidecar is that it does not remain merely an old sidecar for long. Yesterday it was a faded black Watsonian Monza which Hay thought looked like the first car from a Big Dipper I was planning to build in the back garden.

Her sister thinks I'm building a bobsleigh for the Old Sodbury bobsleigh team, who intend to compete in the next Winter Olympics.

Today it has become an archaeological excavation, a structural investigation and, inevitably, a design exercise. I have barely had it 48 hours.

The first job was simply to establish what I had actually bought. Once the body and chassis were separated and the accumulated Yorkshire weather began coming off, the answer was encouraging.

The chassis has been smothered in underseal. Normally that can mean either somebody was trying to preserve the steel or somebody was trying to hide it. In this case, the frame appears solid. There is some pitting, but nothing which suggests it is quietly turning into lace.

The underseal can come off, the metal can be cleaned and inspected, and the frame can then be properly primed and painted. I had briefly considered polishing part of the front rail back to bare steel and lacquering it, although that may depend on what remains after 60 years of corrosion and enthusiasm.

The front bumper rail is another matter.

After scraping the paint from the joints between the front rail and the rest of the chassis, I found a distinct golden fillet. That is a strong indication that the rail was brazed rather than welded, which would be entirely consistent with British tubular construction in the 1960s.

This is unexpectedly helpful. A brazed joint can be reheated until the bronze filler melts while the parent steel remains solid. With the chassis properly supported, the original front rail should therefore be removable without cutting into or shortening the side rails.

That would make fitting a polished stainless replacement considerably easier. The old rail can be withdrawn, the joints cleaned and suitable sockets or spigots fitted to accept a removable stainless front section, retained by discreet bolts or pins. It would be removable, replaceable and easier to polish.

This is the sort of thing which begins as a way of avoiding unnecessary expense and ends with an ex-navigating officer commissioning a bespoke stainless component because he did not want to spend unnecessary money.

The wheel presented a similar temptation.

The tyre is a Continental 4.00-10, and the seller described the wheel as a Mini wheel. The 4 hub studs, however, are on a 3¼-inch pitch circle, which is not a standard Mini fitting. A bespoke 10-inch wire wheel could be made, provided I wished to spend somewhere around £700 improving a £250 sidecar.

I do not.

The existing wheel and hub will therefore remain. They can be rebuilt, cleaned and painted, perhaps with a polished hubcap or some other modest embellishment which suggests period engineering without drifting into plastic imitation wire-wheel trims from a child’s pedal car. Watsonian have a suitable hubcap for £99.99.

The interior was less encouraging.

It is black, rough, knobbly and deeply uninviting. It looks less like somewhere to carry a passenger than somewhere local authorities used to store grit.

I initially considered smoothing it with filler, but the body will flex and filler has a habit of responding to movement by cracking in public. Upholstered panels would improve it, but they would also add weight and provide damp with somewhere private to settle.

The more sensible solution may be simpler.

I have a considerable quantity of grey industrial floor paint left over from the garage. It is tough, repels almost everything and is not very far removed from the colour of the Virago. More importantly, it would stop the interior looking aggressively funereal.

There, that's better.

A removable rubber mat can cover the floor. Thin coloured plastic panels could be fitted to the sides like door cards, using lightweight trim fixings rather than building an entire drawing room inside it.

That would conceal the worst of the original moulding, add very little weight and remain removable if water gets behind it.

Because water will get behind it. This is Britain.

The floor construction initially caused some confusion.

At first, patches of exposed wood made it look as though the plywood formed the entire floor. Then it appeared to be sitting in a recess in the GRP. Then it became clear that the plywood is supported by the moulded fibreglass recess and glassed over from inside, apart from a small damaged area where the covering laminate had broken away and exposed the timber.

The plywood itself appears remarkably sound.

It has lasted since the 1960s with little more than red primer and black paint on the underside. I have stripped that underside back to bare wood and see no reason to entomb it permanently in resin.

The plywood supports the tub and should remain visible and accessible. One day, perhaps around 2086, somebody may need to replace it. It would be discourteous to make them excavate it from beneath half an inch of modern composite material simply because I had bought resin in bulk.

I will prime it with an exterior wood primer and finish it with the same industrial floor paint. It will be sealed, protected and still readable.

The original arrangement lasted about 60 years with considerably less sophisticated protection, which is a fairly persuasive product test.

I have already repaired several rips in the GRP and reinforced the moulded recess which supports the plywood base. The plywood was sound, but parts of the surrounding fibreglass had split and were plainly doing rather less supporting than Watsonian originally intended.

That has now been dealt with using fresh glass cloth and resin, extending the reinforcement beyond the damaged sections rather than merely sticking the tears back together and hoping they would forget what happened.

It is not glamorous work, but it has clarified the construction. The plywood carries the floor loads, while the GRP recess locates and supports it around the perimeter.

Strengthening that junction should prevent the old cracks simply reappearing a few inches further along, which is fibreglass’s preferred response to a purely cosmetic repair.

The 3 seized bolts near the front were rather less cooperative. They passed through the plywood and secure the remains of a substantial steel bracket inside the footwell. It has rusted away at the bend, which initially made the whole arrangement seem perverse. Why put the steel inside the tub rather than underneath, where it could support the floor?

The answer became clearer as the construction revealed itself.

The bracket performs 2 separate functions. Its upper half forms part of the sidecar’s attachment system. The lower connection ties it to the sidecar chassis, while the upper connection carries the link onwards to the motorcycle. Both are reached from inside the tub.

This is the upper half as you can see where it has rusted away from the rest.

 

The lower half did something different. It continued down the side of the footwell, turned across the floor, rose again to meet the other side and the corresponding chassis fixing pass-through. It was secured by those 3 bolts through the plywood. Essentially a large U.

Watsonian had therefore combined the motorcycle attachment and the front body mounting in one large and rather complicated piece of steel.

One option would be to reconstruct the broken bracket temporarily, using cardboard or a bent welding rod to establish its original shape, and then have a complete replacement fabricated. That would preserve the factory arrangement, but probably at considerable cost.

The more elegant solution is to separate the 2 jobs. The surviving upper section can be cut back and faired neatly at the break, leaving it to connect the motorcycle to the sidecar chassis. A new transverse cradle can then run across the front of the chassis beneath the floor, supporting the tub in much the same way as the existing support at the rear.

There is one remaining qualification. The vanished lower section probably prevented the upper bracket from pivoting around its lower chassis connection. I will therefore probably jst fabricate a bridging piece that replaces the rotted bend and attaches to sound metal on each half of the bracket.

The bolts have had roughly 60 years to become emotionally attached to the remains of the bracket and now refuse to turn. They will probably have to be cut or ground off, carefully, without setting fire to the plywood or converting the surrounding fibreglass into airborne misery.

