The main point of this weekend was to go up to Worcester to pick up the lathe that I bought from a fuzzy picture on ebay. It’s a Smart and Brown Model M Mk2 toolmakers lathe from the 1950s and is soon to be manhandled (400kg?) into my little workshop. I’m going to need to get a phase converter as it’s three phase but I am really pleased. I think you can get much more for your money if you buy three phase.

This cost me less than £200 (although a phase converter will probably cost as much). It’s a proper little tool-room lathe and it’s got collets and a three jaw chuck. I’ll just have to start picking bits of tooling up here and there and hope the thing works when it’s all in.

Also, I went up to see my dad to pick up my Scott racer’s cylinder block which he’s had to inspect. I thought I’d bring a few more Triumph bits down too but what I didn’t figure on bringing down was another bike; A Silk Scott.

Ten years ago or more, he bought this Silk Scott from Roy Lambert (not the late John Underhill as I had originally thought. Apparently John had owned it and sold it on previously).

The Silk Scott had been George Silk’s first incarnation of a Scott based motorcycle and had applied 1970’s two stroke tuning theory to the ports and the pipe of an otherwise pretty standard Scott engine. The cranks had been improved and the crank chamber sealing was done with a conventional rubber seal instead of the spring loaded metal to metal gland seal that the original Scott design used. He also created a better oil pump using, I believe, a modified best and lloyd pump design from the vintage period. He had a frame made for it out of Reynolds 531 by Bob Stevenson at Spondon which was basically a copy of the frames Spondon made for the small Yamaha racing bikes.

Here’s a picture of the Silk Scott prototype.

The road bike’s rolling chassis was finished with Spondon 38mm forks, a single sided twin leading shoe front drum and a mechanical disk on the rear. Aluminium rims and a light alloy tank certainly kept the weight down here at least.

Basically it’s a complete racing chassis, built to house an engine which had changed very little from 1928.

George undoubtedly released more power from the engine, but at a cost. Scotts are not a ‘Schnuerle loop scavenge‘ engine, they are a crossflow engine with the exhaust port and transfer ports opposite each other in the cylinder and using a deflector on top of the piston to send the transferred inlet gas into the top of the combustion chamber, thus scavenging the cylinder.

The Scott is notable as a two stroke for having a great amount of torque at low revs, probably because the design does not depend so much on gas velocity to achieve a decent scavenge. Loop scavenge engines, with the transfer ports adjacent to the exhaust port can be susceptible to losing charge directly through the exhaust if the revs aren’t high enough. There are other factors at play, but the torque of the deflector piston Scott really surprises people used to later loop scavenge designs.
If however, as is often done when tuning a loop scavenge engine for greater power, you raise the exhaust port and the transfer and extend the inlet duration, you tend to lose the bottom end. Maybe that’s ok when you’re able to get a engine producing a significant amount of power a bit higher up the rev range, but Scotts aren’t so keen to rev with that massive hump on top of the piston and also have completely unbalanced cranks, relying only on flywheel damping.
Plus the fact that the standard (long stroke) Scott only ever had a three speed box, and the Silk Scott only a four speed box doesn’t enable you to cover a narrower powerband and you start to see where modifications to the original design require an overall consideration of how these things link with each other.

Our plan is to build the Silk up with one of my dads racing engines, which only slight differences to the original port timings but has much better gas flow, and work to make a decent set of exhaust pipes to exploit the low rev range available.

We originally planned to make the Silk Scott a test bed for the engines we built for people so we modified the frame with the intention of doing a detachable front cradle to aid engine swapping.

It’s going to be tight to get it done this year, but I’m going to get on with it and see how it goes.