This thing is basically a family heirloom now, and the next chapter has just been discussed so I’ve decided to document it.
Backstory-
The first thing I ever restored with my granddad was a 1950 D1 bantam put together from my dads bantam parts stash. I was 15/16 at the time I think. My dad is a bit of a hoarder and daily-rode an ex-GPO D1 bantam as his only transport until he did his car test (I was in secondary school at that point, I can remember coming home from school just as the driving instructor was picking him up, so he can’t have passed his car test more than 5 years before I did). Because of this he had a lot of ‘spare’ parts and bikes.
Bear in mind this was the mid to late 90s so anyone still riding a bantam at that point in time as daily transport was unusual. I remember him being late home from work one day, him and the bike being dropped off in a friends van as he’d put the piston and rings through the silencer so hard whilst hitting maximum velocity on the hill down from the pit that he’d taken all the baffles out of it. He swapped the engine for a spare after tea and rode it to work the next morning.
If that doesn’t paint a vivid picture of life in a rural 1990s pit village in Yorkshire I don’t know what does 😂
Still, none of that is really anything to do with the bike detailed here, except in return for him donating me the first bike to restore (and as a result of him seeing what a good job I made of it) I said I’d also go over another, complete-ish bike he had stashed.
And that’s more or less the start of the story of this bike. Well maybe not quite the start, as I do have some slight history. Although he’s a terrible hoarder my dad is quite a good record keeper, and in one of his little notebooks he kept a full record of when, where and who he bought it off, as well as the particulars of the bike itself.
So I know my dad bought it in 1991 of a guy in Tuxford, a small village just under 20 miles away. It’s a Nottingham registered bike so its far to say it probably hasn’t been far it’s in entire life.
Although we are just in South Yorkshire, Tuxford is in Nottinghamshire, being about 40 miles from us, it’s only 20ish from Tuxford.
He says he can’t remember going to get it at all (bearing in mind he didn’t drive, it must have involved someone taking him there) but he know it was quite rare as bantams go, and was worth the 45 quid asking price!
The exact spec is-
1954 D3 ‘bantam major’ (a whole 25 extra CCs over a normal bantam, at 150cc)
Direct electrics- this means the wiring loom has no battery, so the lights only work when running. This may seem like a small distinction but quite a lot of the bike is different because of it. On full-trim bikes the headlamp is different, the toolbox/battery tray setup is different, and the engine side casing on the LHS is different too as battery bikes used a Lucas regulator/rectifier and direct used a wico-pacy one.
Critically the engine number is different too. Suffice to say competition models were all direct electrics.
Direct electrics on a D3 is fairly rare, as because they were the ‘major’ upmarket model pretty much all road bikes were specced with batteries.
Plunger frame model- this is the rudimentary rear suspension, a step up over the rigid models but not like the swing arm models, that weren’t released until late ‘55 for the ‘56 model year. The frame number also has an extra prefix on plunger frames over rigid models.
It’s also a genuine sold-new ‘competition’ model, which is pretty rare. Competition model basically means off-road trials bike/scrambler spec.
You got knobbly tires, slightly raised lightweight alloy mudguards( with no rear rack) an upswept exhaust, raised adjustable foot peg assembly, a seat riser bolted under the seat, different handlebars, no lights (but still a speedo) and a larger rear sprocket to lower the gearing.
Not many sold at the time as they weren’t designed to be registered and where largely impractical for daily use. With the advent of pre-65 trials there’s Proably more clones in existence now than were sold new!
What the ones that did sell did though, was prove to be massively successful in the trailing world. The whole ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ mantra was some of the best advertising available at the time, and although the buyers were buying a road trim bike to commute, given the competition model was just a stripped back and tyred-up street model was easy to see for buyers, so they could see they were buying into the wins.
It’s also why so many bantams ended up as field bikes in their autumn years.
But this is the real deal, and damn rare because of it. The real thing that makes it really rare is they only made plunger frame competition spec D3s for less than two years.
When the swingarm frame came out in late ‘55 they dropped the plunger frame comp spec model. This was a double edged sword, as although the swing arm suspension was invariably better at soaking up the terrain, it was also a considerable amount heavier, and given you’ve only got just under 5hp to work with, seriously harmed the bikes power to weight. Rigid and plunger models remained popular for trialling for a long time after the advent of the move to ‘modern’ suspension because of this.