Anyway, after trying to extract the bracket from its fibreglass shroud, it quickly became clear it was rusted to hell and beyond repair, so the entire thing will have to be fabricated. I'll probably make it in 2 parts for ease of fitment, joining the two halves with an overlap before encasing it in fibreglass.

The problem was hardly unique to Watsonian. Lotus was wrestling with much the same issue in its early fibreglass cars - how to put serious loads into GRP without crushing or cracking it. The answer was broadly the same: let the fibreglass provide the shape, and put steel reinforcement wherever the loads actually enter the structure.

While smoothing the area around the footrest, I discovered what appeared to be a small brass identification plaque. Unfortunately, I discovered it by removing some of the writing. This was not my finest archaeological moment. Fortunately, enough survived to reveal the number S-83. The S prefix dates the body to 1965, making it a Mk2 Monza, and 83 appears to be its individual production number.

I have photographed it and will now leave it alone. Further restoration might improve it to the point where nothing remains.

The nose trim has gone rather better. The Watsonian badge was discoloured, its mounting boss was ruined and the aluminium spear beneath it was bent and tired.

The spear has been straightened, cleaned and lacquered. The badge has been restored and painted. The missing boss has been replaced with a jam jar lid. This sounds less impressive written down than it looks. Once lacquered and fitted, the lid no longer resembles anything which once contained marmalade. It looks like a proper pressed mounting boss.

Restoration is partly engineering and partly ensuring nobody can identify the household packaging involved.

The screen is unlikely to survive. It shows signs of having been heated and bent into shape when it was made, and the cut lines are not particularly true. Replicating it from polycarbonate would be possible, but cutting a large curved screen neatly is not as easy as the internet pretends.

More importantly, I am not sure I want it. Even if I replicated it, to look original I'd need to source or make an aluminium surround. Much too faffy.

A Brooklands aero screen would suit the Monza rather better and give it a more purposeful appearance. I could build up the front edge of the cockpit with sculpted expanded foam and fibreglass, creating a low scuttle into which the screen could be properly mounted. It may not even require building up.

And because I have already made burr-walnut dashboards for the GT6, I am now considering making one for the sidecar. It need not be entirely dummy. A shallow walnut panel could contain a clock, a GPS speedometer and a USB charging port. The passenger would then know the time, how fast they were travelling and precisely how much battery remained while having no influence whatsoever over any of it. A discreet grab handle beneath it might also be useful, particularly once the GPS speedometer begins confirming what the passenger already suspects. Below is the ChatGPT mock-up, although the image on the lower right needs some consideration about the angle of lean.

It'll probably end up looking like a 3 wheeler Morgan, on 1 wheel.

Then there's the paint, which in places like it was done with Tesco's black eggshell, with a stippling brush. That all needs laborious rubbing down before filler is applied to imperfections, and rubbed down again. Lots of rubbing down - and then some high build primer, and more rubbing down.

The original seat is still in Barnsley because I forgot to put it in the van. This may also prove fortunate.

I had already found a £27 reproduction Eames DSW-style plastic stool which looked roughly the right shape to use as a former for a low-backed fibreglass seat. Since then, I have found 4 of them on Facebook Marketplace for £40, which gives me 4 separate chances to cock it up before having to admit the idea was flawed in the first place. However, it's worth a try in order to get something more ergonomic than a couple of padded boards.

The white shells are about 2.5 cm too wide at the bottom for the Monza cockpit, so they will require some surgery before they can be used as formers. That is not necessarily a problem. Cutting, narrowing and reshaping one is rather the point, and I now have 3 spares waiting to learn from the first one’s mistakes. If it works, forgetting the original seat after a 6-hour round trip will cease to be absent-mindedness and become an early design decision supported by bulk purchasing.

So, after two days, the sidecar has acquired a known age, a restored badge, a grey interior, a jam jar component and several competing plans for its future. The chassis is better than expected. The plywood is sound. The damaged fibreglass is already being repaired. The missing ironmongery can be made.

The interior needs rescuing from blackness, the front rail needs rethinking, and the screen may be replaced by something Watsonian never fitted but perhaps should have.

It is still, according to Hay, the first car from a fairground ride. But it is now a 1965 Watsonian Monza Mk2, serial number S-83.

That sounds much more respectable - even with a jam jar lid on the front.

The Sidecar That Gradually Appeared

Buying an old sidecar, I have discovered, does not really involve choosing a sidecar. It involves staring at photographs of damp gardens, workshop floors and unidentified ironmongery, trying to decide whether the wheel belongs to the thing being sold or merely happened to be passing through when the photograph was taken.

The original idea was simple enough. Buy an old sidecar for a few hundred pounds, restore it, paint it to match the Virago, as in the mock-up above, and end up with something rather splendid without spending a fortune.

The first serious candidate was a lovely old Watsonian in Cambridge at £1,050. It was complete, presentable and probably worth the money. Screen, hood, seat, proper wire wheel, the lot.

Unfortunately, I would immediately have repainted it to match the Virago. That meant paying finished-sidecar money for a finish I did not want, followed by a long drive to Cambridge to collect something I was about to dismantle.

Still, it established a useful figure. £1,050 was what a complete and attractive old sidecar could be bought for. Whatever wreck I bought and rebuilt should not end up costing more than that, otherwise I would merely be restoring something for the educational experience of spending too much money.

Then came a Wessex at £600. Beautiful, rare and structurally ingenious, which is usually another way of saying nobody now remembers quite how it was attached to the motorcycle. It had a wire wheel, luggage space and enough loose brackets scattered across the seller’s patio to suggest somebody had emptied a blacksmith’s cutlery drawer.

There was also a Squire in Cardigan at £550. The body looked usable, but it had no screen, no hood and a generic trailer mudguard with trailer lamps bolted to it. It was not a bad sidecar, but £550 seemed ambitious when most of the work was still sitting there waiting to be done.

I also became briefly distracted by wire wheels.

Watsonian will sell a beautiful new one for more than £600. Just the wheel. No tyre, no sidecar, no grateful passenger. At that price I would expect it to arrive with its own valet.

Unfortunately, the Watsonian wheel is a peculiar size, so fitting something else may not be entirely straightforward. A bolt-on wire wheel may exist somewhere, although this requires discovering what has actually been measured, from which side of which stud and by somebody who knows the difference between a hub diameter and a hopeful guess.

There was another £250 Watsonian which I would probably have bought. It was rough, but complete enough for what I wanted. The difficulty was its owner, who failed to respond after a week of increasingly determined prodding.

Online selling has developed this curious ritual in which people advertise something and then resist all attempts to buy it. Perhaps he was waiting for a customer who communicated entirely by telepathy. Either way, his loss.

