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Modern machining

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Brian:
Occasionally the subject comes up about the quality of the BSA tooling and the subsequent quality of the products they produced in the last few years of production.

Its often said had BSA upgraded their machinery they may have been able to producer higher quality products and may have stayed in business.

Now the thing is modern motorcycles are produced with the latest machinery, CNC etc etc so quality should be perfect.

I fit rod kits for people and I have added some pictures of the little end of a rod I removed from a modern 450cc KTM. Maybe our old BSA's were not so bad after all ?

limeyrob:
Having owned BSAs from the 50's 60's and (early) 70's I would say the late 50's early 60's are best.  The designs are good, they have sorted suspension and handling, brakes are getting better and there's no obvious cutting corners or cost saving. Materials are high quality, they are making money and building products to last.  There was some obvious cost cutting on the 71 A65, not drastic, but poor finish on fasteners and poor details.  Parts cracked and broke on the A65, something unimaginable on a 50's A10.
BSA were always an arms manufacturer and I think one thing they could do was make a lot of identical parts very accurately.

Rex:
I tend to agree.
Those interminable bores who like to crap on about "how crap those old Brits(sic) were et cetc" usually have only ever ridden modern Asian bikes and whose technical expertise runs to checking the tyre pressures, but hey, they've read all about the Sad Demise in Classic Bike and on the Net so it must be true.

muskrat:
G'day Brian.
Very poor quality control there. Makes you wonder how many got through like that.
Cheers

Bsareg:
I have a goldie rod machined like that. I bought it new from a dealer but I think it probaly came from the reject bin. Needless to say the dealer supplied another, but I kept the dodgy one.......

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