So again back to this particular bike, way back when I was 16ish I ‘restored’ it, again with a lot of help from my granddad. It was used a bit off road, then has sat in a shed for the best part of 20 years. It had a few bits robbed off it in that time to keep other bikes going (seat, chain) and the rats ate the grips, but other than that and a few paint scrapes it’s fared pretty well tbh. I’m fairly pleased so far with the work I did 20 years ago when I was just starting out and with a budget of f-k all 😂
Let’s say if I still think that once I’ve gone through it again 😬
Backstory-
The first thing I ever restored with my granddad was a 1950 D1 bantam put together from my dads bantam parts stash. I was 15/16 at the time I think. My dad is a bit of a hoarder and daily-rode an ex-GPO D1 bantam as his only transport until he did his car test (I was in secondary school at that point, I can remember coming home from school just as the driving instructor was picking him up, so he can’t have passed his car test more than 5 years before I did). Because of this he had a lot of ‘spare’ parts and bikes.
Bear in mind this was the mid to late 90s so anyone still riding a bantam at that point in time as daily transport was unusual. I remember him being late home from work one day, him and the bike being dropped off in a friends van as he’d put the piston and rings through the silencer so hard whilst hitting maximum velocity on the hill down from the pit that he’d taken all the baffles out of it. He swapped the engine for a spare after tea and rode it to work the next morning.
If that doesn’t paint a vivid picture of life in a rural 1990s pit village in Yorkshire I don’t know what does 😂
Still, none of that is really anything to do with the bike detailed here, except in return for him donating me the first bike to restore (and as a result of him seeing what a good job I made of it) I said I’d also go over another, complete-ish bike he had stashed.
And that’s more or less the start of the story of this bike. Well maybe not quite the start, as I do have some slight history. Although he’s a terrible hoarder my dad is quite a good record keeper, and in one of his little notebooks he kept a full record of when, where and who he bought it off, as well as the particulars of the bike itself.
So I know my dad bought it in 1991 of a guy in Tuxford, a small village just under 20 miles away. It’s a Nottingham registered bike so its far to say it probably hasn’t been far it’s in entire life.
Although we are just in South Yorkshire, Tuxford is in Nottinghamshire, being about 40 miles from us, it’s only 20ish from Tuxford.
He says he can’t remember going to get it at all (bearing in mind he didn’t drive, it must have involved someone taking him there) but he know it was quite rare as bantams go, and was worth the 45 quid asking price!
The exact spec is-
1954 D3 ‘bantam major’ (a whole 25 extra CCs over a normal bantam, at 150cc)
Direct electrics- this means the wiring loom has no battery, so the lights only work when running. This may seem like a small distinction but quite a lot of the bike is different because of it. On full-trim bikes the headlamp is different, the toolbox/battery tray setup is different, and the engine side casing on the LHS is different too as battery bikes used a Lucas regulator/rectifier and direct used a wico-pacy one.
Critically the engine number is different too. Suffice to say competition models were all direct electrics.
Direct electrics on a D3 is fairly rare, as because they were the ‘major’ upmarket model pretty much all road bikes were specced with batteries.
Plunger frame model- this is the rudimentary rear suspension, a step up over the rigid models but not like the swing arm models, that weren’t released until late ‘55 for the ‘56 model year. The frame number also has an extra prefix on plunger frames over rigid models.
It’s also a genuine sold-new ‘competition’ model, which is pretty rare. Competition model basically means off-road trials bike/scrambler spec.
You got knobbly tires, slightly raised lightweight alloy mudguards( with no rear rack) an upswept exhaust, raised adjustable foot peg assembly, a seat riser bolted under the seat, different handlebars, no lights (but still a speedo) and a larger rear sprocket to lower the gearing.
Not many sold at the time as they weren’t designed to be registered and where largely impractical for daily use. With the advent of pre-65 trials there’s Proably more clones in existence now than were sold new!
What the ones that did sell did though, was prove to be massively successful in the trailing world. The whole ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ mantra was some of the best advertising available at the time, and although the buyers were buying a road trim bike to commute, given the competition model was just a stripped back and tyred-up street model was easy to see for buyers, so they could see they were buying into the wins.
It’s also why so many bantams ended up as field bikes in their autumn years.
But this is the real deal, and damn rare because of it. The real thing that makes it really rare is they only made plunger frame competition spec D3s for less than two years.
When the swingarm frame came out in late ‘55 they dropped the plunger frame comp spec model. This was a double edged sword, as although the swing arm suspension was invariably better at soaking up the terrain, it was also a considerable amount heavier, and given you’ve only got just under 5hp to work with, seriously harmed the bikes power to weight. Rigid and plunger models remained popular for trialling for a long time after the advent of the move to ‘modern’ suspension because of this.
So again back to this particular bike, way back when I was 16ish I ‘restored’ it, again with a lot of help from my granddad. It was used a bit off road, then has sat in a shed for the best part of 20 years. It had a few bits robbed off it in that time to keep other bikes going (seat, chain) and the rats ate the grips, but other than that and a few paint scrapes it’s fared pretty well tbh. I’m fairly pleased so far with the work I did 20 years ago when I was just starting out and with a budget of f-k all 😂
Let’s say if I still think that once I’ve gone through it again 😬
