1958 Ariel Leader Pictures
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This lovely bike belongs to my good friend Ron. It’s a 250cc Ariel Leader first registered in November 1958. It’s in great all round condition (which is more than I can say for Ron!) and runs really well. I can also vouch for the fact that there isn’t even a hint of smoke from the exhausts as I have ridden behind him. Very nice.
Hi
I bought a 1960 Ariel Leader in 1960, Please believe me, they all smoked like mad, mabe the fuel oil has changed since then, if you had been cruising for a while and then opened her up the traffic behind was left in a cloud of blue smoke, but what a bike, I loved it, the roadholding was second to none. Happy days!
Hi
As Tim correctly says, many of them did suffer back in the early days with twin curling smoke screens following them,tend to think an excess of two stroke oil managed to collect in the lowest parts of the exhaust systems causing this problem, some owners tended to drill a small hole underneath the system each side allowing the oil to drain off which helped somewhat
.
It was also commonplace for british made two stroke engines back then to run on a fuel/oil ratio of 12/16-1 which did not help this problem,whereas a few foreign imports ran on 33+-1
so never suffered such problems.