Challenging tradition

As the biggest supplier of engine units to the British motorcycle industry, Villiers could sell any and every unit they produced, but while an ideal business model, such success doesn’t always go hand in hand with new developments. Nor it seems were Villiers all that keen on supplying part-engines, it was an all-or-nothing system, though to be fair this had sufficed the industry for a good number of years. With most of their smaller manufacturer clients being interested in or involved in the off-road or competition world, engines supplied to them were being increasingly modified in order to keep up with the competition appearing from abroad.

This situation wasn’t too bad when the mods involved casting a few alloy barrels to offer as an option over cast iron ones, but by the early Sixties Greeves for instance were abandoning a large proportion of the engine and replacing the bits with their own. A casual comment by engineer Brian Woolley querying why Greeves didn’t make their own engines as they pretty much chucked all the Villiers bits