Ken Sprayson: The Frame man
Sooner or later, any regular competitor at the Isle of Man had need of Ken Sprayson’s services. The TT course punishes machinery like no other; frames crack, fuel and oil tanks split, bits break off. For more than 50 years, KEN
SPRAYSON, who passed away on October 15, 2022, ran a welding service operating out of the TT Paddock, which was free to all who needed it.
Ken was born in Birmingham in 1927, and left school at 14 to train as a sheet metal worker. This led him to joining Reynolds Tube Company where he initially worked on constructing mounts for Rolls Royce Merlin engines in their Aircraft Department. It was here that the celebrated Reynolds 531 tubing was developed – a high-manganese alloy steel that was initially used in the aircraft industry but quickly found favour for sporting bicycles and motor cycles. Famously, 531 was used by Reynolds to construct the first of the production ‘Featherbed’ frame for Norton in 1950 – the design that revolutionised motorcycle chassis. Throughout the following decades, Ken worked with the greats – Geoff Duke, John Surtees, Jeff Smith and Mike Hailwood among them – to construct and maintain frames. In 1958 he took over the Reynolds Racing Service at the TT, and from then on was a familiar figure in the paddock, welding torch in hand, with invariably a queue of clients waiting patiently outside the tent. In addition to the TT work, Ken made bespoke frames such as the pair commissioned by John Surtees for his ex-works 250 and 350cc Desmodromic Ducatis, and the very special BSA on which Jeff Smith won the World 500cc Motocross Championship. In 1968, Ken built a frame for Mike Hailwood to house the works 4-cylinder 500cc engine in an attempt to tame the infamous evil handling. That machine still exists, owned by Virgil Elings in California.
Perhaps the most ambitious of Ken’s many projects was to construct the massive space frame for the Thrust 2 World Land Speed Record attempt car from square-section Reynolds 531 tube, built at the Reynolds works. The car was fitted with a Rolls
Royce Lightning aero engine and piloted by Richard Noble. The project took more than five years and suffered many setbacks, including a testing crash, but Noble finally achieved the record on 4th October, 1983 with a speed of 633.468 mph. For his efforts, Sprayson was made redundant from Reynolds (along with 300 others) at the end of 1981.
At age 54, Ken embarked on a freelance career that saw him work for the UK importers of the Indian-built Royal Enfields, then consultancy work on various tubing-related projects, and finally a stint at the doomed BSA factory. The UK recession in the early 1990s convinced him the time was right to hang up his drawing board and welding torch and he spent his remaining years enjoying attending classic races and rallies.