Vintage WorkshopServices for Brough Superior motorcycles and their contemporaries
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Vintage Workshop Services for Brough Superior motorcycles and their contemporaries |
The Montgomery primary chain case/brake lever/magdyno dilemma....
| All Montgomery bikes but the 680 ohv Greyhound had the foot brake lever
on the right hand side. This gave a nice and simple routing for the brake
operating rod and no problems with the primary chain case.
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| Unfortunately this isn't a real option with the bevel drive magdyno on
the 680 engine (though George Brough showed how to do it...) It seems Montgomerys didn't have a better idea than to move the brake lever to the nearside, and to devise this (pardon me) horrible brake rod.
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| The technically awful bend in the brake rod is not the only consequence
of this move. The other one is a rather nasty cut-out in the primary chain
case.
This is the Birmingham museum bike again. Both the cut-out and the brake lever look quite home-made, I really wonder if this is how the bike was delivered or maybe a modification made in the rebuild of the bike. The 1931 catalogue does not really reveal what things looked like, it
just says: |
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| I have strong doubts about the cut-out, but I cannot find a period
picture showing the primary chain case of a 680 Montgomery.
I found a picture of an unrestored 500cc sv model. OK, the chain case is fitted the wrong way round, but it doesn't have the cut-out. |
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| Well then, it is a 1933 model, maybe they had improved things by then.
If the photographer hadn't cast a big shadow, you could see better that the
brake rod is very nicely routed inside the frame stays here. A nice find, besides, isn't it? The bike lives in Holland. |
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| On this one, the lever seems to come from under the gearbox! |
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| This one has a peculiar cast aluminium chain case... |
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| ...and this one seems to have the brake on the nearside altogether! Well, it might have a wrong rear wheel. |
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| For sure, by 1935 the 500 ohv model had a primary chain case like this. You cannot quite see if it had a cut-out, however. |
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| This will be a very nice (and impressive!) bike one day. Maybe it is on
the road already? However it seems the brake rod and brake cam lever were dictated by the "Broughish" exhaust layout. Which will look great, once the pipes have been fitted, I think... By the way, I recently learnt this is the green bike pictured some 4 rows above - doens't the progress look promising? Thank you for the picture, Geoff! |
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| This one is a very faithful and extremely well finished rebuild of a
1931 500cc ohv Greyhound by Geoff Green. Not the same Geoff as above, by the
way...
It needs a little cut-out for the footrest post, which looks alright. I know, however, that Geoff made the chain cover from scratch. Besides being very well finished it looks good, even if we will never know whether the original looked quite the same. |
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| And this one? A lovely rebuild of an early 680 sv Montgomery. However, I seem to remember there was not too much there when Ron started the project, especially there was no primary chain cover... |
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| Do you see now what I meant by "a real dilemma"?? There is not always a definite answer to a question, especially with bikes built in such low quantities as the Montgomery. | |
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