Then there was Barnsley.

At first it appeared to be a £250 Watsonian shell and chassis from which the useful parts had already been removed. The seller had bought it for some of the fittings, which did not sound especially promising.

But each question caused another component to emerge. The screen was there. Then the seat, mudguard, hub, brake assembly and suspension damper. Finally, after a cast motorcycle wheel lurking in one photograph turned out to belong to something else entirely, the actual Watsonian wheel appeared from another corner of the workshop.

It became a sort of mechanical reverse striptease. Instead of parts being removed one by one, the sidecar gradually put itself back together.

For the collection, I borrowed a van from work, only to discover that it was a former AA van, complete with all the internal racking. This had to come out before a Watsonian Monza was going anywhere near it.

The racking appeared to have been designed and installed by a psychopath. Every fixing was hidden behind another panel, bracket or piece of trim, each of which was secured by a fixing hidden somewhere else. What should have been a straightforward removal became an exercise in industrial archaeology conducted inside a yellow metal box.

Fortunately, No.2 Son was available, so I used him to my advantage. Between us, and after rather more dismantling than any sane person would have considered necessary, we eventually removed enough of the AA’s internal infrastructure to create a space large enough for the sidecar.

So I drove to Barnsley to collect it. Three hours there and three hours back (each leg on a single bladder, which was impressive), which is a long way to go for something that does not even have an engine.

The seller and I are both retired. We share a passion for classic cars and both own ride-on mowers, although he also has 2 tracked tractors, so I am clearly still operating at the amateur end of retirement machinery.

He is restoring a 1961 Triumph Thunderbird and renovating another Watsonian Monza to go with it. Inevitably, we stood around chewing the fat over the Thunderbird, the sidecar, old motorcycles and the assorted machinery surrounding us.

As a result, I drove away without the seat.

This was particularly impressive because the seat had been one of the components I had specifically established existed before setting off. It still exists. It is simply in Barnsley, while the rest of the sidecar is now in Gloucestershire.

This may not matter.

I have found a reproduction Eames DSW-style stool on eBay for £27. I have no particular desire to install a piece of mid-century dining furniture in the sidecar, but the moulded plastic seat has roughly the right shape.

The idea would be to use it only as a former. I could alter the shape with sculpted expanding foam, make it more supportive and ergonomic, then cover it with fibreglass to produce a proper low-backed sidecar seat. The plastic shell would provide the basic curves without requiring me to sculpt the entire thing from nothing.

At £27, it is considerably cheaper than buying a specialist sidecar seat and may fit the cockpit rather more neatly than the original Watsonian arrangement.

If that works, the seat in Barnsley becomes superfluous. I will therefore have converted forgetting it after a 6-hour round trip from an act of absent-mindedness into forward-looking design policy.

The Monza itself turned out to be more complete, and rather less derelict, than the photographs had suggested.

The chassis has been covered in underseal, but is solid. The screen, mudguard, wheel, hub, brake and suspension components are all present. There is some minor ironmongery missing, particularly among the fittings which will eventually attach it to the motorcycle, but nothing that looks beyond ordinary fabrication.

It is certainly shabby. The black finish is scratched and tired, the cockpit looks as though it has spent some time collecting Yorkshire weather, and the metalwork needs cleaning and refinishing.

But the fibreglass shell appears fundamentally sound, as far as can be judged without stripping it down. Admittedly there are a couple of splits where the floor meets the upper body, but nothing that can't be reinforced with fibreglass. It still has the original Watsonian badge, a decorative spear. It looks like an old sidecar awaiting restoration, rather than a heap of components which may once have met socially.

The hub and brake will need rebuilding. The damper may be no better than an ornamental spring with ambitions. The screen is damaged and badly aged, particularly around one of its mounting points, but enough survives to provide an accurate pattern. It is a fairly simple curved shape and should be possible to reproduce in polycarbonate without specialist tooling or a small inheritance.

Alternatively, I may dispense with it altogether.

One possibility is to build up the front edge of the cockpit with expanding foam, sculpt it to shape, cover it with fibreglass and fit a Brooklands-style aero screen.

Another is to make a double T-shaped support across the front of the cockpit and mount a motorcycle screen similar to the one already fitted to the Virago.

That would give the outfit a rather more purposeful appearance and avoid spending hundreds of pounds trying to recreate a hood and screen arrangement I do not particularly need.

Rain protection is not really essential. It is a sidecar, not a taxi. If it rains heavily, the passenger will become wet and may subsequently develop opinions. A bit like the person riding the attached motorbike. A few judiciously positioned holes in the bottom of the cockpit will deal with any water which gets in. Drainage, at least, remains within the limits of British engineering.

The bumper rail also needs attention. On the newer Watsonian Monza, the front section was chromed, and I rather like that detail.

Rather than rechroming the existing mild steel, I will probably have a stainless steel front section made. It could either be professionally welded into the existing rail or attached using flanged joints, electrically isolated from the mild steel to reduce galvanic corrosion.

This may sound excessive for a £250 sidecar, but one of the hazards of buying cheap machinery is that it provides almost unlimited opportunities to spend money improving it beyond the original spec.

The important thing is that the major components exist.

A missing screen can cost hundreds. A missing hub, suspension arm or mudguard means hunting for parts which were last considered commonplace when Harold Wilson had a pipe. Even the seat is not actually missing. It has merely remained in Yorkshire and may now be entirely unnecessary.

It was also in better condition than the other £250 Watsonian whose owner had declined to sell it to me. His tough luck. The Barnsley one turned out to be better anyway.

At £250, the arithmetic still works. There is room for paint, bearings, fibreglass, upholstery, a stainless bumper section, possibly a different screen and perhaps, one day, a more elegant wheel.

The sidecar has now reached home.

My earlier plan was to get it into the top shed without Hay noticing and reveal it only after it had been restored and looked presentable.

This plan lasted until she saw it. She asked where I intended to get the other Big Dipper cars from for the fairground ride she thinks I am building in the back garden. This was not entirely the reaction I had hoped for, although viewed objectively she has a point. A faded black sidecar body sitting by itself does look less like the beginning of an elegant classic motorcycle outfit and more like the first delivery for an extremely low-budget amusement park.

Still, every restoration has an awkward stage.

The shabby £250 Watsonian turned out to be the sensible choice. Its important parts had merely been distributed around a workshop and revealed gradually as the conversation progressed.

I have bought a proper Watsonian Monza body, chassis, mudguard, suspension, hub, brake and wheel. The damaged screen is repairable or replaceable. The original seat is still in Barnsley and may now be superfluous. Everything needs attention, but very little needs inventing.

Buying an empty shell and then purchasing the rest of the sidecar one expensive component at a time is merely retail with extra rust.

