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.
No comments:
Post a Comment