Ever since the 1935 debut of the telescopic fork with hydraulic damping on a production motorcycle with BMW’s R12 and R17 models, and its subsequent adoption as the go-to solution for front suspension on powered two-wheelers the world over, there have been numerous attempts to find something better. But so far most of them, with the notable exception of BMW on several of its models, have drowned trying.
So that leaves the Earles fork conceived in Britain immediately after WW2 as a spare time project by Birmingham businessman Ernie Earles, as one of the most popular alternative front ends yet to reach the marketplace, with no less than 114,889 BMW singles and Boxer twins built between 1956 and 1969 all equipped with it. But there were heaps of other smaller companies who also fitted the Earles fork to their products, like the Douglas Dragonfly, and best known of all, the factory MV Agusta race bikes of all capacities from Cecil Sandford’s 1952 World Championship-winning 125 single and the 500 four raced to Grand Prix victories by Les Graham that same year.
Birmingham-based Ernest Richard George Earles registered in the four-page UK patent application duly granted to him in December 1951 for “Motor Cycle Front Wheel Forks”, had been an enthusiastic part-time Trials and Speedway rider before the outbreak of WW2. He began the war working in the Austin Motor Company’s technical design department in its vast Longbridge factory, but in 1942 under wartime conditions Earles bravely established his own company, Elms Metals. At Austin he’d been involved with the developing science of creating lightweight welded-up aluminium alloy fabrications, mainly for supply to aircraft manufacturers,
