Electric starter? What electric starter? Pete Kelly visits Steve McFarlane, of SRM Engineering fame, in Cardiff to fully appreciate the huge amount of skill and dedication that went into his patented design for an electric starter for swinging-arm A7 and A10 BSA twins.
Once Steve McFarlane had set his heart on manufacturing an electric-start mechanism for classic BSA parallel twins in the spring of 2009, using his own A10 Super Rocket (with its 9:1 compression pistons) as the project bike, he tenaciously got on with the job, working out every fine detail and then engineering all the parts himself to an impeccable standard.
It was a long, hard road, progressing from paper templates to medium-density fibreboard (which can be drilled and shaped in almost the same way as metal) and finally the strong and beautifully crafted duralumin components which, largely hidden from view, allow everything to work like clockwork.
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Read more in August’s issue of OBM
