The BSA A7-A10 Forum
Bikes, Pictures, Stories & more => Other BSAs, Other Bikes, Machinery & Tools => Topic started by: Greybeard on 14.03. 2023 08:51
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G'day GB.
Too little too late *ex* The horse (Japan) had already bolted.
Cheers
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Under-developed and apparently used too many legacy parts from older models.
"Henry, we still have 5000 Bantam Wipac headlight switches in the stores, so see if you can use them up on this latest model, there's a good chap" said Horace the senior accountant, a person with no consideration for anything other than the Bottom Line.
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Looks good in the brochure though!
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Under-developed and apparently used too many legacy parts from older models.
"Henry, we still have 5000 Bantam Wipac headlight switches in the stores, so see if you can use them up on this latest model, there's a good chap" said Horace the senior accountant, a person with no consideration for anything other than the Bottom Line.
It seems that it was always BSA policy to use up old stock on the next model
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Being a gun maker backwards compatiability was always very important to BSA
Thus no totally new part was allowed to be made if an existing part can be modified to fit
No good making a perfect motorcycle if it is so expensive no one will buy it
Remember Rolls Royce Motors has been bankrupted on many occasions for just this reason.
Problem was diretors who were defacto managers but had absolutely no understanding of motorcycles or the motorcyce industry.
To give him due credit Edward Turner recognised the 350 market was going to take off in the USA and managed to get a new 350 twin past the board
Down side was the "superman" complex and as Turner had saved both Triumph & Ariel so he must be "superman"
Turner also though he was Superman & laid out ( cant call it a design ) a fundamentially flawed motorcycle that he pressed into production without doing proper testing and refused to let any one tamper with his perfect design . Turner was a very bad engineer, good stylist & designer but a hopeless engineer .
Sounds a bit like Hesketh .
Then quite to the contry about using up old parts, a lot of parts were ordered in and they either did not fit because they were metric or wrongly specified ( entire electrical system )
The gear box could not do the speeds it needed to and the gears locked up, they were bought is as well .
Cam chain was badly designed & resonant vibrations caused the chain to jump off the sprockets
Can't remember right now if there was no way to adjust the tension or the tensioner was on the wrong run of the chain
BSA lost a fortune and this was the start of the cash flow problem that snowballed .
They should have sorted the problems even if the bike was 5 years late coming onto the market as the cost of setting up a production line is astronomical and BSA had to pay for all of the parts that did not work then pay out all of the supply contracts when the bike was abandoned.
Plus of course, all of the bikes they actually made that could not be sold and the oppertunity cost of what they could have been making & selling if they were not making bandits & furys .
This gobbled up a massive amount of cash
Announcing the bike before it was in full production then withdrawing it, destroyed BSA credability & did massive damage to both their brand and to the dealer network .
Once the engineering problems were sorted out they are a really nice bike to ride, handle well & very peppy so would have sold well.
Managed to snag a quick trip round the car park at an ABR several years ago .
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Fascinating Trevor 👍
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Don't know why they had to use legacy parts. Surely, with Japan coming online, they could have redesigned the entire bike properly and sold off their spares to dealers to flog to owners of older bikes??
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What makes you nthink even harder about turner was that he'd toured Japan and there various m/cycle factories ,complacent to the point of stupidity lead him to see nothing to worry about from the japanese.
As well as this don't forget the debacle of the sunbeam/tri scooter originally designed requiring a special cylinder liner he overuled its use ,result seized pistons galore and another nail in the quality of BSA plus I had to try to sell the f******g things !nightmares are made of that. . He may or may not have been involved in the Ariel 3 cock up but that was certainly the last straw !! Reminds you of the england football team trained hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory ,bsa had so many chances to change and didn't grasp them.
ps As a 15/16 yr old I worked for a major BSA /TrI main dealer who also had a Yam agency (seeing the writing on the wall ) across the road was the Bee suzuki agency about a mile up the road there was Hannahs who sold Hondas but the main Honda deal Tom smiths was (first in england I believe but I'm ready to be shot down over that ) so us kids in the trade knew what was coming even our management knew .Even Yams weren't quite as good as there advertising and there version 50 step trew I remember had piston seizure problems so did the yds1+2 difference warranty claims honnoured no messing =happy customers excellent turn round time /sorted by possiforce lub/velo system in no time against a bantam withpetroil no contest.
