Aye Spooky,
Dinnae try and silence the old bopper, they work best with the rudimentary baffle (two perforated tube 'baffles' with no wadding), sound a treat and run very sweetly. They are "Proper" thumpers along with other long stroke singles and will plonk away happily if set up correctly. The silencer for the AJS and Matchy singles is the same as you have fitted in your posted image and not the megga type found on the twins, which again was standard to both marques. This is badge engineering at its best, unless you want to get really anal!
My old '53 AJS 18S was doing 1,000 miles a month up and down the M1- M6 between Hertfordshire and Cumbria when I was at college. I have an image somewhere!
Required a fair bit of maintanence and if anybody knows where OPO 533 is these days, nice to have a chin wag with the current owner.
Your best bet for spares is to get in touch with the AJS & Matchless Owners Club and use their spare parts scheme for most parts, via the link below.
Link:
JampotHowever, the owners club do not appear to stock exhausts or silencers!
So here is a link to an Austrian company displaying a good image of the silencer for the 'Heavyweight 350 single 1954 -1961'.
Link:
Heavyweight_350_single_1954 -1961_silencer"Happy Hamrax Motors" of Ladbroke Grove, London are sadly no more. Their help in supplying me with spares in Glen Affric, 35 miles west of Inverness, when I lived in a bothy there was invaluable. This included repairing the forks after I missed a transmission pole by 6" on a foggy night and removed 5 oak stobbs with my foot between them and the foot rest, before clearing the fence and barrel rolling into a field of neeps. It is all very clear 42 years later!
The despatch and delivery of the forks involved the Highland Omnibus Company; British Rail and their "Red Star Parcels" service. Hamrax was "The" place for AMC spares in the late '60's early '70's. Don and Butch/Chopper were a curmudgeonly pair, the craic was full of expletives, fag smoke and magical cameos of their lives and customers.
This link below sums up Hamrax really well and the gentrificatication of Ladbroke Grove appears to be well under way, from the squats and day to day living of these areas in the late '60's early '70's.
Link:
"Happy_Hamrax"'Twas another world!
My regards, Bill
