Car XxX Blog

Readers of my blog will know that I ran an instrument sales, repair and restoration business that specialised in motorcycles.....
I was strong on Smiths, but dealt with all the others....German VDO, Motometer, Veigel. 
From the USA Jones, Corbin, Stewart-Warner. 
Italian Veglia. 
Japanese Nippon Denso, Yazaki and Nippon Denso to name a few.
This blog is on the German Motometer instruments used on the offroad BMW R80GS....

If you've a motorcycle or car made from the 1930's onwards that is British, then Smiths or it's other company British Jaeger would have been the instruments fitted and available.
But prior to this, in the 1920's and earlier there were numerous instrument firms vying for your business to fit a new speedometer to your motorcycle and in the teens, your car....
Speedometers were not legally required in the UK until 1937....
So many motorcycles were supplied without a speedometer and you had to purchase one separately with the drive and cable, usually from a Factors business ( what we call an automotive or motorcycle accessory house today) ...examples are Halfords, Pride and Clarke etc....
Smiths were just one of the competitors...
So lets have a look at another of them....
The Watford speedometer....well they made tachometers and clocks also....is one we will look at in this blog.
I've a very nice early catalogue which I've scanned and is illustrated below....
As well I have a nice example of a Watford motorcycle speedometer and have photographed it...
You'll note it has two hands...the so called "maximum hand", which stayed at the fastest speed you reached, unless you reset it with the button on the side of the case.
Perhaps this developed with police speed traps and the desire to contest any "booking"....
A 1909 Smiths catalogue I have shows "maximum hand" speedometer which had another, perhaps "bizarre" use...
These were able to be locked and, quoting the catalogue... "allowed owners to check on any furious driving by their chauffeurs"....
Watford speedometers had nickel plated cases and as chromium plate wasn't utilised until after 1926, one can date an object.
As well the speedometer, as did many of the period, has a beveled edge glass and again these disappeared in the late 1920's....
Left click on the images to enlarge them....
As you will see they were made in Watford, North London, hence the name, by the firm North and Sons Ltd, who dabbled with magnetos also. 
The business started in 1905 but there is little reference to them after the  the Great Depression , although they were still filing patent applications for odometers and some ignition system modifications up to the mid 1930's, and the dial on the speedo I have has several patent numbers, but these I seem unable to track down......but I suspect they went under like so many other companies of the time, not surviving either the Depression or WW2.
In my time, when I was active in the instrument restoration business, I can honestly say we only worked on a few examples....
So they are rather rare, but form a nice fitment to a motorcycle of the era as an alternative to Smiths/Jaeger....
Their calibration factor was 710 cable turns per mile, so they were only suitable to be driven from an open gear drive setup on the front wheel, with a large gear attached to the wheel spokes.
I'll run a blog on this drive system in the future....

Firstly, this is the last blog from me this year and in fact until around the 10th January 2010.....
Thanks for dropping in so regularly, revisit again in early 2010, I've a lot of interesting items in the pipeline.....
I'm off to Eastern Canada. the Miramichi in New Brunswick Province to be a little precise with Mrs DQ......
Brrrr I hear you say....Bloody oath I agree with you, but family calls and we have accepted a long standing invitaion to spend Christmas with my son-in-law's family.....
But what of this blog.......??
Thought I'd start an item on the Smiths SSM Speedometer and RSM tachometer......
Firstly what do the initials mean?
SSM is "speedometer shallow magnetic" and the tacho RSM is obvious.....
The shallow refers to the previous Smiths magnetic instrument the SN and RN type or "Nemag" instrument and this new magnetic instrument was shorter in height, hence the "shallow" reference....
They were introduced in 1963 in 60mm diameter case size for what are deemed Lightweight motorcycles....250cc and under, and the dials were usually a shade of grey and the scale often 60mph and 80mph, although later in the 1960's and early 1970's this instrument was supplied in 120mph, and 150mph/180kph for the single cylinder range of Ducati motorcycles ....the 350/350/450 versions.
The speedometer and tacho were called the 2000 series... i.e SSM2001/00, used amongst other things on the BSA C15 and D7 BSA Bantam.
Left click on the illustrations to enlarge.....
Acknowlegements to Mortons Motorcycle Media and Smiths Motor Accessories for items used....
























