72 AJS Norton Stormer

i have recently bought an ajs stormer 410 - road registered

to add to my other off roadie (yam it465)

i found the information about the stormer very interesting !







the small end bearing on the con rod is plain metal - so you need to use castor oil - or you will

get premature wear on the small end. Also none of the parts are ethanol resistant. So the tank needs to be

drained after use......

It handles well - but the engine is so tempremental - dont stall it , it will NOT hot start

ajstormer said:

It handles well - but the engine is so tempremental - dont stall it , it will NOT hot start

Click to expand...

Even if you give it full throttle when you kick it ?

If you want to read up on the earlier history of the Stormer, its probably worth commenting that the earlier James are related - as the NVT empire was crumbling, the Motocross/Scrambles side of things was renamed to AJS. Probably a bit of Francis Barnett in there too somewhere, since that was part of the AMC stable as well, and they were keen dirt guys...

thanks for the info.....

i am rebuilding the engine at the moment

points and magneto's dont work



rusty , worn and neglected



i have purchased a modern CDI - from electrexworld



looks well made - but they offer a lighting kit - that will be available 'next week' , from last september !

Typical British engineering companies.....tomorrow never arrives....

Anyway i was fortunate that i looked at the magneto because both mains bearings were out of spec

slightly more play than even the designer was prepared to accept. Spares are available . NOS that have been

getting rusty in forty years of storage......

http://www.ajs-shop.co.uk/acatalog/PIST ... RINGS.html

The engines were "pure-bred" Villiers. The first Starmaker, a 250, was used in a road-racing bike built specifically for the program just before Villiers was merged with AMC. My old boss, Peter Inchley, rode it in a number of events in 1965 and 66, ending with the 66 TT. He was running second at the final pit stop for fuel. He gassed up and took off again only to have the engine seize up about 5 miles down the road.

The team in the next pit also had an engine failure with much blue smoke and fouled plugs. I understood, from the stories I heard around the office when I joined N-V later that year, that the TT's fuel supplier delivered the 2-stroke mix to the next-door pit, who were running a 4-stroke, and the Villiers pit got gas without the oil.

There was one interesting artifact in the competition shop when I started there. A grid made up from masking tape was mounted on the wall, with inch markings from a felt-tip pen. I asked what it was, and Pete's assistant produced some photographs. They showed the 250 TT bike on an axle stand with Pete on the seat in a racing crouch. One of the pictures had a hand-drawn fairing on top of the image.

Apparently, they took side and front views, drew a fairing shape in, then produced some engineering drawings of the shape and had a local fiberglass firm make a fairing. "Wind tunnel? We don't need some stinking wind tunnel!" Pete commented that at one point coming downhill on the TT course, he was in a full crouch and going just about as fast as 250 ccs can get you going. He sat up to see the next corner a bit better and got another 5 mph top speed.

The motor in the Stormer series descended directly from the Starmaker. I think the "detuning" from its full throttle race settings caused the part-throttle detonation problem. Since I'd left before it grew beyond the 350cc size, I'm assuming that the crankcases and cylinder liner were substantially redesigned, otherwise the liner would only have been a few thousandths of an inch thick where it went into the case.

James and Francis Barnett had been using the Starmaker (and other) Villiers engine for years before 1965.
The AJS Stormer was a James with the badge changed.
And the James, in turn, was basically a Francis Barnett designed chassis , painted in a different colour !

If you have a squiz at old scrambles pics, you can find basically the same bike badged as Francis Barnett, then James then AJS.
With some evolution - almost entirely from the Francis Barnett side of things...

I believe, Rohan, that the Starmaker was a newly designed engine in late 1965. It had some obvious relationships to the older Villiers designs, particularly the 197cc "9E" - I think some of the castings might have been very similar. Until the N-V conglomerate was formed, Villiers sold many thousands of engines and transmissions to the UK manufacturers of "beginner" bikes, like James, Francis Barnett, DOT and also quite a lot of higher performance engines to Greeves. They also sold the 2T, a 250cc two-stroke twin, to quite a lot of their customers.

I agree with your comment about James and F-B being "badge engineered" and they used a lot of Villiers engines and transmissions, but I'm sure the Starmaker wasn't one of them. The 250 most other manufacturers bought from Viiliers was the 2T. The Stormer frame is very much based on the Commando, and was a Wolverhampton design by Bob Trigg's engineering people. The only real difference is that the top tube joins the headstock towards the bottom instead of the top and of course, no Isolastics. Some time ago, there was a photo on this forum of the fatigue crack in the unmodified Commando frame. One of the works M-X bikes had an almost identical failure, on the top side of the top tube - since the gusset was the opposite way round.

Also, immediately prior to the formation of N-V, I understand that Villiers was considering getting into bike manufature. They were doing quite well selling engines and transmissions, also building cylinder heads for the high performance version of the Ford Cortina (the Lotus dohc version) under contract to Lotus and Ford. Unfortuinately, neither they nor the rest of the small bike makers saw the Hondas coming - twice the power, electric start, four-strokes and much more sophisticated machines than what Villiers' customers were making.

If the N-V consolidation hadn't happened, there may have been bikes out there with "Villiers" on the tank and they'd have gone to the wall much sooner than N-V eventually did.

Until the formation of N-V by Manganese Bronze Holdings, I don't think Villiers had any interest in, or connection with the James and F-B bikes, other than being the supplier of their engines and transmissions. Since I only worked there for a very hectic 16 months, I might have mis-interpreted some of the things I heard.

There may have been more than one version of the Starmaker then ?
At some point, the twin carb version became a single carb ?
Some cylinders look more slanted forward than others ?

