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AGV Backmarker: “Modern Motorcycle Mechanics” isn’t modern any more. And a warning about a contemporary problem
February 25, 2010 by Mark Gardiner
Filed under Backmarker
Bernie Nicholson’s Modern Motorcycle Mechanics was first published in 1942, so the bikes in that classic manual are now classics themselves. But Nicholson’s book retains its currency precisely because it remains the best repair manual for bikes of a certain age. Bernie’s story is an unlikely one, and it was an unlikely friendship that now keeps his book, his memory, and his 1939 Triumph Speed Twin alive.
My friend Greg Williams at home in Calgary, with his ex-Nicholson Speed Twin. Greg bemoans the fact that the fork and front hub aren't correct. “At some point,” he told me, “a customer came into Nicholson Brothers looking for a fork for a ’39 Triumph, and they were that passionate about keeping their customers on the road that they pulled the fork off Bernie's own bike and sold it.” * Williams archive
In your mind, go back to 1931—the depths of the Great Depression—and to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. (Trust me, the only way you’d want to go there is in your mind, not in reality.) It was a town with few people and fewer motorcycles. Any road out shriveled to two-rutted wheel tracks within a few miles, and those were impassable during months of winter snow; nearly so for another couple of months of spring mud. Nevertheless, Bernie Nicholson (14) and his older brother Lawrence delivered newspapers to earn enough money to buy a 98cc Dot.
The little machine took eight months to arrive because (although the boys had no way of knowing it) Dot was on the verge of bankruptcy. The English firm only shipped the bike when the editor of an influential British bike mag prodded the management. Perhaps to make up for the delay, the company sent a better model, which must have been one of the very last ones that ever left the works. The next year, the brothers ordered a 350cc Douglas and sold the Dot at a profit. Nicholson Brothers Motorcycles was born. Their first shop was a shed made from wood they’d salvaged from motorcycle crates.
Bernie spent two years at technical school learning to service farm equipment, but was really a self-taught motorcycle mechanic. At the beginning of World War II, he trained dispatch riders for the Canadian military. Maybe that experience honed his didactic skills; he certainly had a knack for understanding—and more important, explaining—the way motors worked.
Once it was apparent the allies would win the war, he wrote Edward Turner (the curmudgeonly boss of Triumph) describing the 750cc twin that he felt Triumph must build if it was to succeed in the North American market. “Very interesting,” replied Turner. Then he went on to explain that there could be no demand for such a machine in Triumph’s home market. Besides, they well knew the existing design “would not stand stepping up to 750cc.”
Bernie was only 25 when he printed the first edition of Modern Motorcycle Mechanics and Speed Tuning. He claimed to have sold over 100,000 copies in seven editions; it must be one of the best-selling self-published books of all time.
By the late ’70s, the collapse of the British bike industry caused Nicholson Brothers to close shop. Bernie maintained the shop’s very successful mail-order parts business, gradually selling off his accumulation of new-old stock, and of course shipping copies of his book to mechanics worldwide.
Williams' biography of Bernie Nicholson is admittedly selective, focusing more on “MMM” than Nicholson's personal life and sad descent into Alzheimer's. But after reading “Prairie Dust,” you'll come away as impressed by Nicholson's entrepreneurship as his mechanical know-how. * Gardiner photo
That’s how Greg Williams met him. Greg was a 20-something punk kid in journalism school, who needed parts to keep his ’71 TR6R—AKA a Triumph Tiger—running. The bike was a daily commuter, more used than classic. Sensing a story, Greg interviewed Bernie, and then, somehow, the kid and the 80-something veteran hit it off.
“Until the early ’90s, when he was winding down the parts business, he was with it. I mean, you could ask him anything about British motorcycles,” Greg told me. “But Alzheimer’s is a frightening disease.”
“I went and visited him every Wednesday afternoon for three years. We’d get in the car and go for an ice cream, just to kind of give him an outing. Sometimes he’d tell me the same story two or three times, but it was something for him to look forward to. Once or twice, we went to motorcycle shops, but it didn’t mean anything to him any more.”
Bernie died in 2001. Greg pressed for Bernie to be inducted, posthumously, into the Canadian motorcycling Hall of Fame. He recently wrote a biography of Nicholson, called Prairie Dust, Motorcycles and a Typewriter. He told me, “It’s the role played by people such as Nicholson with his prairie-based mail order parts business and the knowledge contained in Modern Motorcycle Mechanics that really kept machines on the road.”
Nicholson’s son gave Bernie’s 1939 Speed Twin, his hill-climb bike, to Greg. Over the last few years, Greg has restored it and returned it to street trim. Greg also acquired Bernie’s last hundred-or-so copies of the seventh edition of Modern Motorcycle Mechanics. When those run out, he plans to reprint it. That’s good news for anyone, like me, who needs a manual of exceptional clarity. The happy ending for the Nicholson story is that the kid became the custodian of the memories Bernie couldn’t hang on to by himself. We should all be so lucky.
This never happened in Bernie’s day, when we used proper cables connected to Amal carbs
There are a handful of books that belong in every serious motorcyclist's library. Erwin Tragatsch's “Illustrated Encyclopedia of Motorcycles,” Mike Hailwood's “The Art of Motorcycle Racing,” and—ahem—“Riding Man” are among them. “Modern Motorcycle Mechanics” is definitely on that short list. You'll rely on it if you have a classic bike to maintain. But even if you don't, Nicholson's book is a great general reference when it comes to explaining how internal combustion motors work. * Gardiner photo
Toyota’s recent recalls and uncharacteristic bad press have focused on something NHTSA euphemistically calls a “sudden acceleration safety issue,” and that Consumer Reports dryly describes as “unintended acceleration.”
