Britbike forum Forums British Motorcycle specific Brands Bsa bulletin board Calling all Dash Y and Y bike owners..

It seems like we may be in the throes of getting something happening on the BSAOC UK Dating Site.

These bikes are not at all common in the UK and so we may need some numbers to reinforce the case.

It may get to the stage where we need to petition the Committee to show just how many of us are affected with this numbering dilemma.
We should all know by now that the 1967 Dash Y bikes are plentiful. I own two and I am sure we must have hundreds amongst us.

The 1970 Y bikes are not so common. We have at least 5 members here that either own or have owned them. I suspect that there may be many more.

At the moment I am being informed that the notes on the BSAOC site came from the the words of Alistair Cave, the BSA Works Manager. I think they have been interpreted by one man, one committee member that is.

If Al has been reported correctly then it has to be that he was hiding something. The stories of the dock strikes, supply shortages, bikes in storage and even the warranty one are all being attributed to him.

I think the guys in the UK have gone along with the story as they knew no different. Very few of them have ever seen a Dash Y or Y bike.. let alone own one.

I am not so sure what is the best way of doing this. Somehow we need to get across to the committee that we own these machines and that we see another side of the story.

Maybe if the UK guys can provide an email address we can all write to it with our own personal experiences and opinions.

Another way may be to set up some kind of register here, and then forward details through to them.

Things are looking good.. They are prepared to listen to us but at this stage they really seem to be believing their own story. They think that the 1970 Y bikes are related to 1967 models...
somehow we need to convince them otherwise.
Over to you guys..

It was 44 years ago or so that people were stamping these numbers onto bikes.

Some of those guys were bound to have been young 25-year-old journeyman workers, who would now be a hale and hearty 69-year old retiree.

Has nobody looked up a person who was actually there at the time, who was actually punching numbers, and asked him simply "Wassup widdat?"

That would be an interesting "Quest" for someone! I'd do it myself except for that darn ocean ...

Lannis

Kevin: We were just lately discussing this over at the Jockey Journal. At the same time, one of the respected posters there had put a Y engine on ebay, identifying it as a 67. Anyway, another respected member posted a scan of a BSA document I'd never seen before. You likely have seen the document, but I thought I'd try to point it out anyway:http://www.jockeyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=91975

I can't seem to post a link to either the scan or the thread, but on the first few pages of the JJ board is a thread called "Why the Y".

Why the Y

I have a 1970 Y bike, and I'd be happy to discuss the issue, since I purchased a lot of 1967 parts that didn't fit the bike. Also, here's the certificate from the other forum:

Leon's link:

http://www.jockeyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=91975

Leon: there must be a space before and behind the string.

I'll be posting some info this weekend in the "EBay A65 dating question" thread regarding the "-Y" stamping on Hornet engines, which may help explain its reason. It may apply to the other '67 A65/A50 models as well.

Yes, I have known about the two Service Bulletins for some time now. It was actually a member from my own town here that provided them, BSA USA SB (Gen) 2-70 and 5-70.


As you can see these state that the Y bikes of 1970 exist and are eligible for the 180 day warranty.
Someone has taken that to read that they were stamped especially to show they were eligible. Not true..

All BSA models were eligible, provided they were 1970 model bikes and sold after March 1970. The bikes could be B44, B25 or twins.
Furthermore the bulletin only mentions Thunderbolts and Lightnings.
So what of all the Hornets and Spitfires that have the Dash Y suffix...... if we believe BSAOC they say those bikes were remade and sold in 1970.
The facts are that most (If not all) had been on the road for many years. Gary will tell us that not one Hornet was sold after 1969 !!!!

John Healy wrote recently about the warranty. He can recall the individual that dreamt it up and how it cost BSA/Triumph thousands. The cost was astronomical and new bikes had to be stripped to meet the parts demand.

Lannis mentioned the guys at the factory. Yep indeed, and all the guys down the chain. What were they being told in 1970 when a batch of obviously 1970 bikes appeared stamped in 1967 style numbers ? We are yet to hear from the guys that were there.