And if the motorcycle conversion does not work, I apparently already have the first car for a Big Dipper.

The Air Conditioner That Fights Itself

Lying in bed one night, I woke up thinking about the portable air conditioner. This is the sort of thing that apparently occupies my mind in the small hours.

One inlet and 2 outlets.

At least, that was how it appeared. Cold air came back into the room through one outlet. Hot air went outside through the other. "Hang on. If air was being pumped out of the room, where was its replacement coming from?"

More accurately, the machine has 2 air circuits, both drawing air from the room, but only one returning it. One stream passes over the cold evaporator and comes back into the room. The other passes over the hot condenser and is sent outside through the exhaust hose.

That air has gone.

The room does not collapse like a crisp packet. Its pressure falls by a tiny amount, which is enough to pull replacement air in under the door, around windows, through vents and through the various small gaps in the building.

During a heatwave, that replacement air is warm. If it is humid, the machine then has to remove that moisture as well. So the machine cools the room while creating the pressure difference that draws more warm air into it. It is partly battling itself.

I have dealt with the most obvious problem. The exhaust hose passes through a properly cut hole in a Perspex panel covering the window, so the hot exhaust cannot simply curl around and come straight back in through the same opening. The Perspex does that job perfectly well. What it cannot do is replace the air being pumped outside. That still has to come from somewhere else.

The hose is not helping much either. It carries the hottest air in the system and runs through the room I am trying to cool. It gets hot and gives some of that heat back before the air reaches the window. Keeping it short helps. Insulating it would help more. Neither alters the fact that the hot side of the air conditioner is sitting in the bedroom.

The machine does work. Ours makes a considerable difference in the large upstairs bedroom, particularly when the outside temperature gets into the 30s. It is simply a rather compromised way of doing the job.

Then there are the little plug-in air conditioners now infesting online adverts. Most are fans blowing air across a wet pad. They may cool the air immediately in front of them, particularly in a dry climate, but they do not remove heat from a room. No amount of breathless advertising can repeal the laws of thermodynamics. During the heatwave, some of them have doubled or tripled in price. The technology has not improved. Only the opportunity has.

A proper split system keeps the indoor and outdoor air circuits separate. The indoor unit cools the room air and returns it to the room. Refrigerant carries the heat outside to the condenser. No room air is expelled, so there is no negative pressure pulling warm replacement air into the house. It does not normally create positive pressure either. It moves the heat outside without throwing the room air out with it, which seems the more sensible arrangement.

A car works in much the same way. The evaporator is inside the cabin and the condenser is outside, at the front of the car. On recirculation, cabin air stays in the cabin. Select fresh air and the blower deliberately brings outside air in, with the excess escaping through vents elsewhere. What the car does not do is cool the cabin, take some of that cooled air, heat it up and throw it out under the bonnet.

We are therefore considering fitting a split system next year, but cooling the air after the heat has entered the house is only part of the answer.

Our internal blinds are pale grey and white, which helps, although the dark curtains are less useful once the sun is pouring through the glass. By then the heat is already indoors and the curtains are merely absorbing it on our behalf.

We are now considering proper Mediterranean-style external shutters as well. Not aluminium screens or fabric blinds, but folding oak louvred shutters to match the oak cladding and oak windows.

They would fold back clear of the outward-opening windows when not needed, then close during the hottest part of the day and stop much of the solar radiation before it reached the glass. That is rather more sensible than letting the sun heat the room and then paying a machine to remove the heat afterwards.

Fortunately, the windows are framed by substantial oak verticals, so the shutters could be fixed directly into something capable of carrying them rather than being screwed hopefully into decorative cladding. They would still need serious stainless-steel hinges, proper hold-backs and enough clearance for the oak to move with the seasons. An oak shutter caught by a gust of wind is not a blind. It is a lever.

The shutters would reduce the heat entering the room in the first place. The split system would then deal with what remained.

The running cost is less of an objection for us because air conditioning is needed most when the sun is out, which is also when our solar panels are producing. The battery can cover some of the gaps. It will not make the cooling free, but much of the electricity should come from the roof rather than the grid.

A split unit can also provide heat in cooler weather, so it would not spend most of the year hanging on the wall doing nothing.

External shutters to keep the heat out. A split system to remove what still gets in. Solar panels producing when the cooling demand is highest.

There is a wider irony here too.

When a heatwave drives up demand for air conditioning, gas-fired power stations are often brought in to supply the extra electricity. But as the air temperature rises, gas turbines themselves lose output. Hotter air is less dense, so the compressor draws in less oxygen by mass and the turbine cannot burn quite as much fuel. At precisely the point when more electricity is wanted, some of the supposedly firm gas capacity begins to ebb away - - by as much as 20% at 35°C on some turbines, compared with their rated output at the standard 15°C test condition.

And while the station is dealing with today’s heat, the CO₂ it emits adds to the warming that is making future heatwaves more frequent and more severe.

The feedback is slower and global rather than immediate and confined to one bedroom, but the resemblance to the portable air conditioner is difficult to miss. Both tackle the immediate heat while also, in their different ways, helping to make the job harder. The portable unit sucks warm air back into the room. The gas station loses output as the air warms and emits the CO₂ contributing to further warming.

Wind and solar have their own limitations, obviously. The wind can drop and the sun eventually sets. Solar panels also lose a little efficiency as they heat up. But neither generates electricity by adding more CO₂ to the atmosphere.

Curiously, weather dependence is treated as a fatal flaw when renewables suffer from it, but scarcely mentioned when fossil-fuel generation is weakened by the heat and helping to create more of it.

Barring an absurd quotation, I suspect that is where we are heading.

Sam Vimes' Boots

People say buy cheap, buy twice.

Not always. Sometimes you buy cheap once, discover you've bought rubbish, then keep it for years because throwing it away feels like admitting it has beaten you.

My latest example is a Terratek rotary tool. I thought it would be useful for the GT6, the bike and all those little jobs where an angle grinder would be considered excessive.

It boasts 234 accessories. That sounds impressive until you open the case and discover that at least 200 of them are tiny circles of sandpaper with a hole in the middle.

They fit on a minute screw mandrel, apparently. I say apparently because it is not immediately obvious which attachment they belong to, and by the time you've worked it out the enthusiasm has begun to drain away. Once fitted, they last just long enough to prove you assembled them correctly.

Counting each one as a separate accessory is rather like selling a toilet roll as a 200-piece bathroom system.

The rest are not much better. The sanding attachments wear out almost on contact. The grinding stones disappear nearly as quickly. The burrs clog up and stop cutting. Some of the attachments may have a purpose, but I have yet to discover it.

Then there is the tool itself. A rotary tool is supposed to be small, controllable and suitable for fiddly work. This one is enormous. It is like trying to do watchmaking with a road drill.

