Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2024 i Classic Bike Guide

Welcome Greetings all, here is to hoping you all had a jolly fine time over the festive period. Seems forever ago now, doesn’t it? Luckily, I have my growing waistline – thanks to all that lovely food and lack of exercise – to remind me of Christmas… In the S’West, Oli’s festive activity has been mostly indoors: “I’ve been clearing some space in the dining room for some project work, and I have acquired a wonderful and virtually unmarked 1950s hardwood workbench from the junk shop next door. This bench is a thing of beauty and considerable heft. There’s also a 350 Sport tank for the Morini, a bag of assorted electrical connectors to replace the last bag of electrical connectors which I have put ‘somewhere’, and a new battery…

Welcome back to this series of stories about the most memorable motorcycles I’ve ridden so that I could write about them since I commenced this strange occupation in 1988 or so. Yep, it really is a long time ago, and many bikes have passed beneath my backside down the years, as you might hope. Many of them memorable. Most of those were memorable for all the right reasons – others, less so. Take a look at this, a Hesketh, which was indeed an entirely memorable machine – for many and varied reasons. Wonderfully enough, I’ve been given opportunities to ride several of Lord Hesketh’s magnificent motorcycles down the years, including a truly odd café-racerised device. That was totally memorable, and for all the wrong reasons. Mainly due to its gross…

Excuse me, gentlemen. may I remind you that back in the day, the MZ TS 250 was a bike considered so ugly you’d be embarrassed if your dad was seen riding it, never mind yourself. Not surprising, with a tank like a camel and an exhaust the length and diameter of a drainpipe. And the MZ Trophy was even worse – a hideous, boxy contraption that looked like it had been styled by Daleks. Up against the likes of an RD250 or an X7? No contest. Popular opinion held that this iron curtain stuff belonged, appropriately, in Leon Trotsky’s dustbin of history. And nobody was surprised when the Berlin Wall came down, because any system that comes up with an MZ as its best attempt at a motorcycle clearly had…

■ Buy a radio. It gets tiring talking to yourself. ■ Get some shelves, and some storage boxes to put on them. Big discount stores are good for these, old fruit boxes look cool, and old Post Office letter sorting boxes are brilliant. For big items, the bread and vegetable trays from supermarkets are excellent; you can find them at jumbles. ■ While the garage is empty, get a few security ground anchors in place while fitting out, too. ■ Get some overalls or a foreman’s coat and lots of disposable rubber gloves – you can never have too many. An old beer crate makes a good engine stand and gives you somewhere to sit while you ponder your next move. ■ You will need a solid workbench with a…

CBG Workshop Electrics put the fear into many old bike enthusiasts who would be otherwise happy fixing complex parts like engines. Unnamed wires go into unnamed black boxes. But, as Mike from Abel Motorworks shows us, there’s no need to feel like that about the wiring system of your bike. British singles and twins have almost no wiring – just a lighting circuit and the charging system. Later bikes may have an alternator and regulator/rectifier, or even electronic ignition as an after-fit, but it is still just a few wires, and it’s often easy to spot or find problems. The later the bike you’re looking at, the more complex the wiring loom will be. And as we look at bikes up to the mid-1990s now, things can get quite complex.…

Bantam winner is announced The winner of the BSA Bantam Club’s D7, tested in this very magazine, has been revealed. The concours-restored 1959 D7 Bantam is a two-owner machine and was restored by well-known Bantam bloke Dave Lewis, from Shrewsbury – the town where the bike had lived since new. During 2023, it was taken to 12 major bike shows and was road-tested by various riders to sort out any teething issues and make sure that the winner got a fully roadworthy machine. The draw took place on Sunday, November 12 at the Classic Motor Show at the NEC. The winner was Mark Bentley, who bought his ticket at April’s Stafford Show. Mark said he was always wistful about Bantams and was attracted to this particular bike at the show.…

Italian motorcycles had a legendary reputation in the 1970s. They were stylish, they were fast, they were powerful. They were also hopelessly unreliable and would dissolve if exposed to the open air. Their electrical systems would fry on a whim and the paint and chrome would fall off in lumps. And it wasn’t just the British climate that would inflict such damage. In a 1975 road test of a Moto Guzzi T3 California, French magazine Moto Revue said its eight-month-old test bike had peeling paint, pitted chrome and rusty exhausts, and though the reviewer liked the result of the cast iron Brembo discs going rusty and becoming a “beautiful flamboyant red”, the writer concluded: “You will agree that our Italian girl looked rather bad. And yet, she had slept very…