We have seen an article written by an owner of one of the 1970 Y bikes. It was a 1970 model for him...... right up to the time when he bought that exact same machine back again 26 years later.

Some do-gooder had believed the BSAOC website and retitled the bike as a 1967...... Say what ?
This is what we are up against.

I believe we are very close to cracking this one.

I look forward to Gary's news on the Hornets.

The crux of the matter really is the 1970 Y bikes, - and how they CANNOT possibly be reworked 1967 machines.

Hi folks, I have not that much to add except my spitfire was
first registred as 1967 in 1967 here in Sweden. see photo.

The quoted text comes from a post by John Healy last year.

It shows the situation and you can imagine the pressure on everyone, - certainly the management and dealers.

John clearly remembers the increase in warranty for all the 1970 range that were sold in the USA. I am sure they were forced to do that to match the Japanese opposition.

It was in this environment that Alistair and the management produced and exported the hundreds of 1970 Y bikes.
He claims they had 1000 bikes left over from 1967 and stored at the factory... don't laugh.

They were then reworked (chortle) and re-exported during 1970.

I think there were many more than 1000 of those Y bikes produced. I could produce details of 20 to 30 of them easily.

I can't go into too much detail of what Al Cave has the BSAOC believing but I am sure I can thrash it out on a point by point basis.
If the going gets too tough then obviously I will be yelling out for more help here.

Thanks Morgan for the input. I thought your bike had been sold in Sweden on 25th April but I now see it was despatched on that date.
It makes little difference, it shows that the bike was not sold in 1969 or 1970 as the story supposedly goes.



Ok then. I have been going through some of my old correspondence and dug up the above.

The BSAOC have been talking about an extra zero at the end of the numbers for 1969..
''''''''' The 1969 models are identified by the adding of an extra 0 at the end of the frame marking putting the number series into the 100,000's. ''''''''

I have never seen an example of this.
But.. what we do have and know about is that all the 1970 models have a zero preceding the serial number. (Edit... this is true for the 4 digit numbers as the zero is required to make them 5 digit. All 1970 A65 S/N are 5 digits).
This is for the normal 1970 sequence bikes.
The Y bikes don't have it.

Now those two bikes mentioned above are Y bikes, one had 1969 features to me and the other was all 1970.

The A65TA12215Y bike just happens to be one I posted a pic of on another thread. It happens to have a distinctive engine casting that was apparent around Xmas 1969 for the 1970 season.





The bike is obviously a 1970 Y bike and I know from the engine casting pattern that it is identical to an engine stamped with XD or AD date codes. I guess if this bike was made at the start of 1970 then it would have been expected to ship just weeks or months afterwards.

Oh no, not according to the BSAOC... it was shipped twice, both a couple of years before it was made.

No mention of that bike being shipped in 1970 at all !!!

I am wondering if the original entry is for a Dash Y bike. Then we may have a duplicate entry of 1968 for the 'clone bike'.
I cannot believe it is not showing as shipped during 1970.

Ok, let's look at the other machine.




This is unusual for a Y bike in that it has 1969 features. One of the forum members has a Y bike similar to this though.


Well we have 3 shipping dates to choose from for this bike.
25th April 1968, 31 Oct 68 and 19 April 1969.
Unfortunately I can't see the engine stamp pad.
It will undoubtedly have the raised pad which first appeared in August 1968 and it should have other features from September and possibly November also.
It won't have been shipped in April 1968 so that leaves the other two possibilities.

So what bike was shipped in April 1968 ?

I think we may well be looking at duplicated numbers here.
It is hard to believe but perhaps the Dash Y numbers were chosen again for the batch of Y bikes that followed them three years later.

This correspondence is six years old now and I have have been swimming upstream much of the time, against the flow.

Here we have two examples only of the later Y bikes. No problems with the bikes as such, - they are both true to their model years.
What exactly is the go with the paperwork though. Some of those dates are just not possible.

