PUB TALK

Thank-you to those who have made responses to this column. Regular (e)letter writer Arthur Pentney sent a picture of his square nuts. Not a deformity, but some apparently original nuts he found on his WD Norton. Apparently cycle thread, which would also indicate their being original. PUB can only suggest that at the time material was short and they had to use what was available? Certainly in the early postwar period factories often had such supply problems, as even when they managed to get the required Government authorisation chit, they couldn’t actually find a supply. Phil Irving has described how they would accept what was available and then indulge in inter-company bartering to get the right stuff.

Hugo responded to AJS / Matchless Mary’s ATS query, and PUB has put them into direct touch, with Mary very happy. Finally Mark has sent in a photo of an Eadie car not mentioned in brief references such as Tragatsch, which list the firm as existing 1898-1903, with Royal Enfield as an ‘offshoot’, but the Eadie manufacturing company Ltd. made bicycles from 1892, and finally amalgamated with BSA in 1907. With all this publicity, someone (Chinese or Indian?) should restart the Eadie trademark!

Moving on, the column of two months ago described getting an MoT on the ‘modern’ electric start bike (almost VMCC eligible), but not the loss of its MoT expiry date. This occurred because the tester noticed a small discrepancy between V5C and what was actually stamped on the bike