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Don't know why they had to use legacy parts. Surely, with Japan coming online, they could have redesigned the entire bike properly and sold off their spares to dealers to flog to owners of older bikes??
That was my tongue-in-cheek point earlier on. Those Wipac switches were known to be poor quality and yet someone still insisted they were used rather than sold off/ditched and new and better items used.
Poor old Edward Turner though, crap engineer/designer though he was....allegedly.
Xthousands of (still running) Triumph twins aside, what did he ever do for us, eh?
Another theme (along with how crap are Lucas electrics) that people read on the Net and repost.
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Boss: "Jack, (Paintshop gaffer), the yanks want silver frames (like Ducatis) for the new models, 'ave we got any of that in stock?"
Okay chief, I'll see what I can do...
Later...
"'ere we go Scrote (the paintshop apprentice), mix up some of this black with some white... that'll be close enough"
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Don't know why they had to use legacy parts. Surely, with Japan coming online, they could have redesigned the entire bike properly and sold off their spares to dealers to flog to owners of older bikes??
That was my tongue-in-cheek point earlier on. Those Wipac switches were known to be poor quality and yet someone still insisted they were used rather than sold off/ditched and new and better items used.
Poor old Edward Turner though, crap engineer/designer though he was....allegedly.
Xthousands of (still running) Triumph twins aside, what did he ever do for us, eh?
Another theme (along with how crap are Lucas electrics) that people read on the Net and repost.
Quite Wron Rex
Turner was a brilliant STYALIST but a garbage engineer
The speed twin was virtually re-engineered by Page & Davey right down to the last nut & bolt
Perfect example is his insistance that oil mist is all that was needed to lube the rockers
And that is not MY Opinion it is what Hopewood & Irving both stated in their books .
Koerner & Heaton also stated that in their treatises on the decline of the British Motorcycle industry as did Ryerson in his book.
So not urban web myth , actual truth.
Metten had a big bitch about Turner as well
Turner was the only person in senior management that actually knew motorcycles & motorcyclists .
However by all acounts he was arrogant to the Nth degree , reused to accept he was capable of making a mistake and a very partisan Triumph man .
However his report to the board on his tour of Japanese factories was spot on
In one of the books was a quote from a board member who when told Honda was working a 7 day week 3 shifts a day , the boards reply was "that will lead to disaster because they will wear out the machenery before the production run finishes "
And of course the famous " let them make the unprofitable tiddlers which saves us making the effort to service that section of the market for us so we can concentrate on the sports bike sector where we have a natural advantage that they would never be able to compete with "
It is a management philosophy that is still in practice today , born of raceism & complatency that allows boards to destroy a viable sound business by always making the right ecomomic decisions that are wrong for the times.
The idea of carrying on with the 1935 C series design post WWII because they were yet to amortise the cost of the tooling was a perfectly good economically sound decision
But inflicting an expensive obsolete motorcycle on the buying public was totally wrong for the industry.
Rejecting a horozontally split A 50/65 engine was an economically sound decision as it would require a lot of totally new machines to make where as the vertical split engine just required a modification to the existing tooling which was a lot cheaper to do thus required a substantially lower capital outlay .
The fact that it increaed the assembly costs , produced a plethoria of warranty costs and was obsolete technology never occurred to the board because they were not motorcyclist and has servants to rake the oil stains the Rolls Royces left in their driveways
Turners original layout for the triples was spot on and latter became the "beauty kit "
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Heatons' thesis is an interesting if lengthy read
https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/77/
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The point being that Turner was far from perfect (particularly in his character and dealings with other members of staff) but then clearly he was far better work-wise than later revisionists have painted him.
I would give more credence to his many critics had they surpassed Turner's out-put, but AFAIK none have designed anything of note and certainly none with the longevity of Turner's designs.
