Untouched

I’ve always been acutely aware that there’s nothing more foreign than a Brummie in southern California. You can give him a gold lamé jumpsuit, an avantgarde haircut, and make him wear a cape, but you can’t shake the accent. Yet, for every Dave Hill, there’s a John Osbourne. John who? You know. Batty John. Lilian’s oldest. Wears black eyeliner and goes around dressed a bit like a vampire. Much like Birmingham’s John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne became the Prince of Darkness, the Triumph twin, produced in a redbrick factory 15 miles east of Brum in the English West Midlands, became the King of the Desert. Those Triumphs may have been forged under the charcoal skies of Meriden, but they arrived in the citrus-sucking sunshine of Los Angeles and everything made sense.

Have it! Old and rare it may be, but built to race, and it still chews up the desert.

This bike is a 1960 650 TR6/B. The B designates a scrambler set up – meaning high pipes and a few other minor changes over the TR6/A, its road-going twin. At least it started out as one, but every part has been tweaked and messed with. I knew of its existence and I’d missed out on it a couple of years ago. An eBay alert on my phone a few weeks back and there it was again, still untouched! After an email and phone call the listing was pulled – you can’t faff about and get into a bidding war on these things. I picked the bike up a few hours later in Beverly Hills. Luckily, it’d been saved from a restoration due to the irreversible frame modifications. I sent a couple pics of the bike to Gene Smith, a top desert racer of the mid-’60s. I had an inkling it was something special. ‘Gene! I just grabbed this, what do you reckon?’ Three seconds later the phone rings. It’s Gene. ‘Hayden! Does it have this, this and this? Check here, how about this piece? Is that front hub red? Holy shit! That’s my dad’s bike!’

Buck Smith was a member of the Shamrocks MC, a racing club based in Sunland, just north of LA. A twotime national AMA champion, Buck won the Checkers National Hare & Hound in 1957, the Greenhorn Enduro in ’59 and ’64, and finished second to the legendary Bud Ekins at the Big Bear Run, also in ’57. As the largest motorcycle race in the world, the Big Bear Run had 720 guys flatten a path from the desert to the top of the mountain. 125 miles of brutality saw only 122 of the entrants finish. To win a desert race, you have to finish a desert race. Taking a bike built for the leafy lanes of Warwickshire and racing it in the gruelling terrain of the Mojave took a fair amount of essential modifications. As far as we can tell, Buck’s bike was raced and developed between 1960 and 1966. There was a cottage industry of parts that sprang up around the early ’60s, guys whittling away in garages across the Southland. 1 We have a few examples of those on the bike. For the sake of time and paper, let’s just say the motor’s been hopped up... crank, cams, pistons.

As the Romans figured out, the quickest route to the smoke bomb 2 was a straight line, so these bikes were built to go directly through obstacles, not around them. Up front is a 4.00 x 19in Dunlop Trials tyre, hand cut for traction and fitted to a chrome rim with a half-width hub taken from an earlier model. Half the width, half the weight. The wide front tyre acted as a battering ram. Small aircraft bolts fill the gaps where spokes poke through the hub. Smack a rock at full tilt and bend the rim, the spokes wouldn’t jump ship. The same reinforcement was applied to the rear along with braised seams to stop the hub from separating on heavy landings. A 59-tooth overlay sprocket was fitted for more torque in deep sand and up steep, loose hills. A common problem with the early-’60s duplex frame was its tendency to snap at the steering head, not ideal. The story goes, after witnessing a chap die at the 1959 Big Bear Run, Edward Turner (Triumph’s head designer) added an additional frame crossbar. This bike was manufactured before the upgrade, a homemade addition and an extra steel plate have been welded in its place. The ‘Traveler’ front forks were developed by Buck Smith and Joe Roberts in a garage in Sunland. The only parts they share with stock forks are the sliders.

Fork flex was cured by the Tom Lee fork brace - basically a piece of U-shaped pipe

Steering damper for high speeds and deep sand

The stanchions are stainless steel as opposed to chromed steel and longer than stock. Along with modified internals and dampers, you get a full eight inches of travel, three inches longer than anything else available at the time. A set would’ve knocked you back $60. Fork flex was cured by the Tom Lee fork brace – basically a piece of u-shaped pipe. Bars are always a rider’s preference and Buck was a big guy and by all accounts had huge hands, so he preferred the earlier one-inch bars. The cables run through fuel line to protect them when banging through brush. On the throttle hand, there’s a leather doughnut between the grip and the throttle body to save the constant wear on your thumb knuckle.

Hub modification was learnt the hard way. The small hex screws hold the spokes in place in a big impact.

The big, fat, machined aluminium steering dampener would be cranked down in deeper sand. The frame has been raked by about two and a half degrees over stock to cure the high-speed wobbles. The rear subframe has been tweaked two inches for clearance and the swingarm strengthened. Bates, one of the bigger aftermarket suppliers of the ’60s, produced multiple seats and a whole catalogue of accessories. They were most famous for their race leathers, worn by everyone from Knievel to Sheene. This seat is the Cross Country model and was fitted to countless desert bikes. The footpeg rubbers are also Bates originals.

Clever, easy-change rear sprocket too

The MCM open pipes were tucked in tighter than stock and are the perfect diameter and length to maximise horsepower. Don’t let the rough edges and heavy-handedness fool you, these guys knew what they were doing and how to get every last ounce of performance out of a motor. A Bast Brothers bash plate protected the case from boulders and the odd tortoise, prior to this most guys just used the business end of a snow shovel. The air filter is either homemade or an early Q or Webco. There are a few opinions, but no one can say with any certainty. All we do know is it keeps the sand out of the motor really well. The toolbox has been gleeped off of a BSA and holds a handful of basic tools, plugs and $1.10 – at one time enough to fill the gas tank – all wrapped up in a petrified rag. There are more minute details all over the bike, such as the reworked kicker arm and the shifter that’s been reshaped so it’s easier to find with your toe... It was a machine in a constant state of development, who knows why it was finally mothballed. I unloaded it from the truck and wheeled it into the workshop. All signs pointed to the fact it was last run around the time Hurst was knocking his third in past the West Germans at Wembley in ’66. Change oil, clean points, renew the disintegrated fuel line, new plugs and, most importantly, don’t disturb the dirt. I won’t say it went first kick, but it didn’t take more than four.

BSA toolbox contains essentials

We drove it out to El Mirage dry lake bed for some photographs. She still goes like the clappers. The tyres are more brittle plastic than rubber, so we reckoned that jumping anything bigger than an ant hill wasn’t going to end well. Now it’s in the living room, balanced on an old crate. I have no idea what to do with it. Every bit of me wants to get it in racing shape, but it’s survived untouched for 50-odd years and there isn’t another out there this original. I know, I’ve been looking.