It takes a special type of person to restore, maintain and ride an antique motorcycle.

What possesses us to ride cranky, noisy, smelly, oil-spitting motorcycles that are older than we are? It’s because they are beautiful and fun to ride. Typically, I plan bike trips to take in history, but in this case, I was riding with a group of gents who were most interested in riding on motorcycle history. The Girder Ride was initially organized by Ian Taylor, who publicized and planned the event including the ride routes. 

For the 2024 outing, the Girder Ride was again organized by Ian, but Gary McCaw was the host and route planner, with the jump off point being his country home in Oak Hills near Stirling, Ont., and the ride taking in the exciting rolling curves of the back roads of Eastern Ontario’s Hastings and Northumberland Counties.

MINOR MISHAPS BEFORE THE RIDE

The bikers congregated the night before or the early morning at Gary’s place, with only two mishaps on the trip there. An engine plate bolt had fallen off on my bike while trailering it to Gary’s place, but luckily it was still attached by the horn wiring. The bolt had probably worked itself loose on previous rides. Another bike went down in its trailer from one of the last potholes on the way to the start off point, the only damage being to its old BSA tank badge.

This, the fourth Girder Ride, was open only to bikes with girder front springs, which disappeared in the late 1940s with the switch to the arguably more comfortable telescopic front forks. Prior to the Second World War, the girder fork was the motorcycle’s most commonly used front suspension. 

A pair of girders are typically steel rods extending upward from the front axle to join the steering yoke by means of four short pivoting parallelogram links controlled by a large central spring. For decades, just about every British motorcycle manufacturer built their bikes with some variation of this basic front fork design.

THE BIKES

It takes a real love of motorcycling to ride these historical bikes on demanding country roads, but that is what these individual old machines were built for decades before we were even born. On this trip, the youngest bikes were two from 1947, Gary McCaw’s and Andrew Bosson’s nearly matched Velocettes, while the oldest bike was Phil Goldsmith’s beautiful 1927 Triumph N. This year the ride bikes also included Ray Roberts 1938 Scott, Markus Hertzer’s 1937 Rudge, Jamie Bosson’s 1939 Rudge and Ian Taylor’s 1931 Ariel VF. 

All of the bikes had been meticulously and lovingly restored except for my poor resurrected (not really restored) military 1944 Norton WD16H, which records show had…