Whittet Higgins

Michigan Mike is thinking about buying another Moto-Guzzi. This one is a little old. Old motorcycles need owner-mechanics. Owner-mechanics are well advised to have a shop manual on hand, especially for foreign weirdo mechanical contraptions. Fortunately for the uber-nerd we now have the internet and all the obscure knowledge in the world is now at our finger tips, including this random page I pulled up that talks about locknuts in the transmission, which leads to

Whittet-Higgins Company, 33 Higginson Ave., P.O. Box 8, Central Falls, RI 02863

Everything about the company sounds like it's in the USA, except for the RI part. What the heck is  RI? Oh, it's Rhode Island. Why didn't I recognize it? Maybe because I haven't had my coffee yet, or maybe because I HAVE NEVER RUN INTO ANY COMPANY WITH AN ADDRESS THERE. Or maybe I've never owned a Moto-Guzzi, and never needed any of these sooper-secret mechanical doo-dads. Actually, I have run into these kinds of parts before, but if I ever needed to replace fancy lockwashers, I would get them from the dealer. I'm thinking though, that if you needed to replace the locknut itself, and not just the custom lockwasher, that would imply serious damage to the mechanism, damage so serious as to make repair a dubious proposition. I dunno, maybe Moto-Guzzis eat their locknuts on regular basis. Sounds thin to me.

     Anyway, I run a search on Google for Whittet-Higgins, just to see what turns up, and, lo and behold, E-Bay pops up with 180 Whittet Higgens lockwashers, etc. Guess I shouldn't be surprised. I bought a timer for my dishwasher using the part number off of E-Bay a couple of weeks ago.