The Fouches’ story reminded me of the antics of Two-Tots’s Yamaha. Two-Tots du Toit was a local barman but left some time ago to other pastures. Just before his departure, his old twostroke off-road Yamaha developed enough wear in the kick-start mechanism to occasionally fail to deliver full thrust to the single piston.
This usually resulted in a kick-back that was painful to the owner and forced the piston far enough down the bore in the opposite direction to cause the engine to start backwards. The forward gears therefore became reverse gears. A twostroke will run backwards in a completely contented manner so that the rider would not be any the wiser, until he selected what he thought was fi rst gear. Two-Tots was a quick learner and we all admired the gingerly way he treated his clutch lever when setting off on a ride. He left our town with the bike still in the same condition.
In my youth, a number of mini cars, such as the Messerschmitt Kabinenroller, utilised small two-stroke engines whose transmissions did not include reverse gear. Instead, they were fitted with combined dynamo/starters attached to the front of the crankshaft nose. These could rotate in either direction. Reverse could then be obtained by stopping the engine and starting it in the opposite direction by rotating the ignition key in the incorrect direction.
There were also some diesel engines in those days that developed the habit of starting and running backwards. Many diesel engines could be stopped by pulling a knob that cut off the fuel supply. However, if the driver released the knob before the engine was stationary, the fi nal kick-back in the opposite direction could coincide with a squirt of fuel in one of the cylinders. Normally, this would not matter but, if the engine was fi tted with a vacuum governor, the latter would now dictate full throttle and the engine would run away in the opposite direction. Smoke would come out of the intake air filter and the exhaust pipe would become an intake.
As an apprentice, I remember seeing more than one Morris Commercial truck arriving at the workshop with a wrecked gearbox. This was the result of such an event. Putting the truck into first gear and releasing the clutch pedal with the other foot on the brake pedal was the only way such an engine could be stopped, but the gearbox couldn’t successfully deal with the resultant shock loads.