Hopwood's book has been the subject of much cynicism over the decades, too.
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There is a big differnce between an engineer & a styalist.
Turner was a gifted styalist and there is no dispute in that
he could read the market & produce what they wanted
He was a shit engineer who would not accept that everything he did was not perfect and that was the problem.
BSA had already found out that the small unit singls needed oil feed to the rockers which is basically the major revision with the C11 G
Yet Turner designed the Cub with no oil feed to the head and they fell apart by the thousands because of it
Even his trump card the Speed twin was badly designed with just about all of the early 6 stud barrels either ripping out of the saces or fracturing.
This problem was known about because the prototypes failed for whichTurner blamed the test riders , not his under designed over stressed cylinder .
Then there s the Ariel 4, Sangster liked the idea of a smooth quiet motorcyclle so he hired Turner and paid Turner sufficient for the design to allow Turner to buy his house
To say the Sq4 was a stying success & an engineering failure is somewhat of an understatement but don't take my word for it, ask a Sq4 owner about the atrocious engineering particularly an F4 owner which is mostly Turners design whic was perfect for the UK with water mist assisted cooling but siezed the rear two cylinders on a dry sunny day if the valves had not siezed in the head first & holed the pistons.
So in as little as 5 years it needed a total redesign to correct all of Turners bad engineering mistakes to become the G4 and even then it was still plagued with cooing problems but at least it might get you home .
There is a good reason why the engineers at BSA looked at the design & told the management not to touch it with a barge pole .
Even the use of alloy heads & barrels could not overcome th poorly desgned thermal properties of the bike.
Now to say it is a beautiful bike is a massive understatement it is georgious in all of the variations , but a disaster on the road due to fundamentially flawed engineering.
Turner forced BSA to adopt the his Cub design as the basis of the unit single range rejecting the designs BSA had been working on for near a decade and it then took BSA another decade to get rid of the design flaws .
BSA was the UK's largest supplier of 4 stroke stationary engines and the 4th largest in the world , till Turner redesigned them which devistated the stationary engine division causing it to show massive losses to the point that the board ordered it to be sold to Villiers at a massive loss
Villiers tossed all of the Turner designed engines out and reverted to the old BSA A ,E ,F & G engines which they made profitably for the next 40 years .
And lets not forget the Tina Scooter
Beautiful looking machine two times as expensive to buld as it should have been and unbelievably difficult to service with the Turner specialty of overheating & seizing
Great styling , garbage engineering
And then we get to the bandit .
So please do not come on with the Truner is the victum of modern revisionism
HE should be remembered for the taliented even gifited designer / styalist that he was and it should be left at that
As his engineering sucked which held back the British Motorcycling industry & contributed to demise of it.
Turner was one of the pundits who refused to allow the Triump triple to go into production till it was too late and then rushed it into production without sufficient road testing & developement .
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Hindsight is always 20:20 though. We'll have to agree to disagree.
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Yes but "hindsight" 20:20? No, FORESIGHT (which E.T. did not have) is the 'go' eh? - Sochiro had that in spades didn't he?
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Hindsight is always 20:20 though. We'll have to agree to disagree.
Hind sight ?
His contemporaries
Irvin, Hopewwod, Heele, Munro & Davis all said Turners designs were full of basic engineering flaws
That is not hind sight that is a critique from THE TIME.
Page did not join in in the critism but of course Page worked under Turner & wanted to keep his job
Read some of the motorcycle publications from the day
Hind Sight is things like the failure of the BSA /Triump group to market the triple & 4 cylinder the instant it was designed being attributed to Turners refusal to allow any one to tamper with his perfect design , HIND SIGHT is attributing things to Turners massive ego that is hind sight
Top ends ripping out of crankcases & engines seizing is real time not hind sight.
And I was not going to mention the rear wheels of the Sq 4 that could not take the torque of the engine in the rare times that it could deliver full power .
However you can not reationally argue religion with a devout believer who refuses to accept FACTS
So you can believe what ever you want to but it does not change the actual unargeuable facts that Turner was a shit engineer .
