I have a whiteboard in my workshop and it generally lists too many tasks that I am a reasonable amount of effort away from achieving. This last week however, I managed to get some significant ‘to do’s’ rubbed off the board.
The Silk Scott frame had been waiting at Alan Noakes’s workshop for me to come up with a plan for the final brazing solution. The lugs had been made to be brazed with a capillary fixing which really needed oxy-acetylene. I must admit that we hadn’t fixed the exact type of brazing material we were going to use and this was all part of the delay. I saw a clear weekend coming up and thought that this was my chance to push to get it finished. So the plan unfurled: first to get oxy/acetylene.
We’d had a plasma cutter at work that we’d bought from machine mart (please no comments). It was around £600 new and lasted a year and a day. The warranty department, were sympathetic but not quite to the point of being reasonable or useful, and I was told (after paying for the service) that it could be repaired for a sum of 500 and something pounds. I declined their kind offer. We’d only used it a handful of times to make register plates for woodburners and other bits and pieces. Normally around 3-4mm thick steel for a machine rated for 10mm. Anyway, since this incident I am resolved not to use them again and so was without any metal cutting equipment at work apart from grinders. So, I figured at £5 each per month for bottle hire, I could justify the oxy/acetylene. My Dad had an old portapak I could have and so I found myself at BOC sorting out an account last week.
I called Alan from the shop and enquired as to whether he’d got any prior arrangements for the weekend, and asked about rods. He didn’t and It didn’t seem that they had anything suitable, so I left with two bottles hoping that I could sort out the rest in the following few days.
I remembered a conversation with a man called Arthur Sosbe not long ago. Arthur, though now mostly retired, is a Leicester welder held in very high regard by my father. He is also a vintage motorcycle enthusiast and I believe used to race a velocette that used to lurk under a cloth in his workshop. I myself have known Arthur for many years and he has repaired many a Scott crankcase, as well as frost damaged barrels and many other fragile vintage parts.
Arthur had said that he’d naturally use silver solder, but when I quoted him a 0.010″ gap, he said that it was too wide and he suggested something else. I remembered this conversation and also that many lugged cycle frames used silver solder and I did a bit of research. A company called ‘Cupalloys’ came up as being suppliers of silver solder to model engineers, so I gave them a ring. I’d since confirmed the gap with Alan as being nearer 0.006″, which was within the capillary range for a 38% silver solder alloy which also apparently had the benefit of melting over a reasonably wide heat range, which gave scope to also create fillets.
I bought two packs of 5 rods, and at over £4 per rod, I hoped this was going to work.
So Friday came and later than I’d hoped, I packed the Moss crankcase destined for the Silk Scott into the van and I headed up country to Leicester to see Roger and to get the portapak and hoses/ regulators I needed to take up to Alan. I didn’t arrive until after 9pm but we gathered all the bits and pieces together, as well as a trophy I’d been awarded by the British Historic Racing club, the ‘Aotearoa Trophy’, gifted once to the club by a New Zealander. I believe it’s supposed to be the best performance of a 1930 and under bike. I won it last year also, and although it’s not that I actually won a race, it’s a beautiful shield with names going back many years.
We chatted, a lot, and eventually I got to bed around 1.30am.
So up and off to Alans, the offside front wheelbearing of my van starting to whine somewhat irritatingly.
I arrived at Alan’s somewhere after 10.30am and had thoughts that I might need to find a B & B for the night, as I didn’t know how fast the job would go with untested equipment and solder. I needn’t have worried because apart from Alan having to adapt some spacers to fit the crankcase, the whole process went very quickly. 
So onto the hot work and (making sure the detachable lugs all faced in the correct directions) using a propane torch and the oxy-acetylene, Alan soldered the new cradle assembly into the frame within a few short hours.
with a thanks and farewell to Alan, after he’d showed me some detailed bits he’d made for Scott TT replica forks, 
Tag Archives: Alan Noakes
Silk Scott racer project – the return of the frame tubes
I’m not sure that would make a successful Hollywood title but it sure as hell excites me!
I don’t know whether everyone does it but I carry moments of regret through life somewhere buried in a dusty box in the corner of my brain. They spill out sometimes and I go through an internal process of closing my eyes and shaking my head side to side as I remember the feeling. It is largely pointless of course as the moments are long gone.
The bike(s) I shouldn’t have sold, the engines I shouldn’t have blown up, the Rolls Royce I shouldn’t have crashed (it wasn’t mine.. I was working as a mechanic in New Zealand and being towed to a garage) and definitely in the mix.. the Silk Scott frame I shouldn’t have cut the front tubes out of. Putting the fact that it wasn’t going to be easy to swap engines without doing something ‘detachable’ aside… the Silk Scott sat rather forlorn for at least 10 years until I started looking at possibilities last year. It’s not finished by any means but Alan (Noakes), who’s been working on the detachable cradle has got a loose assembly together now. he just sent me the pictures: This is how Christmas should feel.
