Reply To: Allett Regal No.1

[trusty220]

That will be something to work on in the future. I know that you could buy spirals from Ransomes in the 80’s because one job I had was to re-spiral some of our hire Motor Triples to save the expense of replacing cylinders in them- a false economy as it turned out, the labour to remove the old ones and weld in new spirals just made it too much work.

My theory- and I don’t base it on any evidence at this stage- is that Allett made the centre shaft and the webs and bought in the spirals from Ransomes. These would be made from a special alloy as they are the wearing part of any cylinder and if you get it wrong it reflects badly on the whole machine. If it’s too hard it keeps a sharp edge but if you hit a stone it can shatter or crack; too soft and it won’t keep a sharp cutting edge, so the metal needs to be a compromise between hard and soft- hard enough to keep sharp, but soft enough to bend if it meets a foreign object. Ransomes have a long history of getting this right so it may be the way they decided to go.

Of course, somebody may have re-spiraled the Allett cylinder at a dealership using Ransomes spirals. No doubt the secrets will come to light in time, but we have to ask the questions first!

This is getting deep, isn’t it…?