Sam Vimes had a point about boots. Terry Pratchett's theory was that poor people often spend more because they can only afford things that wear out. Buy the cheap boots several times and you end up spending more than the man who bought the good pair once. This is the workshop version.

By the time the supplied consumables have worn out, which does not take long, decent replacements are not particularly cheap. Buy proper sanding discs, decent burrs and grinding attachments that survive more than a brief introduction to metal, and you may as well have bought a better rotary tool in the first place.

So I have learned something. Next time I see a tool advertised with 234 accessories, I shall count the sandpaper before I reach for my wallet.

From Watsonian to Dodgem

Watsonian has been building sidecars since 1912, which places it among that select group of British manufacturers whose products have survived wars, recessions, changing fashions and the repeated efforts of the British motorcycle industry to abolish itself.

Its sidecars belong to an age when a motorcycle combination was not merely an eccentric weekend toy. It was family transport, commercial transport and, for many people, the nearest affordable alternative to a car. Over more than a century, Watsonian developed the curved glass-fibre bodies, polished fittings and traditional coachbuilt appearance that made its name almost synonymous with the classic British sidecar.

That history is part of the attraction. A Watsonian does not look like a plastic box attached to a motorcycle as an afterthought. It gives the whole outfit presence. There is something gloriously civilised about a proper chair, with its upholstered seat, small windscreen and polished trim, travelling beside a motorcycle that would otherwise carry little more than its rider and a modest quantity of luggage.

A Watsonian sidecar on the Yamaha Virago 535 is therefore an attractive idea. The Virago is low, compact and has exactly the sort of faintly old-fashioned cruiser appearance that suits a sidecar. Add a traditional Watsonian chair and the result would look as though it had always been intended, rather than assembled during an unusually energetic weekend with an angle grinder.

There is, inevitably, a slight difficulty. Watsonian sidecars cost money.

Facebook Marketplace, however, offers an alternative universe in which sensible engineering decisions compete directly with things that seemed amusing after 2 glasses of wine.

A complete Squire sidecar appeared for about £550 - Squire merged with Watsonian in 1988. That was probably the rational answer. It already had a chassis, suspension, wheel, seat and body. In engineering terms, most of the difficult work had been done by somebody who presumably understood sidecars.

There was also an unfinished Watsonian project at around £600. It was elegant, traditional and potentially very suitable, although the word unfinished in a vehicle advertisement can cover anything from requiring a coat of paint to requiring the recreation of several missing decades of British manufacturing.

A motorcycle sidecar looks rather like a heavily disguised fairground dodgem, and that sparked a thought. Why not start with an actual dodgem and disguise it as a sidecar?

Old dodgem bodies seem to sell for between £100 and £250. Most are glass fibre, approximately sidecar-sized and designed to carry a passenger while surviving repeated impacts from members of the public. This is already a more impressive specification than that of some production vehicles.

One multicoloured example, proudly marked Dodgem III, had particularly promising proportions. Beneath the fairground clutter was a long, low body with enough room for a passenger and a shape that might conceivably complement the Virago.

Not immediately, obviously.

The rubber bumper would have to go. So would the steering wheel, lights, metalwork and towering rear bodywork. The passenger seat would need lowering, the excessive rear overhang removing and the shell reshaping so that it no longer presented the aerodynamic qualities of a garden shed.

A small windscreen could be added. The body could be smoothed, repaired and painted to match the metallic green-grey of the bike. Properly done, it might look less like a retired fairground ride and more like something produced by a small European coachbuilder during an eccentric period.

The body is not, of course, the sidecar.

It would still require a proper chassis, suspension, wheel and correctly engineered mounting system. A £55 vintage sidecar chassis also appeared for sale, although its age and condition raised the possibility that the low price merely reflected the cost of the rust.

The chassis would need to be examined carefully, particularly its suspension, bearings, alignment and ability to accept secure mounting points. The Virago itself would require a properly designed subframe. Attaching a dodgem shell directly to a few convenient-looking parts of the motorcycle would produce something memorable, but probably only once.

A sidecar needs properly triangulated upper and lower mounts. It also needs correct wheel lead, toe-in and lean-out. These are not decorative details. They determine whether the outfit travels along the road or spends its time attempting to visit the opposite verge.

There is also the question of weight. The dodgem body is likely to be relatively light, which is useful, but an excessively light chair can lift readily on left-hand bends. Ballast might be needed when travelling without a passenger, although the final requirement would depend upon the finished weight and geometry.

Braking would also need consideration. A light unbraked sidecar can be perfectly workable, but the completed outfit would have to be assessed as a whole rather than on the comforting basis that each individual part once belonged to a vehicle.

The complete Squire remains the sensible option. Buy it, fit the correct subframe, set it up properly and go for a ride.

The unfinished Watsonian is the elegant option. It would suit the Virago and produce the sort of combination that attracts approving nods from men wearing waxed jackets.

The dodgem is the interesting option.

It is cheaper only if one places no monetary value on fabrication, glass-fibre work, paint, suspension repairs, engineering, repeated dismantling or the gradual transformation of a garage into a small and badly managed vehicle factory.

But it would be unique.

And once you have imagined a Yamaha Virago 535 with a fairground dodgem beside it, the complete Squire begins to look depressingly sensible.

However, this one looks as if it escaped from a maritime exhibition.

Then I spotted this one on Facebook Marketplace for £250.

Make unknown, but it does have a 1960s Watsonian Monza look about it. Unfortunately the owner is not responding to my enquiries on his advert. Could be away on holiday.

I uploaded the image to ChatGPT instructed it to renovate it and paint it in the same colour as my Virago.

Now, that does look rather attractive. Unfortunately ChatGPT is a bit squonk when lining the bike and sidecar up in the same plane, but you get the general idea.

I contacted Watsonian about a subframe for the Virago 535. They replied that they don't have enough data on the 535 to produce one off the shelf, so they'd need the bike to fabricate a bespoke subframe. The price was £595. That's not cheap, but it would be the proper job. It may be something to do over the winter.

I then made the mistake of joining a Virago owners' group on Facebook. You know the sort of place. You ask a perfectly straightforward question and receive every answer except the one you were looking for.

I asked whether anyone had drawings or measurements for a Virago 535 subframe so I could get a tame fabricator to make one. Instead I got the usual pearls of wisdom. Buy a BMW. Buy an 1100 Virago. In other words, don't answer the question at all.

Fitting a sidecar to a Virago 535 isn't impossible. Plenty of people have done it. Yes, it blunts the performance, but I didn't buy a Virago because I have an overwhelming desire to frighten sports bikes. I bought it because it's a pleasant, steady plodder. My comfortable cruising speed with a sidecar would probably be 60 to 65 mph anyway.