It’s happened. We’ve accepted it, finally. We need a cull. No, not the deer; they’re safe. Fat, not that good at understanding the Highway Code, but safe. Nor the cats; apparently, they are safe too. I’m talking motorcycles and motorcars. We have far too many. Numerous amusing antidotes suggest ‘the best number of bikes is what you currently possess plus one’ or other such drivel, and how we chortle. But the stark reality is you can have too many. Owning motorcycles needs a support network. You need to want them – no issue with that, so many different sorts, eras and manufacturers to try. You need to find them – that, also, seems to be no issue; in fact, many find their way to us. But there’s more. This support…

It’s Sunday, September 10, 2023, and the replacement starter jet has arrived and been installed, along with its new gasket, in the rear Dell’orto carb. After many months of wrestling with carburettor settings, taking things out and screwing them back in again, it’s time to take the Ducati on the road and see how the latest permutation of jets and settings performs. In my limited experience, there are few occasions in classic bike fettling when you can ride away and within minutes it dawns on you that finally, magically, wonderfully, the bike’s actually running perfectly. Today is one of those days. Things, and indeed the bike itself, looked very different 15 months ago. Back then it was a Cagiva Alazzurra 350, yet it was a true Pantah at heart, with…

CBG WorkshopPART TWO Last month the engine was largely stripped, the culprit of the noise found, and the whole caboodle removed from the frame for better inspection. So far, I felt comfortable as it was all work I’d done just a year before on this very bike. But now, removing the crankshaft, I was off-map. Still, I was quietly confident I could have all this done in one day; at least the engine and back in the frame. A ‘dead cert’, as horsey people do say. I believe. The front bearing was already off with a little heat, so now was the time for cam chain and sprockets. From September 1978, I believe, the R100 boxer engine went to a single chain, saving weight. However, this one is August ‘78…

In 1985, Japanese motorcycle designers seem to have become slightly over-enthusiastic about what they were doing. That year, three of the four – Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha (Kawasaki has always been a bit unhinged) – came out with ridiculously fast two-stroke middleweights, based loosely around their 500cc Grand Prix racers. Grand Prix was a big deal worldwide, though slightly less so in Britain as the nation hadn’t produced the kind of world-beating superstar rider the sport needed since Barry Sheene. Though we did sort-of adopt Aussie Wayne Gardner later on, as he raced for Honda Britain! With GP so important to boost sales, Yamaha debuted its new 90bhp RZ/RD500LC square four-cylinder, while Suzuki came up with the 95bhp RG500 Gamma, another liquid-cooled, two-stroke, square four. While the Yamaha was a…

The omens were not good. According to the national media, after a couple of days of biblical downpours, Newark was mostly underwater, writes Oli. It came, therefore, as something of a surprise to arrive mid-morning at the showground, half an hour after opening, to find the traffic backed up halfway down the A46 and the car park rapidly approaching capacity. I’ve been attending the Classic Bike Guide Show since 2017, and I’d not seen it as busy as this before. Through the gates and having elbowed through the crowds, it was apparent that there was something slightly off-the-wall about Newark. Stafford is the big daddy of shows, and Bristol is eagerly looking forward to the spring, but Newark, taking place at the end of a period of excess, with often…

CBG WorkshopHints & tips FROM HUTCH'S WORKSHOP A Triumph spool hub rear wheel landed on my bench recently, rebuilt with an alloy rim. It was a lovely-looking thing but had unfortunately suffered some damage to the hub in transit, courtesy of Pa... – an uncaring courier company, I mean. You can never pack something too well these days. The damage was to one of the outer, thinner parts of the hub which is threaded where the bearing retainer fits; fortunately, the right-hand thread one, as the other side is a left-hand, reverse thread. If possible, I didn’t want to strip the wheels down and rebuild, and the damage didn’t look so bad that it couldn’t be rectified and the thread ‘pulled back from oblivion’. But obviously, taps of that size,…

I hate selling bikes to friends. Come to that, I hate selling bikes, pretty much. Buying them is usually a vast entertainment: unexpected discoveries, surprise stumbles, and occasional great success. But selling? It can be a truly tedious and all too often miserable process, especially at times like these when prices are not entirely what we might describe as rising rapidly. They may be rising faster than a submarine flooding its tanks during a ‘dive dive dive!’ situation, but not much. An easy example. A couple of months ago I spotted a Norton for sale, a model I’ve never owned but which is familiar enough via bikes borrowed for stories. It was a runner, mostly stock and unrestored – which is how I prefer to find them – and the…