willedoo

The only older Norton I've ever ridden was a 650 SS. With the featherbed frame, it was noticeably better handling than the Commando but at around 60mph had a very uncomfortable vibration that you felt in the seat of the pants. Once you went faster it would go away but the problem was the vibration was right at the speed limit you wanted to cruise at. To avoid it you had to ride slower or go faster and risk a speeding ticket.

I remember when my original one had about 10,000 miles on the clock I was pulling into the yard from the street and the whole bike went pear shaped. The small bracket connecting the frame top tube to the engine had cracked through and the whole integrity of the isolastic suspension system was gone. Without that bracket, the engine/gearbox,swing arm and rear wheel were one unit and the frame, tank and front end another. Only the bottom mounts held the bike together. Just lucky it didn't break speeding into a corner. The Commandos of that era had a few issues straight out of the box. Some bad design, sometimes bad manufacture and/or assembly. The common joke of the time was that if you got one built on a Wednesday it was ok. Get one built early or late in the week and you could have problems.

This is partially the same bike a year later. I bought it back from the insurance company and rebuilt it into this. It has the original tank, side panels, engine and gearbox, but everything else was replaced.

It hit the curb at around 110mph and went end over end a few times before tumbling and sliding the rest of the way. You can see where the top rear section of the frame is flattened onto the rear wheel. That's where it was airborne at some stage and came straight down on that section, wiping out the seat and rear fibreglass tail section. Both rims are heart shaped from the initial hit on the concrete curb. All I have left of it these days is the number plate.

Another scan, my poor old Fastback outside the police station, 1973.

A short 15 minute documentary on the history of Chamberlain tractors.

Another scan; this photo was taken north of Lake Callabonna, South Australia, in 1984. It's not a natural lake but a clay pan between sand dunes fed by a never ending flowing bore. At the time I estimated it was easy big enough for three ski boats to use at the same time, as a size comparison. It was one of those South Australian government bores that flowed unrestricted for many, many years before they finally started to close them down. I don't think there's any left flowing like that now. The bore was sunk on the side of a sand dune and the flow had cut a deep ravine in the dune that was deep enough to die from the fall. If that didn't kill you, the boiling water would. You had to go 500 metres downstream before the water was cool enough to have a hot spa bath; I'd estimate it flowed about a kilometre all up from the bore to the lake. Judging by irrigation bores I've seen, I guessed the flow at between 20,000 to 30,000 gallons per hour, flowing year after year. Evaporation over the large lake area would have accounted for a fair portion of the water loss.

I looked up Kulin on Google maps; I've got a cousin who farms north of there, between Kellerberrin and Tammin. I didn't realise there where so many salt lakes in the wheatbelt if that's what those white areas are that I'm seeing on the satellite view.

This 1982 photo shows the Simpson Desert the driest I've ever seen it. The only vegetation visible from the air was the shrubs and trees, no grass to be seen. The drought broke the following year with a lot of flooding. The photo is taken from a Cherokee Six just entering the Simpson from the east en route from Windorah to Alice Springs. Everything went ok until halfway across when the alternator died and the battery went flat, so no radio or instruments, just the compass. We landed on the strip at Ringwood Station on the western edge of the desert, and luckily the station owner was home to see us come in. He drove over and picked up the pilot so he could use the station radio to call Alice Springs airport to clear a space for us to fly into there, being pre satellite days when the stations relied on HF radio for communications. We got to stay overnight in Alice waiting on the new alternator to be fitted, then on to Bililuna in W.A. the next day. Another surprise there on landing - the client (Shell if my memory is correct) had given the crew three days off as the Halls Creek annual races were on. We took off again to Halls Creek which took us straight past the Wolfe Creek crater, so that was a good sight from the air. It was a memorable trip for different reasons. When the battery went dead over the Simpson, it really got us thinking how little preparation we had in regard to survival gear if we had to put down in a dune corridor. We didn't even have near enough water required to stay on the ground any length of time. As a comparison of seasons, I took these photos with a digital compact camera in the Simpson in 2010 after an extended wet period. Most of the green you can see is grass and herbage that burns off with hot, dry conditions. It was very different to the other deserts I've been in which have more permanent vegetation in the dune corridors, and much more spinifex. Edit: Just as a post script, it wasn't far from where these three photos were taken that I came across an old survey marker peg that was the site of Geosurveys Base Camp #1 from Reg Spriggs' first motorised crossing of the desert in 1962.

How all this scanning started was that an old close mate I'd known since 1971 passed away recently and I've been looking for photos of him from the old days to scan and forward on to his daughters. Scanning old photos is a bit like letting the genie out of the bottle, then down the rabbit hole you go.

I use Paint a lot to resize photos down in size; I find it really easy to do in Paint.

This one is Macumba Station in 1984. That was a big year for work. I did a lot of 10 week on/ 2 week off hitches that year and one bloke I knew spent six months straight in the field without a break. Not that he did much work anyway, but it's still a long time away. We started the year working at Lake Frome, then up around Lake Callabonna, over to Lake Eyre South, then at Macumba up the west side of Lake Eyre, then finished the year off around the top of Lake Eyre and north of there towards Kalamurina.

Once lightened, I had to have a good look to make sure I wasn't asleep in there.

Great photos onetrack. Flash gear in it's time but we're probably talking about collector's items now. I can remember hauling out sugar cane with one of those Massey 35 tractors with the little Perkins, but if you told someone in the game nowdays they'd think you'd gone loopy. Those D7Gs we had look old in the photos now, but back then they were the latest and greatest. All good old tractors. Here's another old beast we had back in 1982, a D8H 22A. I've got an idea they were built or assembled in Scotland, but I could be wrong.

Getting bogged can be connected to stupidity or sometimes to necessity and at other times, just bad luck. I'll own up to this one, just not sure which category it belongs in - necessity I think as a crossing had to be found one way or another. This is crossing the Macumba River in 1984 and it was like wakling through a minefield as you couldn't visibly pick the soft areas from the hard. I found the soft bit. The scary bit was looking at the flood debris in the tree tops on the opposite bank. Taking into account a 10' bank, that would put this machine about 30' under water in a flood like that. Edit: the rippers are upside down as it had previously been ploughing explosive cord into the ground with one central ripper, similar to the way they lay cable.