The trick is to keep the sidecar as light as possible. A lightweight Squire or Watsonian is a far better match than some enormous touring chair. The engineering challenge isn't whether the Virago can pull it. It's designing a proper subframe that spreads the loads without abusing Yamaha's rather unconventional frame.

Facebook Marketplace and the 32-Inch Waist

There is a small absurdity in buying second-hand motorcycle clothing on Facebook Marketplace.

Motorcycling is supposedly a pastime built around speed, machinery and a faint disregard for convention. Yet the used clothing market appears to have been designed almost entirely for fat bikers with 40-inch wastes. Waist, obviously, but given the amount of surplus material involved, the misspelling seems oddly appropriate.

Search Facebook Marketplace for summer-weight riding gear and the same things appear repeatedly: black jackets, black trousers, dark blue jeans and enough reflective piping to suggest someone briefly remembered visibility before surrendering to fashion. Anything in a lighter colour is rare. Anything with a 32-inch waist is rarer. Finding both at once is apparently regarded as an unreasonable demand.

The reason I was looking is that I already own a Texspeed heavy-weather suit, which is excellent when Britain is doing what Britain does best. What I wanted was something lighter for warm, dry summer riding, rather than spending every sunny journey gently poaching inside waterproof textiles.

Then, among the acres of black polyester, a complete JTS jacket and trouser set appeared in RAF-style blue camouflage, with armour, in the right size, advertised for £10.

RAF camouflage is not really camouflage on a motorcycle, unless you ride in the same manner that Ron Weasley drove the Ford Anglia. On an ordinary road it is light, distinctive and considerably more visible than the regulation biker uniform of head-to-toe black.

Better still, it had already been reduced and still had not sold, suggesting that the overlap between bikers with a 32-inch waist and bikers willing to countenance RAF camouflage is not especially large.

Naturally, the seller's idea of Facebook Marketplace ended at the marketplace. Collection only.

I reckoned the suit was worth £50, so that is what I offered delivered. That was apparently enough to persuade the seller to abandon her no-posting ethic. A Japanese deal: she received enough to make the inconvenience worthwhile, and I paid what I believed the suit was genuinely worth. Both sides were happy.

Buying second-hand always carries some risk. It may not fit. The armour may need upgrading. The waterproof lining may have retired before its previous owner. But the important thing is that it appears to be genuine JTS motorcycle clothing in excellent condition, and exactly the sort of lighter-weight outfit I had been looking for.

The alternative was spending £240 or more on a brand-new summer suit that might still fit like a marquee, because finding properly protective clothing in a 32-inch waist is apparently a specialist requirement.

At £50 delivered, the downside is modest. If it fits, I have acquired a complete, conspicuous summer riding suit for a fraction of the new price. If it does not, I can probably put it back on Facebook Marketplace without losing much.

Sometimes being cost-conscious is not about buying the cheapest thing available. It is about recognising when the market has briefly made a mistake in your favour. Or perhaps, in this case, recognising that a bargain is simply what happens when two people value the same thing differently and both walk away smiling.

Stop press: I discovered today that I'd not bought a complete ensemble of jacket and trousers, but just the trousers. And yes, I hadn't read the advert fully, as usual. Still, £50 for a pair of highly conspicuous motorcycle trousers isn't really a bad deal.

An Accident Waiting to Happen?

I drive for a living. I have now covered thousands of miles without an accident.

There are 2 tempting conclusions. There are 2 tempting conclusions. The first is that I must be an exceptionally good driver. The second is that the law of averages is waiting behind a hedge with a clipboard.

Neither is quite right.

Experience matters. The more miles I drive, the better I become at spotting the little signs that somebody is about to change lanes without looking, brake for no obvious reason or discover their turning only after they have passed it.

You learn to expect the unexpected, although that phrase is rather ruined by people who use it to mean absolutely anything.

You notice the car drifting slightly within its lane. The driver looking sideways. The brake lights appearing for no obvious reason. You begin to recognise the difference between someone who knows where they are going and someone who is about to make their uncertainty everybody else's problem.

That must reduce risk.

But every extra mile also gives something else another chance to go wrong. Experience may make each journey safer, while the sheer number of journeys increases my exposure overall. Both can be true.

A clean driving record probably indicates patience, anticipation and at least a reasonable degree of competence. It also contains a fair helping of luck. I cannot control the deer in the road, the tyre carcass falling from a lorry or the driver who has decided that looking at a telephone is more urgent than looking at the carriageway.

What it does not mean is that an accident is somehow due.

Probability does not notice that I have escaped trouble for several years and decide that fairness now requires a collision. Yet people think like this all the time. A long run of success becomes proof of brilliance. Then, when something goes wrong, it was apparently inevitable because the good run had lasted too long.

This sort of reasoning becomes even worse when politics enters the room.

A government takes office and inflation falls. Its supporters declare victory. Inflation rises and its opponents declare economic sabotage. Energy prices, interest rates, wages, exchange rates and policies already in motion are quietly pushed aside because they complicate matters.

Something happened after something else, therefore the first thing caused the second.

Sometimes it did. Quite often it did not. The awkward bit is showing how.

The same trick appears everywhere. Migration rises and crime rises, therefore migration caused the crime. Police numbers fall and crime also falls, therefore police numbers do not matter.

The conclusion comes first. The explanation is then bolted onto it afterwards, usually with great confidence.

A proper explanation has to show what changed, how it affected behaviour, what else was happening and what would probably have happened anyway. That is harder work than pointing at 2 events on a graph, so naturally it is less popular.

Without that missing mechanism, the argument is no stronger than blaming the driver because the car developed a fault after he bought it.

Personal anecdotes are no better.

I have driven thousands of miles without crashing, therefore I am a superb driver. My grandfather smoked until he was 90, therefore smoking is not dangerous. I once knew a dishonest claimant, therefore claimants are dishonest.

The anecdote may be entirely true. It may still prove next to nothing.

Most outcomes have several causes operating at once. Skill matters. Luck matters. Policy matters, but so do circumstances that no government controls. Individual choices matter, but those choices are made within wider conditions.

This does not make explanation impossible. It merely means that explanation requires rather more effort than spotting that one thing happened after another and announcing causation.

My accident-free record deserves some credit. I would be a fool to think it proves immunity.

Experience improves the odds. Exposure gives the odds more chances to go against me.

The danger begins when we turn that uncertainty into a tidy story, then mistake what happened next for why it happened.

They Lived the War. We Inherited the History.

A recent conversation with my 90-year-old father-in-law took an unexpected turn. He mentioned that the SS Great Britain had had its name changed, because some people - certainly not me - had supposedly associated “SS” with “slave ship”.

That led to a separate discussion about the other meaning of SS. He then asked me what SS meant in Nazi terms.

