Sidecar Jubilees?

...comes up Trumps.

In my Lightweight Twins History of the Jubilee family, I make reference to:

May 1960. Bob Collier takes a Jubilee and Bambini sidecar outfit around Scotland in the ISDT.

NOC Member Colin Leighfield sent me a photocopy (of a photocopy) of an article he found on Bob Collier, where they refer to him as "Captain Ingenious" - and there is a grainy picture of said Jubilee included on one page... Sadly, I dont know who printed the article.

If Bob Collier had anything to do with it, the bike was probably very non standard.  Sammy Miller has one of his creations, where he took two prewar Model 18 engines and re-built them side by side to make a 1000cc parallel twin.  A bit like Alan Milyard...

Mine struggles to go over 50mph solo - I daren’t think what it would be like with a side car!

 You could go round and round in circles to build up enough momentum to move off!

But they fitted these chairs to fartboxes (sorry, Vespa's and Lambretta's) with 10hp on a good day and they managed. OK, well managed to get to 40mph on a good day, so a Jubilee should have coped ok. Also very few people who would have ridden these were overweight at that time, so that would have helped.

The bike was a standard 1960 Jubilee, Bob did it to prove that it could be done and it completed the Six Days in 1960. The photo shows Bob with his wife Joan and his passenger, Gordon Wilde, who I knew because he was a buyer at W.Canning In Birmingham when I worked there, 1963/72. Later Bob removed the sidecar, fitted a Navigator engine and Roadholder forks, to make it into a solo trials bike. He scrapped the (lousy) Wipac ignition system and aluminium welded the magneto drive housing from one of the singles onto the timing side and fitted a magneto with manual timing adjustment. I knew Bob in those days and he let me ride it around the mini trials section in his very large back garden, in Erdington. It was amazing how it would plonk around at virtually zero revs over anything. That was in 1964, I don’t know what happened to it eventually, most of Bob’s stuff went to Sammy Miller after he died. Little known is that after Suzuki introduced their 50cc two-strokes, they approached Bob in 1964 and asked him if he could make three of these into trials machines to enter the ISDT, as a publicity exercise. He used girder forks to make longer swinging arms and mounted in them at the front end, three-speed Albion gearboxes, connected by chain to the final drive. They had separate gear levers, so that by using both of them, you could select twelve speeds. It sounds Heath Robinson, but didn’t look it and I was able to ride one of them around Erdington for about five miles. I was astonished at how well it went. I believe that the bikes were entered and finished. Bob was an incredible man, not just an innovative engineer, but also a top level trials rider, solo and sidecar. Fond memories of a top bloke and a very decent man.