Toyota originally claimed that hundreds of instances in which cars accelerated out of control were due to most prosaic of parts… the floor mats.
It now seems certain that floor mats were not the only culprit or, perhaps, the main one. At least one driver with nerves of steel managed—with skilled use of the brakes and by shifting between neutral and drive—to drive his car, jammed at full throttle, to the dealership where he bought it. There, in the dealer’s parking lot, it revved its guts out while all concerned had to admit the floor mat had nothing to do with the problem. In one accident, investigators found the mats in the trunk.
Now Toyota claims that the fault lies with another simple part… the accelerator pedal. There are plenty of people who remain skeptical of this explanation.
Regardless of the cause of these unintended accelerations, they’re exacerbated by two other key problems. One is that under some conditions they’re accompanied by a partial brake failure, so that use of the brakes alone may not be enough to bring a runaway vehicle to a controlled stop. Another, even more frightening scenario is that many new cars don’t rely on traditional keyed ignitions, and they can be quite difficult to shut off when running at full throttle. Some of the Toyotas affected by the recall, for example, require the driver to push and hold a small dashboard on-off button for three seconds. That would feel like an eternity. In that time, a runaway car could cover a block.
There are lots of people who suspect that the real fault lies in Toyota’s fly-by-wire throttle system. Fixing that is more complicated than taking out the floor mats or replacing an accelerator pedal. Thus far, Toyota has firmly denied that it’s a computer glitch.
Bernie and Lawrence Nicholson on a field trip. Farmers—and other motorcyclists far from their nearest dealership—relied on Nicholson Brothers' mail-order parts and Bernie's clearly written manual to keep their bikes running. * Nicholson/Williams archive
The potential for an uncontrollable acceleration was, of course, the gorilla in the room a few years ago when motorcycle manufacturers also adopted fly-by-wire systems.
Modern sport bikes accelerate much quicker than any Toyota. In an unintentional power wheelie, it can be hard to let go of the handlebars to disengage the clutch (and there are bikes on the horizon that don’t have conventional clutch levers anyway). On a runaway crotch rocket, it might take a few seconds to find your wits and the kill switch, by which time you could be going 100 mph—even if you were only in first gear.
Maybe we need systems that cut the ignition if the motorcycle senses that the rider has crapped himself. But seriously, if fly-by-wire systems do prove to be the culprit in the Toyota situation, the motorcycle industry needs to ensure that we aren’t at risk, because the consequences will be far worse for us than they are for Toyota owners.
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Oops. There’s a mysterious phrase in there. “(If I had a Toyota, I’d think about fitting one).”
Somehow, on the way to getting posted, a sentence or two disappeared. I originally noted that motorcycles, unlike cars, are fitted with a prominent kill switches. THAT’s what I’d think about fitting to my Toyota. All race cars, of course, are also fitted with a kill switch on the exterior, so safety crews can shut a car off if it’s still running after a crash.
Sorry about that, Mark. That was my bad during editing. Fixed now.
I grew up in Regina (south of Saskatoon), and as a teenager in the 70’s there were an amazing amount of British bikes in Saskatchewan. I didn’t take any notice at the time, but now I realize how influential Nicolson brothers were in my life as my group of friends started out on Triumphs and BSA’s . There were lots of “other” old British bikes around for sale, but no one wanted them because they were too hard to find part for, not running, or no one had ever heard of them.
Greg Williams is an interesting story unto itself. gregwilliams.ca
“Maybe we need systems that cut the ignition if the motorcycle senses that the rider has crapped himself.” Depends.
As a former computer programmer and tech support guru (Ok, I got tired of the crap and got out of the business) I suspect the computer programming. Too many times there are weird interactions that ONLY pop up after a certain bizarre sequence of events. Some of those chains can be many steps long, and only occur under very rare conditions (Once in a blue moon for example). I really don’t completely trust anything controlled by computer. Boeing had held out for years against fly by wire on commercial jets, simply because they wanted the pilot to be the ultimate commander of the aircraft. With modern fly-by-wire systems, you make a request to the computer to accelerate and it decides how much throttle to give you.
Dave T.
It’s still unclear to me why Toyota drivers couldn’t simply shift to neutral if the throttle was stuck wide open.
To answer Lance’s question, and to affirm Dave T’s suspicion, in most modern Toyota’s, the shifter is not a direct link to the tranny. It is an input device to the ECU, just like the throttle, and in the case of the woman who recently testified to Congress about her out-of-control Lexus, every system she mentioned which failed is merely an input to control two computers which are connected by CAN-bus protocol (in her observed failure order: Cruise control-which has a radar controlled anti-tailgating function, the throttle, the brakes, the shifter, and the power button). The ECUs then control the outputs.
It is true that the driver is responsible for generating the hydraulic pressure in the brake system, but the(any) ABS computer (what Lexus calls the Skid Control ECU) has the final say as to how much of that pressure is applied to any of the four wheels. (there have been recalls for slow-speed ABS activation which caused just such a problem).
So it is completely plausible that if the programming in the ECUs didn’t account for some out-of-character signals it was recieving by any of these inputs, and freeked-out as it were, that the driver would have no control of the vehicle. Quite literally a blue-screen-of-death.
God forbid that steering should one day be ECU controlled as well.
As for the emergency brake, it is really a parking brake and has nowhere near the stopping power of the service brakes.
Now that certain motorcycle makers are implementing traction control and ABS along with the fly-by-wire, lets hope they keep that KILL SWITCH a true circuit interupter and not just another computer input, and the CLUTCH a true drivetrain decoupler…