Damien Towning

Ron and Grease Monkey, Thank you both for the help! I have gone over to the Ariel owners forum. Got me fired up to sort it actually. Fine looking bike the 28 is. Managed to dig up a drawing today which might be very close to this frame. Have concluded I will have a shot at a jig for it. The lugs are actually not to bad. Just the tubes. Together or apart same basic problems. I would not have taken apart all the lugs at once like this but maybe they already had a jig and were just more confident than me. Or they were just more interested in fitting it in to any jig for anything that would vaguely align it. I was wondering if they intended to chop it somehow and graft some other frame on to the back. Anyway my thinking is it may be able to live on as a beater for Sunday racing in the shifting class. I almost have enough information now to build a jig for it. Almost. Even though I got the frame in pieces I have been left with at least two critical dimensions to work from. The bottom lugs on the seat post and the neck. Since the front half of the frame is still together and fairly intact and seems straight I will try. If it was all in pieces I think it would be terminal and I would give up. As it is even if it was all still together I would be doing every single tube in the frame regardless as they are so pitted and rotten. Amazingly none of the lugs have cracks apart from a tiny hair line around the seat post bolt hole which I am sure I can fill with some cast brazing type material. I have previously straightened a worse frame for a Japanese bike that was both twisted up and cut in at least two dimensions and that was a nightmare. In my mind this seems easier ! Got it easy what with all the angle information baked in to the lugs. I'll use the cad and the mill for quite a bit of the jig I think to get it nice and accurate. I'll design some clamps to fit each lugs in to and then pin the whole lot in place on a big milled plate. Anyway I will hand back to the war motorcycles now. Sorry for the interruption and thank you once again for your help!

I am starting to think it might be an Ariel 1928 model. Like this one here. http://classicsmotorcycle.blogspot.com/2011/04/ariel-55-hp-1928.html

Grease Monkey / Ron, I am a bit confused. Is the lug ( circled in red ) the lug for a shift bracket / lever assembly to mount to ? And is the lug ( circled in blue ) for a side car attachment? Or are they both part of a sidecar mounting? I'll look closely again at the rest of the frame for any more sidecar related mysteries tomorrow. Also I took another look at the Y lug again and I can't see any more writing on it anywhere else.

Perhaps the number stamped in to it is the V / N ( vin number ) that it would have been registered in Australia with. The mystery continues ! I am curious about what is going on with the gear box mounting. Clearly some artist went to work on that !

Also I had remembered slightly incorrectly. The big lug I was talking about is on the diagonal of the tube that joins the top tube.

I've uploaded some pictures of the frame. In the first picture a barely legible serial number is stamped on the top tube where it meets the seat post. I do believe it looks something like \N 5928. It is quite a rough stamping and whatever preceded the \ part of the serial number is long gone.

That is absolutely inspiring. I have had what I believe is a W/NG Ariel frame that came to me in pieces sitting in a box for years. I pulled it all together off a table at a jumble and it seems I managed to get all of the frame. I think it differs from yours in that it has a great big lug poking out on the top tube for what I presume is a side car mounting. The markings on the frame are almost gone but I can faintly see a W / and perhaps an NG. Anyway it looks just like yours and just like it at the back the tubes are all rotten. The drop-out lugs have been cut off right at the lugs leaving me nothing to grab on to to heat them up and pull out the old tube :/ Also the whole front motor mount area has been modified by some kind of monster for goodness knows what engine. I will go out tomorrow and grab some pictures if anyone is interested. I think this frame probably has an interesting story. So I wonder did you mill/lathe out the rear drop-outs to fit the new tubes ( what I presume the previous hairy paws that cut them off had in mind ) or or did you heat the lugs up and extract the old tubes before putting new tubes in ? Also did you base your jig on some drawings with dimensions or take them off the bike itself ? I've been looking everywhere for some basic dimensions of the W/NG frame. I feel like if I could just find a drawing of the frame from the side and the front with some measurements I might be able to save this beast.