The Smiths Chronometric instrument had become an expensive instrument to produce and was labour intensive, and with the major motorcycle manufacturers compaining of supply costs, Smiths produced an 80mm diameter version for the end of the 1963 season.
















The 80mm diameter type, often refered to as 3" instruments, but Smiths were metric in their chronometrics and continued this into the SSM/RSM at least with the bezel rim and case.
They were initially offered in a grey dial, with a lighter grey circle in the centre with white concentric circles and of course numerals....
Known to one and all as Smiths "greyface" instruments.
Black dials with white numerals appeared later in the 1960's and illustrated is a batch of 80mm SSM and RSM instruments I built for Ducati 750/900 bevel drive motorcycles for a Japanese customer years back.















































Illustrated is a speedometer and tachometer from a Velocette Venom Thruxton 1966/67.... the red sector was discontinued by Smiths by 1968. Again rebuilt by me.























So how do you get into these RSM and SSM instruments.....??
You can use a screwdriver, carefully manipulating under the rolled edge of the chromed bezel, levering against the case. However you can expect to see marks on the case via this method...bit annoying if the case has been painted. We paint our cases after the instrument is dis-assembled.
In this case Mrs DQ is doing the honours....






















A better idea if you've a few to do, or are an instrument repairer and are curious as to how others do it is to purchase a pair of German made, Knippex brand "mirror/glass breaking pliers" and grind the ends suitably.... they work like a charm...
The original Smiths bezels were brass, pressed out and chrome plated...with time the brass, under stress from the pressing will split and you often see "new old stock" instruments with radial splits on the bezel edge. I bought hundreds over the years and often got caught, and of course needed to roll on a new bezel rim.
This means with this splitting, that it is almost impossible to re-use an original bezel after you manipilate it off.
We made our bezels in 0.7mm thick, half hard copper sheet and chromed onto it. Big advantage is that you can remove and refit the bezel several times without it looking horrible or splitting.




































































Rolling on the bezel is for another day, but illustrated is the Smiths factory tool......

According to Phil Irving, the Australian engineer who worked at Vincents on several occasions during their heyday and was involved in the design and building of the pre-war series "A" twin and then post-war with the Black Shadow twin, Smiths Industries were approached to build a speedometer comensurate with the expected performance of the new to be introduced Black Shadow model at the 1948 November Earles Court motorcycle show in London.
A hastily cobbled up 5" instrument based on a car model served the purpose for the show and then Smiths came up with a cast aluminium bodied, lustriously black enamelled 5" speedometer with a chronometric movement ( the same as the current 3"/80mm versions) and a scale of 150mph or 250kph for European and metric markets.
I'm not a Vincent man, so can't tell you how many Black Shadows they built, which would give you an idea of how many 5" speedometers Smiths supplied, but the demand continues, and in the years I was in the instrument business I must have build over 120, and continue to build the occasional one.
Vincents never supplied the 5" tachometer and I believe these came due to a demand after the Vincent factory closed its doors. They were likely made up by the London firm, run by Joe Shaw...Auto Tempo Instruments...but that's just my guess....
I don't intend to intimately describe how to build such a 5" speedometer or tachometer, but I will, following, set out in photographs the items you would need.
One sheet of text gives a description of the chronometric instrument and this coupled with some drawings will lead those with a technical bent on a voyage of discovery as to how these facinating instruments work....
My acknowledgments to Smiths Industries and or its decendants for some of the drawings and descriptions and to others I may have inadvertently overlooked
...the photos are my own.
Read on....
Left click on images to enlarge.....



























































































As I did the original blog late on a Sunday night, I added some more items this Monday morning.... these are comment by Phil Irving from his Autobiography, page 365 and three pages from the Smiths Equipment Schedules for Vincent Motorcycles......


















The publication "Motor Cycling in Australia" did an impression of one of the first Black Shadow Vincents sent to the Queensland Distributors and published it in their Dec.1948 edition. Below is a photo from the article which shows the prototype speedo. Obviously the first few made had these before Smiths Motor Accessories got into production.






























































A selection of dials that I made available...shown in reversed image for clarity....