Time Travellin'

It's been a while since I've posted, since a hiatus was forced upon me due to a confusing quandary that a cavalcade of onlookers couldn't diagnose.  Therefore, a pilgrimage to the mecca of all that is Birmingham Small Arms, to the godfather of American BSA racing.  (Forgive the overzealous vocabulary, I've been driving most of the day and I haven't had much sleep.)

The day started at 5:30 am.  Up and out the door by 6:15.  Picked up Mark and his dad, and hit the road just after 7.  Breakfast at Waffle-Steak.  At around 11, we pulled into what can only be described as the last existing BSA dealership on the planet.  It's not a public place.  You have to wind down dirt roads in the middle of Nowhere, OH, and drive slowly into 1971.  You have to be a friend of a friend.  You have to know the secret handshake.

Just as Master Yoda was the Jedi who taught Obi-Wan Kenobi, Earl Bowlby is the racing legend who mentored Mark, who in turn is mentoring me.  For a solid month, we've been facing our own Darth Vader - a crank that won't turn.  We had tried everything, thought of everything, yelled at everything, but to no avail.  It became apparent that it was time to make a journey of our own to figure out how to conquer the forces against us.  (I think I'm Luke Skywalker in this analogy.)

Earl was a 10 time national title holder for hill-climb, and finished his career by winning climb racing's triple crown at the age of 51.  That was not a typo - he was FIFTY-ONE-YEARS-OLD, and not only competing with 20-somethings, but beating them all.  Today he's almost 80, and in better shape than Jack LaLane.  He sports the perfect old-guy uniform: New Balance shoes, black socks, polyester pants pulled up a little too high, a plaid, short sleeved shirt, and a pair of bifocals that went out of style in 1967, then came back into style 6 months ago.  His workspace in meticulous to the point of OCD.  Everything is labeled.  In pen.



I'd talked with Earl on the phone a few times before I met him.  He's the kind of guy that knows the size of a reamer for a 1967 A50 valve guide without having to look it up, and will explain the tolerances to the 1/1000th of an inch.  (The correct reamer is a .313, by the way.)  When explaining something, he's never talking down to you, he's wanting to share 60 years of experience.  He's straight out of 'Mad Men', an octogenarian who's quiet, patient, shy and methodical, with arms like a bear and a living room that looks like a trophy shop.

For many years, Earl owned a BSA/Suzuki shop in Ohio, and upon retirement, rather than selling off his inventory, he moved the shop closer to his home.  It now sits about 30 feet from his front door.  I'm not sure if it's an obsession gone wrong or religious devotion gone right, but Earl rebuilt his BSA dealership in an outbuilding next to his home, complete with parts counter, original dealership signage, a fully stocked shop in the back, and more original inventory than the factory in Birmingham, England.

Jesus wept.

I could extol the virtues of "he who is Earl" for many days to come, but we came to Mecca on a mission, and that was to find the answer as to why the wheel wouldn't turn.  Like the cavemen of yore, we hit it.  We applied fire.  We even prayed to the god of high octane fuel, but only found the same conclusions that we'd previously assessed.

In the end, after hundreds of measurements and tests with different bearings, cases, and even a little finger crossing, we figured it out, and it was wholly anticlimactic.  Basically, the machine shop honed the main bearing crooked.  That was it.  A slight rookie fuck-up, barely visible to the naked eye.

It's definitely taken WAY too long to assess a simple error, but we're laying new track, and great progress should be made very soon.  Looking on the bright side, I got to spend a lot of time with Mark and his Dad, and they're just as much as a font of knowledge and great stories as anyone.  I got to visit the BSA shrine.  I got some nice compliments on my truck.  All in all, it was a good day.

The word is "awe".  It wasn't until I got home that I fully comprehended the magnitude of the importance of Earl's little shop.  Not only are the bikes straight out of the 60's, the whole atmosphere, the attitude, and the mentality is no less than a time capsule.  Can anyone say that they love their job so much that they build a replica of their office cubicle in their garage?  I'm happy that we've solved our mystery, but even happier to know an 80-year-old man who's passion burns brighter than anyone I've ever met...even if he wears black socks with white sneakers.