Don Morleys' excellent book on Classic British Scramblers quotes that the AMC-made 2 stroke engines were a flop, and "for 1963 both James and FB fitted either the twin carb Villiers Starmaker or the Villiers 36A engine with Parkinson all-alloy top end". Also shows a pic of Chris Horsfield in action on a James, with Villiers Starmaker engine.

He mentions quite a lot of the history of FB, James and then AJS, and how they and the team riders were all blended together eventually into the AJS Stormer, mentions Peter Inchley at AJS.

And also that in 1972, the Stormer got a Cotton frame, and the James connection was gone..

Cheers.

very interesting info....thanks

i think the stormer (and starmaker) engine stayed pretty much the same- small changes to clutch

they just tilted it in the frame.....

1965

1970ish

1977


they kept making them until they ran out of engines.!

from what i understand the frame was originaly a Fluff Brown design for Cotton motorcycles, which he
continued to develop when he was competition manager at AJS.

I have seen a picture of a Cotton with the starmaker engine and the frame 'looks' the same in 1962 ish.
Predating the commando by some years.....

The frame in the Sprite photo isn't the AJS frame. It has a triangulated top tube design. Also the loop behind the gearbox is a different shape.

Incidentally, the tail-pipe extension/spark arrestor/muffler on your Stormer is about identical to the ones N-V made for the 68 ISDT bikes. We entered three 250's that carried the AJS badges and one 350 that carried a Matchless badge. I'm pretty sure that was way after the last of the AMC Matchlesses and probably the only ever two stroke to carry the badge.

The bikes were ridden in the event by four guys from the Royal Air Force Motoring Association.

frankdamp said:

The frame in the Sprite photo isn't the AJS frame.

Click to expand...

Thats because it is a Sprite frame !
Supplied, in kit form, by Sprite Motorcycles, Oldbury, Staffs.
Add your own engine - including the Starmaker.

Apparently they (briefly) sold hundreds of them in the mid-1960s, at the then 'bargain' price of 154 quid.
just like Don and Roy Jordan were winning on.
The tax loophole that allowed this was soon closed, and the bubble was over...

Info from Don Morleys book on Classic Bristish Scramblers.
Excellent book, the depth of research is amazing...

frankdamp said:

I'm pretty sure that was way after the last of the AMC Matchlesses and probably the only ever two stroke to carry the badge.

Click to expand...

The Matchless Pinto was a 2 stroke.
While they may not have sold many, it was a production Matchless, and the brochures show them for a few years...

Hopethishelps.

Rohan:

That's a completely new name for me. When was the Matchless Pinto on the market? I don't remember any Matchless bikes being on the market after about 1964.

Good link LAB. They were 1960 and 61 and maybe 62, export only to the USA.

There was also the Matchless Papoose, a little 2 stroke powered scooter thing, same era.
Same engine, laid flat ? Rebadged James too.

frankdamp said:

Rohan:

That's a completely new name for me. When was the Matchless Pinto on the market? I don't remember any Matchless bikes being on the market after about 1964.

Click to expand...

It was a James in reality.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/1960-Mat ... 232a067f5b

The key in that article was that the Pinto was only sold in the USA. I movd over here in 1968, so it was probably off the market by then. I'd decided not to pursue motorcycling once we got to the land of short-sighted little old ladies in gargantuan cars.

It was well off the market by then - they were sold in 1960 to 1962 only ?

The AMC made engines, designed by Piatti was it ? - were considered a dud.
Not as good as the Villiers apparently.
And with assembly problems, apparently Villiers ended up building them anyway !

P.S. Good link timewarp. They must be pretty thin on the ground.
Not seen one in the metal, but that one looks very neat indeed.

I almost bought a Piatti Scooter in 1958. Thank goodness I wised up at the last minute and got a Vespa. Mom wouldn't let me have a "MOTORCYCLE". I sneaked an Ariel Leader through by saying it was really a scooter, then got a "real" bike, a BSA A7. She was horrified when I started working for Norton and riding every day.

This bike is about 1970 or 71. Stormers certainly were competitive, at one point (about midway) in I think the 1970 MotoCross World Championship they (Malcolm Davis and Andy Roberton) were first and second in the World Champs. Then they got injured or something. The guy that bought the stock and AJS name was Fluff Brown, who was a works team mechanic, and was previously a works rider for Cotton. I bought the cycle parts of one to put a 350 Triumph twin motor in (!!) to make a street bike, with a 19" front wheel all the angles worked out just right. Sadly I had to part with it when we left the midlands, but I still have the Norton spindle, modified to fit a Norton front wheel into the AJS forks.
There was a plan to build a street version of the moto cross bikes, it was about the time that Yamaha introduced its DT5 (????) street scrambler. The plan was to have a motocross bike with lights on basically, sadly it came to nothing when it was costed, the DT5 was sold in the USA for (say)$500, relatively speaking the AJS was going to cost something like $800. I rather fancied the 250 pure street bike (think Bultaco Metralla only faster and better handling), which was part of the same cancelled program.
cheers
wakeup

I used one of the ISDT bikes as a run-about around the factory and local streets. It had lights and a spark arrestor/silencer. That was the one that had me climbing the frong grille of a double decker bus.

Someone at the factory had n=been eperimenting with different ignition timing and had left it more advanced than usual. As I rolled to a stop at a red light, it died, but a quick clutch dip got it running again before I stopped. When the light changed, I gunned it and took off - backwards! With the scrambles knobby tires, it climbed radiators very well! I realised afterwards that it sounded odd when it re-started, but I never thought it was runninig backwards