Photos: Supplied.
BY JAN NARY
Restoring old motorcycles can be a challenging business, particularly when you aren’t a motorcycle petrolhead, there are no extant workshop manuals and every photographic reference of (allegedly) the same bike has different features. That didn’t stop John Heselwood and Ralph Gofton from embarking on a two-year restoration of a 1920’s Indian Scout and achieving a breathtakingly good result.
John and Ralph are both members of the workshop restoration team at Redland Museum. They inherited the bike’s restoration as a task no-one had been willing to undertake since it was donated to the museum in September 2017 by Mary Lee and her daughter June. The bike had belonged to Ray Lee, Mary’s husband and June’s father, who kept it going and rode it until he was well into his 90s. John had extensive experience in restoring vintage cars and Ralph was an innocent abroad in the world of mechanics.
“What we both knew about motorcycle restoration could have been written on the back of a postage stamp with a carpenter’s pencil,” John laughs, “but we put our heads together and got on with it. We stripped it down in a day then followed the restoration procedure; save what you can, find out what you need and then source it.
“Everything on the bike needed restoration. There was no such thing as a workshop manual so we started with the luggage rack.”
Like house restoration, when stripping off the wallpaper reveals a myriad unexpected faults, taking off the paint revealed etching primer that had to be ground off, in turn revealing extensive metal pitting over the whole rack. The pair developed a hybrid metal/fibreglass filler that did the job – after repeated filling and sanding – and then moved on to the monumental job of saving the frame.
“We each took home bits and pieces to work on; it took each of us about a hundred hours to get the frame back to where it should be. Then we moved on to the mudguards and had to deal with the same metal pitting as we had on the rack.
“The tank was one step worse; it had pinholes that had to be silver soldered and treated internally with rust remover, cleaned several times with various solutions before a pH-altering liquid, then a special fuel tank sealant. On the original inspection we’d thought the tank was fine but then discovered we’d been looking at the oil compartment in the front of the tank!”
The world-wide hunt for spare parts and advice seemed endless; some specialist clubs were wary of these two unknown enthusiasts but an introduction to the network by and old friend of John’s proved invaluable and help started to flow in.
“We found sources of reproduction parts in Sweden and Poland,” says Ralph. “The parts were really expensive but they did the job. The hardest part was the magneto; we opened it to find that three components were missing, with no indication of what they were.”
The pair’s ongoing sleuthing paid off with tracking down a data book that had a list of part numbers and – serendipitously – a few diagrams. The missing magneto parts identified, the Dynamic Duo located them – in Poland, the USA and Melbourne respectively.
Despite gathering photographs and reference material world-wide, John says that specific model identification can be a tricky business. “They were very popular in Australia but models sold here didn’t always have the updates that appeared on the corresponding American model,” he says.
Confused identity notwithstanding, a splendid piece of motorcycling history has been respected and preserved. Scouts continue to be a popular motorbike; they were the bike of choice for the Wall of Death riders at Coney Island and they’ve also had their Hollywood show pony moments.
“Think of the bike Burt Munro rode in the movie The World’s Fastest Indian,” says Ralph. “That could be the same model as the one on show at the museum.”
John and Ralph will be giving a Floor Talk presentation of the restoration at Redland Museum on Wednesday July 24 at 10:00am; more information is at https://www.redlandmuseum.org.au/whats-on/events/
