Hitchcocks Forum

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Bullet speedo's

A quick and possibly inaccurate scaly guide.



Old, old bullets from Redditch were fitted with Smith's Chronometric speedos.






Chrnometmics have a rather complicated load of clock type parts in them and they are 'jumpy'. They compare the speed you are going and update the pointer about 4 times a second. This is hone way to tell a genuine chrono. Bit hard to explain, but watch the vid below!





(id vid fails, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r67oN7ZvOiw)



Also, the genuine type for a bullet has a 4 digit trip milage display at the bottom.





Modern 'Smith's repro's





This type which is available for about £6-99 on Ebay should be stamped on (without permission) everytime you see one. What do you expect for the money? Just don't!!!






I have this type fitted in my bullet. It is not very accurate, but does look good.


With the arrival of the early nineties, Enfield were having a slight problem in so much as sales were down and they were sadly heading the way that Redditch had some years previously. Very slowly, they started 'modernising' their bullets to meet the requirements of the export market in the hope that exports would increase. One improvement was to install 'telltale warning lights in the casquette, to show high beam and indicators. These are fitted on my bullet 'Tornado' above, but would have originally have looked like the picture below, which also shows the correct speedo.




a 350 bullet from 1993







Soon, a new type of speedo arrived which contained the warning lights and so the separate casquette lights were discontinued.



Interestingly, the casquette tell tales story does not end there. One guy wanted a Chronometric (repro) speedo and of course, it has no integral tell tale lamps, and so he installed his own casquette tell tales. Nice job he made of it too!






Next, Mr. Sidhartha Lal, a very important guy in Eicher Motors, though he would look cool sitting on a bullet and bought the company. (He has since increased these ambitions by designing the Continental GT and buying a Leather jacket!) Luckily, this saved the company which continued to upgrade the bullet until the first fuel injection model hit the streets. now that the neutral lever had been lost with the albion 4 speed gearbox, (Still love them) you got the addition of a neutral light in the speedo.



A home market white speedo with THREE pretty lights, each a different colour!





Here, My 2010 Woodsman "thunderbolt' shows the more familiar black MPH speedo.




One thing that had survived through the years was the trusty BA9s lamps, either in the casquette or lighting the speedo and the tell tales.



A trusty old BA9s, A 'proper' lamp




But now it seems that the latest bullets have new 'T10' bulbs in the speedo. These are a cross between old fasioned camera flash bulbs and christmas tree light bulbs.



T10 - a nasty cheap looking crappy thing.




So there you go, another nail biting saga in the wonderful life of Bullets!














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So what is it the chap in the vid is riding? I went to the Youtube source and there was a link to a similar vid with the same GoPro view looking at a very similar dash and speedo but a different rev counter. Most interesting having the Smiths Chrono's in Kilometres, I have one in the shed ready for the next project and I had assumed erroneously that it was a rare thing but of course it's only rare here where in the days of Smith Instruments we were using Imperial measures. They are a thing of beauty and a brilliant if over complicated way of measuring speed.

They are not common speedo's and the complexity of them can make them cost a lot. Also, they sold them to other countries that could not understand feet, inches and miles, and had to rely on the system for dummies (Metric).

I would love a real chronometric for Tornado, but they seem hard to get and there were many different models for different vehicles!

All I can do is show the small pic from his channel!



It has the same white tank.