Description
17 Page – PDF Download – Complete Series – Villiers Singles Model Guide
“The British Two Stroke Single
The ubiquitous Villiers engine powered everything from lightweight commuter bikes to top scramblers and invalid carriages. Don Morely’s portrait of this powerplant will include a complete engine strip and rebuild.
Dirty, smelly, oily, unreliable. All that many would use to describe their recollections of Mr. Villiers’ single-cylinder two-stroke, petrol lubricated engines.
But despite such apparently anti-social habits, Villiers engines still happily managed to power the vast majority of commuter type motorcycles seen on Britain’s streets throughout the 1940s, 1950s and indeed onwards into the 1960s and ’70s.
There were, of course, numerous twin-cylinder Villiers engines, including the ‘Starmaker’ racing engine which appeared during the factory’s death throes. Joe Public, however, and most trials or scrambler riders, chose one of the veritable multitudes of bikes powered by the Villiers single.
Villiers only made engines, not complete bikes like the BSA Bantam, and they supplied them to manufacturers of motorbikes, lawnmowers, dumper trucks, invalid carriages, mini-cars, scooters and even chain saws.
The Wolverhampton built single cylinder two strokes also powered TT racers in basic 125cc form and when modified by bike makers like Greeves, the Villiers engine cleaned up as a 250cc single on and off the road.
Dave Bickers trounced all comers in the moto cross world championships and trials rider Don Smith twice won the world trials title on Greeves machines with a Villiers engine fitted with Greeves own top end.
Bill Wilkinson’s victory in the 1969 Scottish Six Days Trial all-British victory, again achieved with the Villiers 37A engine plus Greeves’ alloy barrel and cylinder head combination.
Sprite’s Dennis ‘Jonah’ Jones, however, regularly won British National Championship Trials using a perfectly standard ‘iron barrel’ engine exactly as Villiers supplied…”
17 Page – PDF Download – Complete Series – Villiers Singles Model Guide