PS his father was a good engineer and I often wonder how much of the early work attributed the Edward was really the work of his dad.
And do not forget that BSA bought Triumph because Triumph, under Turners management was bankrupt for the second time.
Now attributing the massive number of warranty failures in the USA as being a prime cause is hindsight but noting that the speed twins had the highest failure rate of any British motorcycle imported into the USA is a fact .
So hindsight is wondering why BSA allowed Turner to join BSA rather than giving him his marching orders
And when he finally was asked to go & became freelance name a single product that he designed that actually went to market .
Bet you can not
To quote the real engineer who turned the Comet into the Rapide one PE Irvin
"Turner made the speed twin with a 360 deg crank because he was not capable of working out the resonant vibrations and rocking moments of anything more complicaed than a single and even then he got them wrong . "
Now if you want to read what I believe is the truth about the state of British motorcycle engineering in the era, get a copy of Irvin's autobiography .
It is a difficult read because it is written like an engineers diary with way too many fine details .
And he does not belittle other engineers of the time in order to elevate his own status.
This is the opinions of a man who went on to design a world beating F1 race car ( repco brabham) that was still winning races 20 years latter .
The man who quadrupled the torque from Chamberlain Tractors
Invented the wire rolling method of making piston rings which is still in use today.
So that is the sign of a competant engineer, a person who can make successful things over a wide range of uses
A stylist usually is limited to a single item
And name a book on motocycling design or engineering written by Turner
or even articles in period publications under Turners name or any nondeplume attributed to Turner .
Tuning for Speed is still in print because it was written by a competant engineer who knew what he was doing .
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Yes, agreed. Irving was the REAL brilliant engineer. But he was also a self-promoter! (I don't mean anything derogatory, because if there was ever a man who deserved promoting it was Phil.
(I once sussed him in the 'Technical Bookshop', Swanston Street, shuffling 'Tuning for speed' to the front of the shelves).
Great to have had a few words with the man- about Velos mainly.
Phil had foresight. So much of what he wrote in the 50's 60's and 70's is as true today as it was then.
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And thet's wyh "Tuning for Speed " is my bible. Sadly lost in the fire.
Cheers
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And thet's wyh "Tuning for Speed " is my bible. Sadly lost in the fire.
Cheers
http://www.moto-depoca.com/wp-content/uploads/Tuning_for_Speed1.pdf (http://www.moto-depoca.com/wp-content/uploads/Tuning_for_Speed1.pdf)
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Hindsight is always 20:20 though. We'll have to agree to disagree.
Hind sight ?
His contemporaries
Irvin, Hopewwod, Heele, Munro & Davis all said Turners designs were full of basic engineering flaws
That is not hind sight that is a critique from THE TIME.
Page did not join in in the criti etc
You've certainly got one on for old Ed.
As the Bard had it, "methinks he doth protest too much".
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G'day TT.
Thank you very much. I had thought about searching for a download but never got around tuit.
Now to fill the printer with ink and paper. I prefer to read a hard copy rather than sit at the monitor for hours. With workshop manuals I usually just print the section I need.
I'll put that link in the "Service literature, Scans, Links, Documents.
Karma given.
Cheers
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G'day TT.
Thank you very much. I had thought about searching for a download but never got around tuit.
Now to fill the printer with ink and paper. I prefer to read a hard copy rather than sit at the monitor for hours. With workshop manuals I usually just print the section I need.
I'll put that link in the "Service literature, Scans, Links, Documents.
Karma given.
Cheers
It’s thanks to whoever took the time to scan it.
Needless to say, I’ve had a hardback copy for a long time.
It’s an interesting work.
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G'day TT.
Yes when I was building my race A7ss I tried to use as much as I could out of that book.
I'm sure I had the fastest A7 around. No one else was silly enough to race one *ex* She was good for 240kph and 8000rpm (OK she did blow a few times). Won B grade State Titles at Eastern Creek in 96 & 97 with more A graders behind than in front.
Cheers
Sorry getting off track.