I was taken aback. I would have assumed that anyone who had lived through the war, even as a child, would know that the SS was the Schutzstaffel, the organisation that became central to Nazi repression, racial policy, concentration camps and mass murder.

But why should he necessarily have known?

There is a curious paradox about the generation that lived through the Second World War. They experienced it directly, endured its restrictions and carried its memories for the rest of their lives, yet many of them knew far less about the war as a whole than their children later did.

My father’s generation knew their own war. They knew their regiment, their ship, their airfield, their convoy, their factory or their bomb-damaged street. As children, they knew rationing, air-raid warnings, blackouts, absent fathers and anxious adults. What they did not necessarily know was how their small piece fitted into the vast machinery of a global conflict.

That was not because they were ignorant. It was because they were inside it.

Operational secrecy meant that servicemen were told only what they needed to know. Censorship limited what could be written home. Newspapers and radio reported what the government judged safe, useful or good for morale. Propaganda was not merely something the enemy did. Britain used it too, often for entirely understandable reasons. A country fighting for survival could hardly issue a daily bulletin listing its mistakes, shortages and secret plans.

Children knew even less. They heard scraps of adult conversation, saw newsreels and absorbed the official version. They might know that Hitler was the enemy and that British forces were fighting overseas, but that did not amount to a detailed understanding of Nazi institutions, the Eastern Front, the machinery of occupation or the developing evidence of genocide.

A soldier in North Africa might know very little about the Battle of the Atlantic. A sailor escorting Arctic convoys might have only the vaguest understanding of events in Burma. A family sheltering from the Blitz would not know the scale of what was happening on the Eastern Front, nor the political bargains being struck between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin.

The war was too large, too dispersed and too secret for any ordinary participant to comprehend in real time.

The generation born afterwards met it in a very different way. By the time the war reached the History curriculum, the pieces had begun to be assembled. Campaigns had been mapped. Axis records had been captured and studied. Commanders had published memoirs. Historians could compare Allied accounts with those of their enemies and examine decisions using documents that had been unavailable while the war was being fought.

We were not taught only about Dunkirk, the Blitz and D-Day. We learned how the theatres connected. We learned about the Eastern Front, North Africa, the Atlantic convoys, strategic bombing, resistance movements, intelligence, diplomacy, occupation and genocide. We learned what the SS was, how it developed and what it did.

We were shown the map rather than merely one muddy square of it.

That formal education mattered. It gave the post-war generation a structure into which individual stories could be placed. A veteran might remember a retreat, a bombardment or a sudden change of orders. The historian could later explain why it happened, what was occurring elsewhere and how it affected the wider campaign.

The classroom was only part of it. Boomers were also surrounded by war films. They appeared constantly on television, especially at weekends and during school holidays. However simplified, patriotic or occasionally myth-making they were, they supplied a rough chronology and a mental map.

Dunkirk, the Atlantic convoys, Colditz, the Dambusters raid, Arnhem and D-Day were already familiar before the teacher reached them. We knew what a Lancaster, a U-boat, a Spitfire and a Bailey bridge were before anyone thought to examine us on them.

School History therefore did not operate in isolation. It filled in, corrected and connected a story that films, family memories, comics, documentaries and remembrance ceremonies had already made part of everyday life.

Then television carried the assembled history into the living room.

Programmes such as All Our Yesterdays and, above all, The World at War did something extraordinary. They brought together archive film, official records, military analysis and testimony from people on every side. They allowed millions of viewers, including veterans themselves, to see the conflict in a form that had never been available while it was happening.

But many veterans did not watch them. Some had no wish to see again what they had spent years trying to forget. The war might have become history to their children, but to them it remained memory, and memory was not always something to be invited into the sitting room on a Sunday evening.

Trauma did not yet have its modern vocabulary. Men simply changed the channel, left the room or said they had seen enough of the war already.

Others did watch, and must have learned more about the overall course of the war from television in the 1960s and 1970s than they had known in uniform. For the first time, they could see how their own experience fitted into the larger conflict.

Later generations encountered something different again. There was simply more history to cover. The Cold War, decolonisation, civil rights, the Middle East, the fall of communism and the development of modern Britain all demanded space in a curriculum whose timetable had not obligingly expanded.

Teaching methods changed as well. Continuous political and military narrative increasingly gave way to selected depth studies, source analysis, social history and broader themes. None of that was inherently inferior, but it meant pupils could study important parts of the war without ever being given the complete sequence that joined them together.

The result was not necessarily a less accurate version of the war, but a more fragmented one. Pupils might study Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the Home Front or a handful of turning points while lacking the wider framework: why the war began, how its theatres interacted, why Germany lost, how Soviet manpower and American industrial power altered the balance, and how the settlement shaped the world that followed.

The war films also faded from everyday television. The veterans disappeared from family gatherings, the old stories became second-hand, and the shared broadcasting culture that had repeatedly exposed almost everyone to the same films and documentaries broke apart. The war ceased to be the national backstory playing continuously in the background. It became another historical module.

The Boomers may therefore have occupied a brief historical sweet spot. We were far enough from the war for the evidence to have been assembled, but close enough for its people, stories and imagery still to surround us.

This is not to diminish what the wartime generation knew. They possessed a kind of knowledge that no classroom or documentary could reproduce. They knew the fear, boredom, noise, cold, exhaustion and grief. They knew what it was to wait, to obey, to lose friends and to carry on because there was no alternative.

But lived experience is not the same as historical understanding.

Memory is local. History is assembled.

My father-in-law had lived through the war as a child, but that did not mean he had been taught the structure and vocabulary of Nazism. I encountered it later through the History curriculum, books, war films and documentary television. His generation inherited the memory of wartime Britain. Mine inherited the assembled history. Those who followed us were often taught its most important parts, but not always the continuous story that joined them together.

The Bureaucratic Skull

Apparently, the human skull has a sophisticated understanding of vehicle classification.

At ordinary cycling speeds, a cycle helmet is regarded as appropriate. Travel more slowly on a small motorcycle, however, and the same helmet becomes legally inadequate. Not because the likely impact is necessarily greater, but because the machine beneath you has crossed an invisible bureaucratic frontier.

I have some personal experience here. I once came off what was, in essence, a bicycle with a 50cc engine attached, at well under 15 mph, and suffered a bilateral subdural haematoma.

So I am not arguing that low-speed motorcycling is harmless, nor that proper motorcycle helmets are unnecessary. Quite the reverse. Low speed is not the same thing as low consequence. The road, the kerb and the inside of the human skull are entirely indifferent to whether the machine has pedals, an engine or both.

A cycle helmet is accepted and recommended for a cyclist travelling at 15 or 20 mph, yet becomes legally inadequate when worn by a motorcyclist travelling more slowly. The road does not know which vehicle category you selected. Nor, as I discovered, does the brain.