The next step is to braze the lugs up.
So that’s what Alan has been doing!
What have I been doing?
I’ve stripped the weighted cranks out of the crankcase my dad machined for the Silk Scott as I need to do some final work on the gas flowing on the transfer and inlet passages (I love doing this.. stick a MotoGP DVD on and needle file for hours). I’ve also written to Rex Caunt, an ignition expert, to get advice about the process of setting up a charging system using the ring of magnets on the side of the flywheel.
It’s all too much. I’m off to bed.
January 2015 – Progress report
Well, we are moving in the right direction (I think) but I’ve a lot of ambitions this year so we’ll see how it works out…
Last weekend I decided to drive up to Leicestershire to see Roger and to help him improve security at his place, following the break in the previous weekend that resulted in the theft of a Yamaha RD 350 LC YPVS F2 (the one I had when I was 18 years old.. 25 years ago). He’d bought lights and I bought an alarm system and over the weekend we fitted it all and made the best of a bad lot.
I love being in the workshop and he’s still pushing forward with improvements to machinery and tooling, the latest being a DRO on the beautifully made Smart and Brown 1024 VSL lathe. You don’t need them, but they do make life easier and quicker.
It’s also good to be surrounded by his Scott engine work and I think we help motivate each other to do the best we can to make sure that our racing Scotts are in good competitive order for riding this year.
Sometime on Sunday morning we had a visit from Eddie Shermer, the editor of ‘Yowl’ (journal of the Scott Owners Club) and a skilled engineer in his own right. He and his wife also put great energy into organising the annual ‘gathering’ of the Scott Owners Club held at Abbotsholme School in Staffordshire. 
In fact, I kept a Scott line going through the weekend because I’d arranged with Alan Noakes in Lincolnshire that I’d take the Silk Scott frame up to him so that he could make a start on the frame connectors. Lincolnshire is hardly on the way back to Devon, in fact around 2 1/2 hours in the opposite direction, but it meant that I could see Alan and chat through some of the details and also see some of the things that he is working on. He had some hardened and ground clutch hub centres as well as pressure plates that he’d made on the bench, and also a very compact roller starter that he’d even cast the rollers for. Very impressive.
Anyway, I couldn’t stay long as I had a 6 1/2 hour drive back home! Just back by midnight.
This last week, I’ve removed the carburettors from the Super Squirrel as I need to make some modifications for the return to petrol. I never had the twin carb set-up developed for methanol anyway (switching back to petrol this year) so it’s not something that I wouldn’t have to do anyway. The two carbs are Amal 276, but are of different bore sizes at the moment. I need to get them bored out to 1 1/16″ and also have some short inlet ‘trumpets’ made. They won’t be very trumpet like, but will just have a better radius for the air flow.
I’ve also got some ‘K-type’ thermocouples which I want to fit to the exhaust, fairly close to the exhaust manifold, to give extra information when I take it to so a dyno setup when the inital carburettor modifications have been done. Petrol will make everything run hotter, and I’ll need to be careful to try to make sure that I do what I can to make sure that I’m not overheating the piston. I may also fit a temperature sensor to a spark plug to read that, as well as coolant temperature to see whether the small radiator is able to shed heat. It’s possible that I could pressurise the radiator to help the situation, but it might not be necessary. I also have a slightly rough, larger radiator that I bought many years ago from the late John Hartshorne, a prominent Scott enthusiast who had some wonderful stories, not least from his work with Wilf Green in bringing East German MZ’s into the UK in the years before the ‘Iron curtain’ came down.
Also on the agenda is crank counter-balancing. A Scott engine, being a 180° twin has reasonable primary balance, and normally they are known as being fairly smooth engines. They have almost no actual balancing on each crank assembly however, as the cranks are too small. The engine relies mainly on the large central flywheel to help dampen out the residual vibrations, which it does reasonably well. Some people have drilled the side on the flywheel on opposite sides to try to counteract the implied rocking couple effect but roger has never been convinced of the efficacy of this process. His own idea was to view each crank assembly in isolation and to work to try to balance at least as much of the big end weight as possible. In his ‘four bearing cranks’ he has two crank ‘discs’ each side, rather than the usual one. His enables him, using tungsten heavy metal (and Titanium rods) to balance the big end if nothing else. Rogers engine is very smooth, much more so than my own, and seems to want to rev more easily. We have ‘slugged’ single sided ‘Moss’ cranks in the past for a couple of people, and one of them cannot praise its smoothness enough. My cranks are not weighted, but I have some heavy metal slugs and I want to fit them. Normally, the holes are put into the cranks prior to heat treatment, as the final specification of the material conforms to around 50 to 53 HRC which is pretty tough stuff to machine. I’ve been looking into using surface coated solid carbide cutters rated up to 60 HRC to machine out for the slugs. I’ll post further information on the calculated % balance. I think it should be interesting!
