Almond Tinkler was a racer, inventor and engineer whose extraordinary ‘power egg’ motorcycle was unlike anything else at the 1927 TT – but exhaustion, breakdowns and bad luck prevented it from ever making the start line.
TINKLER
Almond Tinkler was a keen motorcyclist from the time he could throw his leg across a machine. In 1914, at the age of 18, he built his first motorcycle out of parts and then opened a business after the Great War. He took part in the TT Sidecar in 1924 and 1925 with his older brother Norman, on a Matador and a P&M respectively. Although the P&M would let them down, the brothers had finished a very creditable third in the 1924 race on the 350cc Matador, despite Norman falling out of the chair at Ramsey hairpin on the first lap.
But Almond didn’t just want to race other people’s machines; he had plans to build his own motorcycle – and it would be revolutionary. He’d already built a three-cylinder radial engine by the time he unveiled his ‘power egg’, a water-cooled engine which had a radiator, gearbox and fuel tank all encompassed by a metal case. The crankcase was at the front behind the radiator, while the magneto was fitted at the side of the engine, driven from the crankshaft. This engine would be fitted into a conventional motorcycle chassis.
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Almond built a machine using this engine in time for the 1927 TT, although at first we could find no evidence that the motorcycle actually raced. That mystery was solved by a preview in Motor Cycling, in which Graham Walker wrote: ‘The Tinkler was brilliant in its conception even though it failed to qualify and, therefore, never started in the race. Imagine a steel ‘boot box’ divided by a longitudinal partition, filling the entire space between the bottom bracket and front down tube. Lying along the near-side half of the box was a two-valve OHV water-cooled 79 x 100mm cylinder with its head to the read, the flywheels occupying the near-side forward section of this weird ‘crankcase’.
‘From the mainshaft a primary chain went to the gears which lay alongside the cylinder, an extension of the layshaft carrying the overhead cams and an extension of the flywheel mainshaft driving the magneto by worm gears. The clutch was unique, being situated between the gearbox and the rear chain. A radiator was fitted at the forward end of the box and the only visible parts were the rearward protruding exhaust pipe and the carburettor.’
Later research discovered that, when Almond and his brother had arrived on the Island in June 1927, their motorcycle was unfinished and had to be completed in a garage at Laxey Bay. He didn’t get to compete in the first practice week and in the second practice week, it seized near Sulby due to a leaking radiator. The following day it suffered again with radiator problems. Almond and Norman worked around the clock but the bike was still slow. Almond collapsed with exhaustion and a doctor forbade him to ride anymore. After one more slow lap, Almond scratched the Tinkler entry.
Despite the disappointment of failing to race in the TT, testing in practice provided useful information and resulted in changes being made to the cooling system and engine compression. But it appears that just one machine was built and then extensively road-tested.
Almond Tinkler and his brother Norman teamed up with OEC and the result of that partnership was advertised in the latter’s 1929 catalogue as the OEC-Tinkler. It was shown at the Olympia Show in 1928 with The Motor Cycle reporting; ‘Always among the
leaders in progressive design, the Osbourne Engineering Co of Gosport is taking to Olympia several designs … the biggest surprise is the combination of an OEC duplex steering mount with the Tinkler engine unit. The revolutionary Tinkler design has been forgotten momentarily by the motorcycling public, but the Liverpool brothers are persevering and their machine now comes into the limelight again, with modification, as the latest model in OEC list. It is early yet to prophecy its success, but that it will be a centre of attention at Olympia is a certainty.’
If another OEC-Tinkler was ever built – and we suspect it wasn’t – it is lost to history. Although it apparently was well-received at Olympia, neither OEC nor Tinkler had the finances to proceed with the project.
It’s a great shame that it seems that Almond Tinkler then moved away from motorcycling, running Langham Engineering, a successful engineering company in Liverpool for many years (the OEC-Tinkler was stored at the Langham factory for many years) and being awarded an MBE in 1968. His brother Norm moved to the Isle of Man to run the Fairy Cottage Filling Station at Laxey. He was unimpressed by later sidecar racers, saying of the 1958 Sidecar TT: “It was a fine race, but I still think we were as fast on the corners, for all their gymnastics. The modern machines are much faster, and have more powerful engines, but I think we were just as fast on the corners.”
Original article appeared in Old Bike Mart. To subscribe, click here: https://www.classicmagazines.co.uk/old-bike-mart