Would BSA be so foolhardy to use the same numbers twice ?

Surely not.

Writing out dating certificates for some of these machines must be a nightmare.

That's a very interesting bit of correspondence Kevin, was that from BSAOC UK or someone else?

Here's my example of a dash Y with the extra zero added.

A65LA 105590Y
On the engine, there appears to be the remnants of a dash behind the zero, indicating the number had previously been A65LA 10559-Y.





I purchased this bike around 1984 or 1985, it was a rolling chassis with the engine out. There were a few boxes of parts included which also held extra parts from other similar BSA's.
This makes it hard to say what the exact configuration of the original bike was but the engine has 1967 features and the rolling chassis has 1968 features.

> >>A65TA12215Y 1970
> >This bike has two entries so should be one of those
that was despatched
> >and returned then despatched again. But it looks
like one bike was
> >shipped to BSA West on 21 June 1967 then another
with an extra zero on
> >28 March 1968.

This March 1968 date from the correspondence you quoted in the previous post would make that bike a 1968 model, not 1969. Of course, that's assuming "standard" procedure at the factory!
As we've discussed previously, it would make sense to sell 1967 overstock in 1968, not so much for 1969 and 1970.

Yes, the two pics are of a 1967 Dash Y bike that has been modified... or at least the numbers have been.

I doubt it was done at the factory so is probably a recent 'addition', - possibly to bring the bike into line with the Owners Club website listing. We have see other examples of 'corrected' numbers.

As for the shipping dates of the 1970 Y bike. That email came from the previous dating officer and may have a typo.

I realise the 28 March 1968 date is suspect. He talks about the extra zero also. I think it may have been a code within the dispatch book only, - the bikes themselves were probably never stamped.

I have no answer to the confused shipping details for that Y bike. Hopefully it is just a typo and he meant to say 28 March 1970. That would make much more sense to me.

I find it amusing that of all the numbers I presented (about 15 Y bikes) he chose to give me two examples. Both of which make no sense.
We are only working with very small samples here but I am starting to see trends now.
I can almost get to the stage of dating a pre-OIF unit twin ('66 - '70) without looking at the numbers. And that can be within a few months on some of them. We are only talking a 5 year span and there were just so many changes introduced over that period. Casting and machining marks are very telling also.



This number is an easy one and shows us many things.

it is a 1969 engine, even the lists will tell us that.
It has the LC codes which we know were for the first few months of the 1969 model only. It does have the raised pad so is about August or September 1968 manufacture.
It has the old style stamps and even has the enlarged 8 we associate with 1968.
Perfect... so it just a few months into the 1969 run before the new dating code was introduced. And before the new font stamps for that matter.
We can see the new hardware on the thru-bolt at the front of the engine there. I think it is an August 1968 engine.

If we look at the numbers we can see the next anomaly of the 1969 model year.
Oops. So we have a very large number for just a few months production.
The dating lists have us believe the numbers started at 101....

Not for 1969 they didn't.
Just like 1970 numbers start with a 0, the numbers for 1969 all seem to have a 1 out front putting them all in the 10,000's.
Indeed the Parts Book states that the numbering started at 11001 for 1969 Twins.
Does that sound familiar?
This is what the BSAOC UK website says....


I am afraid that is pretty typical of the accuracy achieved by that Dating Page. It is amateurish at best..

Who has ever seen a zero making a 1969 frame number into the 6 digits? These guys are taking the piss..


Or are they ?

Two Alpha just posted a pic of exactly that.
Having said that his is a 1967 Dash Y bike and not a 1969 model.
I think it is unique, possibly modified to tally with the website comments.
Has someone tried to make out it is a 1969 bike?

Honestly, the BSAOC website needs a little bit of thought put into it.
Half truths are of no use to anyone here.

Thanks Morgan for posting the Dating Certificate for your '67 Spitfire. It is now the only "Y" Spitfire I have in my '67 database. My research of the factory production books in the UK last year didn't reveal any Spitfires, only Lightnings and Thunderbolts. And the numbers for them were in the 10,000, 11,000, 12,000 and 17000 groupings. No 15,000 numbers in the "Y" sections. Maybe I missed it.