Anyway, enough for now. things are happening! Even the Triumph head is back although a little more work needed here too.
I’ll try to not leave it so long as we go through the winter.
Recollections of the Silk Scott by Colin Heath
I was intrigued that former Scott racer, Colin Heath’s name had come up as a subsequent owner for both the ‘prototype’ racing Silk Scott 
I wondered whether this could be true.. did he really own both of these machines and what was the story?
Colin came to visit me a few months ago, as his daughter lives in the same town as I do, and upon seeing the picture of the white Silk Scott prototype on my wall noted that he’d owned it, having bought it from George Silk himself.
Only this week, Dave Whiteside contacted me to say that he’d bought it from Colin and that it was now in Sweden.
I thought I’d email Colin to ask about FNT, and he sent me a piece that he’d written for ‘Yowl’, the journal of the Scott Owners Club in 2005 but never sent to be published.
See the PDF 18. The Missing Silk Copy.
A wonderful insight into the work that people were putting into Scott engines at the time and the results!
Colin also sent me a couple of photos too, one of FNT’s engine and one of Alan Noakes taking off.
many thanks Colin.
November 2014-Moss/Silk Scott racer progress
As with all good projects, you need a certain amount of momentum to get over the tricky bits. The first tricky bit for the Moss/Silk Scott racer is to rebuild the frame so that its strong and aligned.
I cut the front downtubes out about ten years ago, as we had intended to make the bike work as a test bed for engines we were rebuilding. The problem was that you couldn’t get the blinking engine out without having to partially strip it, or that’s what I remember anyway. Maybe others (Yuri Gellar?) would have had better luck. Paul Dobbs, who raced Roger’s bike at the time, agreed with my suggestion that we could have a detachable cradle… so I cut the front tubes out. I’ve often regretted it, mostly because of the extra effort required to get the thing back together. With some intelligent work though, it could be a really useful modification and it’s time that I pushed to get it sorted out.
As Roger is snowed under with engine work (and welding and brazing were never his thing anyway) I’ve been talking to Alan Noakes, an engineer and a Scott enthusiast, about the best way to approach this. Alan has considerable experience with welding and brazing and also has a frame jig for the duplex Scott frame which may just work with the Spondon frame.
Another reason that it’s great to be working on this with Alan is the fact that he has his own history with the Silk Scott. He sent me a wonderfully atmospheric photograph of him with a Silk Scott set up for racing when I first contacted him and after some encouragement he gave me some of the background.
The Spondon Silk (see below) you have pictured on your website could be Georges prototype but it does not have the double sided Fahron front brake which I would have expected as the first one was raced in the Manx GP by Stuart Hicken 2 years running either 71/72 or 72/73, by the way I believe Stuart Hicken is MD of Mallory Park now, I did meet him at a vintage meeting at Crystal Palace after his ride in the MGP and he said he was aquiring Scott parts to build a vintage racer with Georges (George Silk) help but I don`t recall ever seeing him racing after that.
The story of the Silk Racer in the photo is this, during the 1960s I met a local Scott owner by the name of John Farrar, we were both intent on tuning our Scotts to make them faster we also used to bother George Silk at race meetings hanging round his camp asking stupid questions etc. at some stage John had his crankcase fitted with Silk cranks and we carried on experimenting with different mods and sharing information with George, I did the engineering John paid for it. When George and Bob Stephenson shared a stand at a race bike show in London could have been 71/72 george had his racer and the first road bike on display, John had decided to order a racing chassis complete with gearbox but minus engine as he would use his existing engine and placed his order at the show this is the bike you see in the photo, on the day the photo was taken you can see that the bike was not finished no exhausts etc. we just wanted to make sure that the gearbox and clutch worked I had modified a Jawa speedway clutch to fit. The letters FNT on the bike stood for Farrar Noakes Tingley, Barry Tingley was a Local rider quite good had been given rides by Stan Shenton from Boyers of Bromley who later ran team Kawasaki. Our first race with this bike was at a Big international formula 750 meeting at Brands with the likes of Sheene Grant etc. we finished well down the field the following week saw us drawing up a completely uprated engine with reed valves flat top pistons alloy cylinder and heads etc. I did actually start making some bits for this engine but a change of job put a stop to progress and by that time John had decided that Georges new Silk engine would be a better option for the bike. John eventually sold the bike to Colin Heath.
