Fishtail 451 – March 2018

The recent bad weather has caused us to re-schedule our planned talks for March. We were fortunate that Stuart McGuigan from Criterion was able to come to our Club Night on Tuesday 13th March and give us a talk on the Velocette gearbox. About 30 members attended the night which shows how much interest there was in the subject. Stuart and John went through some of the features of the gearbox and although in the general the gearbox is very good they pointed out where you can get problems. Criterion are known for developing improvements for Velocettes and Stuart and John showed us a development prototype of a new first gear pinion which gives a lower first gear in the Series 12 gearbox without altering the other three ratios. This about to go on test and it will be interesting to hear how that goes. It should make bikes with Series 12 gearboxes more manageable in traffic. I personally found the restoration of a gearbox mainshaft which was worn in the sleeve gear area of great interest, it could be the solution to a problem on another bike which uses a gearbox very similar to the Velocette gearbox. Many thanks to Stuart and John for coming to our meeting and sharing their thoughts with us. We appreciate the time and effort they put into making the evening so successful.

With the weather improving and the days getting longer we are looking forward to getting out on our bikes more. Our first planned ride is to the Rural Life Museum at Tilford with the South Hants Centre and we then have regular rides planned for the rest of the year. Details can be found in the Events Section of our website or the Fishtail Events Diary.