Is it just a typo on the Dating Certificate and it should have a "-" in there, or does your machine have just the "Y" and no "-"?

The "Y" entries in the '67 factory production books that I observed were far less than 1,000. One of the three '67 books only had 68 of them, another book did not have any.

Gary, Morgan's Spitfire is a common Dash Y model.



I think it was far too early to be included in the Hybrid MkIV listings. I must have satisfied myself that the engine did indeed have the dash. Eleven years ago Brian would have been unaware of the significance of the Dash preceding the Y suffix.


I note your comments on the Y bike shipping info.

I suspect there were more than 1000 produced during 1970. I would have thought the books for 1970 shipping dates would hold that info. I think you were looking at the earlier years mainly.
All the Hornets and Spitfires would have been shipped in 1969 at the latest.

As you have stated in the past, - the dispatch books are confusing and difficult to interpret.
What a mess.

It is even more reason to have a corrected Dating Listing so owners can see for themselves what model they now own.
It will take the work load off the Dating Officer at the same time.

If the zeros weren't added by the factory, they would have been added more than 25 years ago, prior to my purchase of the motorcycle. This would have also been prior to the existence of the BSAOC UK website by at least a few years.
It seems very improbable to me that a previous owner of this bike would have been farsighted enough to realize that by adding on the two zeros, one on the engine and one on the frame, he would be in line with information from Alistair Cave which was posted on the BSAOC UK website years later.
Now perhaps the BSAOC UK actually based this story of the 100,000 range of serial numbers on their receiving numerous requests for dating of home modified numbers with six digits. If that were the case, why would those home modifiers all decide that they had to add a zero, and only a zero, to the end of the number? Obviously that's probably not the answer either.
I think, at present, that these 100,000 range numbers actually were done at the factory, and that what is on the BSAOC UK website may be a partially true explanation of the reason why.



I think that he may have been referring to a bike with the number A65TA 12215-Y "shipped to BSA West on 21 June 1967 then another with an extra zero on 28 March 1968." The second one would have been the same bike with the dash over-stamped with a zero, as on my bike, making it A65TA 122150Y. In that case, the date of 28 March 1968 would make sense.
The bike that you have a photo of is another bike altogether, a 1970 model with a serial number of A65TA 12215Y.






None of the parts that I received with that motorcycle when I bought it appear to be specific to 1969, there are items specific to 1968 though and the bike was sold to me as a 1968 model. The engine is 1967, the rest seems to be 1968.

Does anyone have a list of the rolling chassis upgrades for 1969 ready to go?

Thanks TA,

I hear what you are saying about the zero being added and you have some good valid points.

I think there may be something in what you say. It is not straightforward though and may fall into place soon.

I see a few issues there.
The stamp appears to be different from that used in 1967.
The BSAOC have referred to the Y suffix meaning something else.
Your number has both the Y and stamped zero.
I have never seen a genuine 1969 bike with the 6 digits.
All Y bikes have the Y suffix on the frame number also.

I like what you say about some bikes being re-exported, I am sure it may have been only a small number though.

I am concerned that I was not provided with a logical shipping date for the Y bike though.



On the left is a 1970 Lightning. On the right a 1967 model Lightning !!

This is a similar Y bike that was shipped during 1970. (to our example earlier).
One of the original owners bought the bike back many years later but it was now a 1967 titled machine.

My money is on A65LA10971Y being sold a Dating Certificate at some stage.

OK I found out that my ex spitfire was first licensed and registered for road use
1968 April 24th.

The hybrid SA's have random numbers begining with 11577, so a 15000 machine could be a hybrid. With Morgan's machine having a "-Y" then, as you say, it is a classic '67 as the picture shows those features.



The last true '67 (all models) dispatched was SA 16614 sent to New Jersey, May 17, 1967. The last SA hybrid was SA 17892 dispatched April 18, 1968.