The absurdity is not that the motorcyclist must wear a motorcycle helmet. It is that the law treats the adequacy of the helmet as depending more on the vehicle category than on the speed, the fall or the actual risk.

Naturally, there is a reason. The law likes simple categories. Bicycle: helmet optional. Motorcycle: approved helmet compulsory. It is tidy, enforceable and saves everyone the distress of having to consider circumstances.

But it does leave us with the curious conclusion that physics concerns itself with speed, force and impact, while British law concerns itself with which box the vehicle occupies on a form.

The skull, having once expressed a fairly robust opinion on the matter, remains unconvinced.

Two Carburettors, One Useful Question

Since tracing the Virago’s fuel leak to the rear carburettor breather, I contacted the FJ Owners Club workshop near Yate, less than 2 miles from home. The club takes its name from Yamaha’s FJ1100 and FJ1200, the large 4-cylinder sports-tourers around which it was formed.

Their first reply was reassuring, although the figure quoted was for a 4-cylinder machine rather than the Virago. A complete carburettor overhaul would be roughly £300, they said, with another £50 to collect the bike from Old Sodbury. The only difficulty was timing: they were busy and would need about 3 weeks before they could fit the job in.

Even £350 to collect a 27-year-old motorcycle and overhaul its carburettors was not going to turn a £1,750 purchase into a financial catastrophe.

There was, however, one small detail. The £300 figure was for a 4-cylinder motorcycle. The Virago has 2 carburettors.

This is why it pays to read what people have actually written rather than what you expected them to mean. Had I simply accepted the figure, nobody would necessarily have done anything dishonest. I would merely have failed to ask whether a price for rebuilding 4 carburettors also applied to rebuilding 2.

The answer came back at £250. With £50 for collection, the total is £300.

That is an entirely fair price, and the correction is almost more reassuring than the saving. They did not attempt to preserve the higher figure once the difference was pointed out. They adjusted the price to reflect the actual machine.

That matters.

We have become used to businesses where the person answering the telephone knows little about the work, the person preparing the estimate has never seen the machine, and the person carrying out the repair is expected to follow a screen rather than understand what is in front of him.

The FJ Owners Club appears to be something rather different: essentially one experienced man, perhaps 2, working from a workshop that is clean as a whistle and dealing with older motorcycles because he understands them rather than merely tolerates them.

I have been there before with my son’s Hero Bullet. It had a fault that needed diagnosing rather than a part randomly replaced in the hope that the problem would disappear. They found it and fixed it. I came away impressed then, and nothing about this exchange has changed that opinion.

A spotless workshop does not prove mechanical genius, but it is rarely a bad sign. Carburettors contain tiny jets, passages, needles, seals and diaphragms. They are not improved by being dismantled on a bench that resembles the aftermath of a jumble sale.

I have therefore asked another question: whether he would charge me more for allowing me to stand beside him while he dismantles and reassembles the carburettors.

Carburettors are something I really ought to know how to dismantle, inspect and rebuild myself. They are not sorcery, although the arrangement of springs, diaphragms, needles, floats and microscopic passages can make them appear designed to punish the merely curious.

Watching somebody competent do the job properly would be more useful than repeatedly studying exploded diagrams and then discovering, halfway through my own attempt, that I had misunderstood which way a tiny component was fitted.

Time spent explaining a job is still working time, so I would not expect the lesson for nothing. Nor would I expect him to tolerate a customer leaning over his shoulder, asking questions and slowing the job down without being compensated for it. But if he is willing, the additional charge would buy something more durable than the repair itself: the confidence to understand and perhaps deal with the system next time.

The 3-week wait is not a deterrent either. A busy specialist is generally preferable to an empty workshop advertising immediate availability. It suggests that other people have already discovered the value of somebody who knows what he is doing.

It also gives me time to attend to the other parts of returning to motorcycling: finding crash bars for the Virago and locating a decent pair of armoured motorcycle trousers that do not cost the equivalent of a small mortgage.

The crash bars are the easier part. They must fit the XV535, protect something useful rather than merely decorate the machine, and preferably provide somewhere sensible for my feet without turning the bike into a mobile scaffold tower.

The trousers have proved more difficult. I want something pale enough not to absorb every available ray of sunshine, roomy enough around the calves not to cut off the circulation, and fitted with proper armour. Apparently this is an exotic specification.

The market will happily provide endless varieties of black, charcoal and slightly different black, generally described as ideal summer wear by people who have never sat stationary on hot tarmac.

Add a 32-inch waist, a regular fit and Level 2 knee protection, and the prices begin to resemble the opening negotiations on a house extension.

Still, the delay means the search can continue without the temptation to buy the first unsuitable thing simply because the motorcycle is waiting outside. The trousers matter more than cosmetic accessories, and probably more than the crash bars. Chrome can be replaced. Knees are less readily available as pattern parts.

There is also a wider point here about old vehicles. The cheapest repair is not always the one with the lowest invoice. Paying less for somebody to guess, clean half the system, replace the wrong component and return the machine with the original fault still present is not economy. It is simply paying in instalments for the privilege of remaining stranded.

The Virago does not need somebody searching fruitlessly for a diagnostic socket. It needs somebody who understands floats, needles, seats, diaphragms, fuel levels and the consequences of petrol emerging from a breather above a hot cylinder head.

That expertise has a value.

At £250 for the carburettor overhaul and £50 to collect the bike, I am not merely buying a repair. I am buying the judgment of somebody experienced in diagnosing and repairing older carburetted motorcycles, and who knows the difference between a symptom, a cause and an expensive guess.

Should he agree to let me watch, I shall also be buying a little of that knowledge. Not enough to become an expert in an afternoon, but perhaps enough to stop the inside of a carburettor being treated as forbidden territory.

It also makes joining the club seem less like paying for a badge and more like supporting the survival of a useful institution. Owners of old machinery often complain that nobody knows how to repair it any more. Then, when they find somebody who does, they haggle over every pound and wonder why specialists disappear. There is a limit to what expertise can be expected to survive on goodwill.

The plan is for the Virago to be collected in about 3 weeks and for the carburettors to be dismantled, cleaned, inspected and rebuilt. The float system and diaphragms can be checked rather than guessed at, and any contamination can be dealt with before the bike is asked to cover serious mileage again.

Meanwhile, I shall continue searching for crash bars and protective trousers while trying to establish why motorcycle clothing manufacturers believe every rider wants to dress as a member of a heavily armed burglary team.

The original £300 estimate turned out not to be the price of my job. It was the price of a larger one.

One question saved £50.

Another may teach me how the carburettors actually work.

And the 3-week wait may yet prevent me from spending £200 on a pair of black trousers that do not fit.