Bob Nichols, 1921-2018
BOB NICHOLS, 1921-2018
The TUNER
KEVIN CAMERON
Some 20 years ago I “met” Bob Nichols on the phone. He was making up lightweight connecting rods for his prewar Indian Scout and wanted to discuss alternative designs. We found lots to talk about, and he sounded excited about his project and eager to cut metal.
Many more phone conversations followed over the years, from which I learned more about Nichols. He’d been born into the Great Depression but spent 24 years at Douglas in the most intense time of aviation development—a time when the U.S. Congress couldn’t say no to a never-ending series of X-planes. He became a technologist, but not by the usual escalator of pay-as-you-go good schools. He mowed lawns for small change and spent any free time in auto and machine shops until people gave him work that revealed his natural aptitude for mechanics and mathematics. Soon he was on his way as a machinist, his energy and steady flow of ideas advancing him rapidly.
He was always at the motorcycle races. As for so many of us, the human scale of the motorcycle made it Nichols’ first and enduring technology. By the time the U.S. entered World War II, he was in a protected occupation but enlisted nevertheless.
Nichols seems never to have got into any groove. Being attracted to new technologies, he learned them, keeping himself on the frontiers of best practice. At an age when most professional men are retired to golf and Kiwanis, he was writing parametric CNC programming. Why racing? Like aviation, racing appeals to agile and curious minds because it won’t sit still and constantly requires new solutions.
The last time we talked on the phone, Nichols, well into his 90s, had two things on his mind. One was the “big-base” bottom end he’d located and bought for his 1940 Indian Scout dirt-tracker. Bobby Hill’s tuner Dick Gross had been first to put ball main bearings on Indian cranks and Nichols was eager to build up his engine that way. Then, he told me, he’d broken a leg and was in a hospital.
“I looked around and there were my whole family crowded into that room. They must have reckoned I was about to go. But I didn’t die! And I’m getting better all the time.”
“Racing appeals to agile and curious minds because it won’t sit still. ”
Nichols had been friends with Leo Goosen, the revered designer of American race-car engines, who had begun as a draftsman with the legendary Harry Miller in 1919. This is a connection that goes back to the beginning—to Peugeot’s 1912 new synthesis—the original fourvalve, double-overhead-cam engine. Nichols described lunches with such founding fathers of high-performance design, wondering what he was doing in such august company.
Nichols knew what titanium could do—everyone in aviation was developing the new techniques required to forge and machine this novel material. In 1964 Nichols produced titanium con-rods for George Bignotti’s Champ car, driven by A.J. Foyt. Nichols’ projects coexisted with his family and his supervisor’s position at Douglas, so he was always busy.
Talking with Nichols was a series of verbal snapshots—he described people in racing resisting the wonderful new maraging steel. Introduced in 1960-61, this novel material combined very high strength with unusual ductility. Nichols said people in racing didn’t want it, saying “We can’t use it—nobody knows what it is.” Then he would speak of another friend who held 175 patents in inertial guidance. And of another who had, over his long career, built 5,000 racing engines. Good company.
Looking over information on super-tough maraging steel coming across his desk at Douglas, Nichols knew the problems it could solve. One was the high-fatigue stress in the Indy 500-winning Offenhauser engine’s heavy inverted-bucket valve tappets. Conventional steels were a compromise between strength and ductility—heat-treat it to higher strength and it becomes brittle. The much lighter tappets Nichols made from maraging steel made practical more-vigorous cam profiles that boosted output by 40 horsepower.
Nichols’ Indians were steadily developed throughout his life—a project he was continually pushing forward. By replacing the engine’s original moving parts—flywheels, con-rods, cams, tappets—with his own designs, made in aerospace materials, he was able to increase its safe redline rpm to 9,000, quite a jump for a side-valve design originally released in 1919. Designing your own cams is a math-intensive, analytical process. Bob Nichols could do it.
It was clear from his words and manner that each advance thrilled him. Veteran dirt-track bike and engine builder Ron Wood gave Nichols an open invitation to run on his dyno. “Your carb’s no good,” announced Wood after some pulls. When a 38mm Mikuni was dialed in, peak power rose 3 hp. A change to exhaust head pipes 19 inches long brought another 4 hp. Christmastime!
Small wonder, therefore, that a frequent theme of Nichols’ conversation was, “I have so many things I want to do!” Yet this cheerful enthusiasm was not the result of a carefree life—he’d seen how thin is the line separating living from non-living. His was a time before child-safety seats and Siri, the life coach.
At a desert race he’d attended as a boy, a rider was killed. Because the event was far from towns, and cellphones and helicopters lay in the future, the dead man spent the night where he fell. Nichols survived three plane crashes during WWII, two of them because he took immediate action. He was the only survivor of 18 aboard a C-46 transport that went into the Pacific—because he was able to swim several miles to an island he’d noticed. In 1945, as an Army Corps of Engineers maintenance man on the Pacific island of Tinian, he’d seen many B-29s begin their take-off runs normally, then start backfiring after 20 seconds of take-off power. The loaded airplane would then stagger into the air on three engines, slowly roll and yaw into the failure, then cartwheel into the ground as bombs and fuel ignited. He didn’t read it in a book and he didn’t see it on YouTube. He was there.
Nichols had plenty to do. When stationed on Tinian Island in the Pacific’s Mariana Islands, he was part of the lively and impromptu dirt-track racing scene that found an abandoned Army Harley-Davidson in a wire lock-up; Bob knew just how to liberate it— pulling it over the fence with the 2-1/2-ton A-frame crane truck he used in his daily work of maintaining pumps and refrigeration units.
A common response of skilled machinists to automation was resentment. But to Bob Nichols, the computer numerical control (CNC) metal-cutting revolution that began to flow out of USAF/MIT cooperation after 1950 was an opportunity to shorten the time between an idea and hardware. Think of what this will let us do! He learned the new way. Being involved in both racing and aircraft manufacturing, he was one of the many high-tech go-betweens who brought sophistication to the strong California racing scene. In his life, he knew many of the greats on both sides.
Nichols had two Indian Scouts—the red bike and the yellow bike. The red bike ran a telescopic fork with Ceriani clamps and sometimes ran classic reverse-cone megaphone exhausts. The yellow bike had the original Sport Scout girder fork and ran broader-range plain straight exhaust pipes. He had updated their internals with such things as his own aluminum knife-and-fork con-rods with pressedin roller races of hardened steel. He could design and he could manufacture. Off to vintage dirt track with a younger rider and race-ready bikes.
Older people are advised to knit or work crossword puzzles “to keep their minds sharp.” Bob Nichols had no need of such things—to the end of his 97 years he was focused on all the things he wanted to get done.
