1959 BSA C15

 Owned by "Sinky"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Completed C15 on the bench

 What can you say about a BSA C15?

A heap of appalling rubbish is the comment most probably arrowed towards this 250cc motorcycle. It may be regarded as truly awful but this ignores the original purpose of the bike – namely cheap home to work transport  that can be maintained by a reasonably competent person.

Poor and ham-fisted home maintenance was often the downfall of this motorcycle, like many others in the cheap ride-to-work category. It was not as well designed as the Tiger Cub and the engine was not as simple as the Villiers 2-stroke which was the choice of many smaller manufacturers in the 50's such as James and Francis Barnett. It wasn't just the power plant that was regarded as poor, the tinware was equally despised. The heavily valenced mudguards were of course practical dirt and water deflectors suited to it's purpose as a ride to work device rather than a nice looking toy.

One thing is for sure, there is little point in restoring a C15 to originality other than for posterity and even the National Motorcycle Museum wouldn't want a production line example to spoil the ambience of it's wonderful halls! The C15 deserves to be altered somewhat as was the done thing in the 1950's and 60's. They look quite nice when transformed into a trials or scrambles version; the factory did try to make them into competition machines and that was the summit of their somewhat mundane existence.

So we had a basketcase C15 to work on. At least it wasn't a C11G or a C12, although there was one lurking in a box somewhere in the shed! It was to be made into a usable runabout within reason and within a small budget. A C15 is never going to be worth much so no point in spending gross amounts of cash on it. A reasonable looking 50 year old classic is the best that can be achieved, with a few modern tweaks to aid reliability and rider pleasure would be the order of the day. What we discovered was a very pleasing old machine. It came with a high compression piston, everything was there and it was a bike that hadn't been overly abused as most of them were. There was bad news however – an out of true crankshaft and an over-abundance of Red Hermetite which smeared not only the mating surfaces but everything else, including oil galleries and the inside casing surfaces.

But once cleaned up and assembled, it looks quite handsome with it's alloy mudguards and bright red paint job, much as a good one would have looked in the 1960's. We crafted a few things such as a neat little chainguard and a rear numberplate in aluminium. It was converted to 12 volt electris, using a zener diode to stop the battery from being over-cooked. A heatsink for the zener was also crafted from aluminium.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The shiny rebuilt engine         The dinky aluminium chainguard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Rebuilt engine timing side    

 View from the rear

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hand crafted rear number plate
and Miller Lite!

 

                                            Front forks showing zener heat sink

 

 

 

 

 

 

The tank finished in red               Another view of the timing side

 

 

 

 

 

 

Almost finished

 

 

      Rod Working on something!

 

 Partially constructed from the boxes

 

 

And ready to go home.