Les's workshop & the Eldee 2

There are many enthusiasts who never saw Les at work in his home workshop in later years, they assumed he had a large work area resplendent with the Eldee 2 sitting up on a workstand surrounded by a large array of machine tools and other equipment. Such was far from the truth! Les was always a meticulous worker with everything clean and never out of place. However, his workshop was only one side of a small double garage that he had built many years before. One side had a covered pit and was always occupied by the family car which never stood in the open!

In front of and around one side of the car was a brick wall with random shelving and a board containing tools, some of which dated back to our childhood. Les was immensely proud of a huge heavy duty wooden handled screwdriver that was still used daily! A modern high quality lathe of Asian origin stood against the other side wall, and a modern Asian mill drill, stood between the lathe and the family car. At one end of the lathe there were storage shelves, and underneath these there was an air compressor that Les had built many years before using the discarded cylinder from a motorcycle.

At the other end of the lathe was the garage entrance door and tucked into the small remaining corner space was a small bench and chair with a small nest of shelves above. This was Les's paperwork and thinking corner. Quite often it would have a part finished work piece from the lathe or mill on the table. The last thing that I remember seeing there was a partly finished jig for drilling the holes in a manganese reproduction of a Gold Star magneto chain cover. I suspect that this was probably the last thing that he ever did.

It was only in later years that he knocked down the back wall of the garage and dug back into the ground that sloped up behind the shed. He extended the roof back a couple of meters or so and the area was bricked in with a retaining wall and a concrete floor laid down. This area sported another small bench top cupboard with Eldee 2 occupying most of the floor space. One end of the area had heavy duty shelving completely filled with odd possessions that he had retained for most of his life. A full length leather motorcycling coat that he had bought second hand when he was probably no more than seventeen which we had shared for many years now one of my own treasured mementos of those early years. A model racing car that he had constructed in the same period, complete with full differential and an air cooled miniature two-stroke motor that he had built, even making the piston rings from small cast iron billets!

This new area was about 300mm higher that the original floor and there was a special wooden ramp stowed close by that allowed Eldee to be manoeuvred in the restricted space and run down the ramp, between the mill drill and family car, then out of the garage. When the Gilera was finally finished, there was barely enough room to store it! Les had acquired a caravan and this occupied a newly erected carport on the side of the garage. The back section had also been dug back into the slope to become Audrey's fern house. The truth was that Les didn't require a large area to create his magic, everything was to hand and he had never, like most of us, accumulated road going motorcycles or the like. In fact he never really rode a motorcycle on the road at all after his twenties, all his riding was done on the racetrack. The restored Gilera was an almost new experience for him!

His work area was to me very restricted but he pointed out that he only needed to take a few steps or just turn around for everything that he needed. But I remember him gazing with awe at his first sight of my 12x12 metre workshop, with the adjacent large area for my dirty tools, grinder, sandblaster, linishers, hydraulic press etc. However he quickly observed, that while it would be nice, he had all the room that he needed at home. Basically Les only needed the lathe and mill drill plus a solid vise. All the hand tools that he needed were tucked away somewhere out of sight and somehow his space requirements never exceeded what he had – at most the family car may have been moved out of the garage for a few hours. Servicing the family car, painting the house and doing household carpentry were all undertaken with the same fervour that he applied to his working career, his family and hobbies.

His other passion radio, took up a neat area at the end of a closed in verandah. The few pieces of modern ham gear, together with some neat shelving was this part of Les's life, the only external sign of this hobby was an enormous array of rotating aerials that he had laboriously erected over the years on top of an old windmill frame which he concreted down on the slope at the rear of the house block. This was of course remotely controlled from his radio panel with accurate digital readouts. This became one of the major problems for Audrey after his passing who was terrified that a gale would bring the whole construction down into the neighbour's property. We managed to find a capable enthusiast who paid her a few dollars, and who, with the help of his enthusiastic friends, dismantled the whole array and supporting structure and like a team of ants, carried it all away down the hill through the fruit trees, then down the drive at the side of the house. Within hours, it was all gone! Eventually Audrey realised that the family home that she and Les had built and shared for so many years, was too big a burden for her and so she sold up and moved into a comfortable unit in the Adelaide foothills where I visit her when possible.

My memories of the times spent with Les are still fresh in my mind and often, as I bend over my lathe, I feel his presence and remember his quiet tutt tutting as I take a shuddering shortcut or use the drill press without resorting to the vise or clamping the work to hold it steady. At these times I also remember him back when we first got that JAP firing on the end of that buried sleeper and he would wrap a length of primary chain around the engine shaft sprocket, then wrap the other end around his hand and PULL. The motor would fire and run and I was sure that one day it would backfire and tear his hand to pieces but he would reassure me – and it never did! One thing is interesting though, both Les and I knew countless workmates who lost fingers and even hands and worse in our association with machinery, but neither of us forfeited any digits. Any injuries that either of us suffered over the years were the result of other people's negligence as far as I know. Maybe we respected machinery – maybe we were lucky! I even sometimes think about those tin can boilers that we used to run our steam engines with, listening to the ends crinkle as the pressure built up.

Maybe he still rides on the back of my motorcycle with me, as we once did back in the 30s – I know that he appreciated the mechanical excellence of quality modern machines – he loved the little Gilera (pictured)! I look at the full length leather coat that we shared back then – now restored and relined and hanging close to the same Gilera and the Velocettes, and I wonder?