You are saying then that there are two bikes with the same number, one with "Y" built as a '70, and one with "-Y" built as a '67?

I regret not having spent more time researching the production books last year. A day and a half was just not enough time. At the time the '70's production books were not included in our 'to-do' list, as the list was already 1.5 pages long.

Hi Gary. My comment on Morgan's Spitfire being too early was referring to the shipping date. The MkIV features of the hybrid bikes would not have been available at that time.

You have surprised me with the shipping date for the last of the 1967 model bikes. It was a massive year for BSA and you are saying all bikes had gone from the factory by the end of May.
That is a tremendous effort.



I am even more concerned about these comments now.

What bike was shipped on 21 June 1967 ?
You seem to think all the 1967 bikes had already gone.
We were already worried about the 28 March 1968 date and how that did not seem to match anything.
I would bet my left ball on the bike being made about Xmas 1969... so where is the ACTUAL shipping date ?
It should be January/February 1970..



I guess I am. I have never contemplated this before but after today's discussions it is certainly a possibility.

I was quoting 1970 bike details to the BSAOC and the shipping details I have received are for bikes that were shipped 2 years before my bikes were even made. What explanation can we have for that ?

You have factory documentation dated 26 October 1966 talking about the stamping of engine numbers with the Y (Dash Y presumably) suffix.

The BSAOC are offering their version saying the stamping was carried out in 1970 (with their interpretation of the warranty SB).
That rift is a mile wide..

We have to forget that they have been selling Dating Certificates, like Morgan's, that actually agrees with our version of events.

I really do think I can produce around 40 numbers of 1969/70 S/N's of Y bikes.
I mean I actually have pics of engine numbers of those bikes, taken in the past few years.
That is 4% of 1000 bikes and without even trying.
I believe that we will unearth a large number of Y bikes being made during 1970. I have no idea where the shipping records for those bikes are.


Is that why all these 1970 Y bikes are being dated as 1967 models ?
Perhaps there is no trace of them...at least in the factory records we are holding.


.



THE UK GOVERNMENT
AND ARMS TRADE
CORRUPTION:
A SHORT HISTORY

As I have presented previously in the dating thread, the "Y" machine entries in the inside front and back covers of the '67 production books show dispatch dates of January, February and May of 1970, all LA and TA models.

A clarification on the last true '67 dispatched in my previous post. Note that it is the last "dispatched" in '67, not the last machine built or dispatched in later years. Book 276 starts at #16656 and goes to #18601 with it dispatched April 24, 1968 (yes '68, and they are not noted as "Y" bikes.

More juice in my notes: "about 768 '67 "Y"'s to 1970, and approx. 380 are dated Febuary 1969".

What do you make of this Gary ?
If you were to put some money down on it what would you be backing at this stage ?

I think you have the inside running as you have actually seen the books.
I keep forgetting that these Y bikes of 1969 and 1970 are mixed up in the despatch books of 1967. It seems almost like they are squeezed in afterwards the way you are describing 'inside the front and back covers'.

I am getting confused... if we do have duplicated numbers then they are being recorded in the same books.
You should see the same number but with a number of different export dates.

ISN'T THIS EXACTLY WHAT WE HAVE ?


If the books are indicating the same bike was exported twice then BSA need a cover story.
Something along the lines of dock strike, unfavourable exchange rates etc. The bikes could then sit at the factory awaiting refurbishment but there would be supply shortages (naturally !!) so they sit here for 2 or 3 years.

BRILLIANT

Lets run with that.



The documentation referred to is SB USA (Gen) 5-70. The bulletin advising of the 180 day warranty across the BSA/Triumph group beginning March 1970.

I particularly liked this bit..


The Company is going down the gurgler and they are sitting on 1000 plus bikes, stashed in every available space !

For two years !!!!!!!!

How did Alistair keep a straight face ?

Gary, I'm trying to send you a PM but you are over your limit, possible to free up some space?