ARIEL HTs
Callum Ives’ love for Ariel’s off-road singles was inspired in early childhood – and has led him to building his own HT3
My first words were “mammy” and “daddy” – no surprises there. However, the next additions were more unusual: “magneto”, “carburettor”, “timing cover” and “exhaust pipe”. This thrilled my dad, who, when home on leave from his job as an RNLI Staff Coxswain, would take me into his workshop and school me in the lore of motorcycles, aged 18 months. I learned to use metal polish long before I mastered toothpaste.
This was early 1969 and my dad only gave garage space to four-stroke pre-unit British bikes, usually 500cc singles with the occasional 650cc twin for distance work. In pride of place were his competition off-road bikes, which at that time were exclusively AJS/Matchless and Ariels. Dad and his bike mate Ron Gray had already been competing off road for 20 years and they both owned 1956 Ariel HT trials models – still my favourite bikes to this day.
Ron and his mate Arthur Brown bought their HT5s new in 1956 – quite a feat, as they were hard to get because production only got into full swing in late 1955 and Ariel allocated the HT5s to either top trials riders or influential dealers. Fortunately, Arthur’s dad had a motorcycle shop in South Shields with an Ariel franchise and both lads were good clubman trials riders, so two shiny HT5s turned up in Fowler Street, South Shields in February 1956.
Amazing spring frame
Ron’s bike was the 40th HT5. It was hand-built in the competition department under the exacting control of the HT5 creators, the brilliant development engineer Clive Bennett and competition and service manager Ernie Smith at the Ariel factory in Selly Oak, Birmingham. Clive and Ernie did an amazing job of developing a spring frame to replace the rigid one in the 1954/5 HT model. The new frame was no heavier despite the addition of a swingarm and twin rear ‘suspension bottles’, as Ron refers to shocks.
The simple but effective frame design was so good that even newly-minted replica frames follow essentially the same layout some 68 years later. The hand-built nature of the HT partially explains the difficulty in trying to buy them new at the time, but an additional demand placed on HT production was the need for British factories in the 1950s to export models to help the flagging British economy after WWII. Curiously, my mate Yushiro in Japan is currently restoring HT5 #35 which was produced alongside Ron’s bike in February 1956 but sent to J
