Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2024 i Classic Bike Guide

The Hogslayer roars again Back in the 1970s, a legendary twin-engined Norton drag racer emerged from a Workshop in Kenosha Wisconsin and blew away the Harley-Davidson mounted opposition. Provocatively named The Hogslayer, the bike won four world championships with the late TC Christenson in the saddle. After 20 years as a museum exhibit in the British National Motorcycle Museum, The Hogslayer roared again at the Santa Pod Raceway in England for Dragstalgia on July 5-7. This exhibition run was an honourable tribute to Christenson, who died in 2023, and John Gregory, the team manager, innovator, and builder of the famous bike. An ambitious group of UK drag race enthusiasts and experts took it upon themselves to revive The Hogslayer. With the blessings of museum director James Hewing, Neil Baskerville and…

CBG Your super 650CC guide to: With huge thanks to Philip and Irene Fields for letting us photograph their Bonneville The word ‘iconic’ is bandied about with such abandon these days that one expects to pop into Screwfix and discover it has a deal on an ‘iconic’ outside tap. This month we’re allowed to use it, as the T120 Triumph Bonneville from the 1960s truly is an icon. A design classic, it is the bike even non-bikers recognise. The bike on a hundred department store T-shirts. The late-1960s Bonneville has the performance, the handling, and the drop-dead-gorgeous look that has made it famous from Birmingham to Beijing, and from Los Angeles to Kyoto. The Bonneville’s creation followed a singular effort by a team of enthusiastic US petrolheads to break the World…

“IT’S SOUNDING NICE AND FRUITY THIS MORNING,” said Garry, Sean’s T140-owning neighbour, as I pulled up on my Bonneville. Garry has been bugging me for ages to get a set of Norton Peashooter silencers for my Bonneville, which has the original cigar pipes and which he claims muffle the engine and strangle the carburation. Sean’s GPZ750 was loaded and ready to go, and my good lady Fiona had a lot of spare kit in the ‘support car.’ While Sean and I hang out at boring motorcycle destinations, she is going to explore the far north. Why should we have all the fun, after all? Sean writes: “The plan was to navigate between Telford and Wolverhampton, stay south of Stafford to Rugeley, Uttoxeter, and Ashbourne to Matlock on A and B…

CBG Workshop My unfortunate tumble on the entrance to Montrose did both myself and my Triumph T140 some damage. Nothing major, but mostly irritating. The damage was done to the left-hand side of the bike, taking out an indicator, the headlamp and the left-hand headlamp mounting ear. The left-hand footrest was heavily bent out of shape and the rev counter bracket bent upwards. There was a scrape on the front mudguard, and it seemed something had gone askew with the handlebars. Fortunately, the pannier full of clothes had protected the rear end, though the silencer had a small scrape. Gordon at the Shetland Classic Motorcycle Club kindly donated an indicator, though it was one with a short stem, and rather splendidly, a period appropriate Cibie Iode Halogen headlamp unit. On…

The Adventure Bike Rider Festival, spawned from the magazine of the same name, is now the biggest motorcycle festival in the UK. It also claims to be the largest adventure motorcycle festival in the world, ‘Glastonbury with motorcycles and posh toilets’ becoming its mantra. The good The first ‘rally’ was in Cumbria in April 2011, with its first Midlands rally held in August of the same year attracting 80 riders. In 2018, the festival was born as it is today. With the magic number of 500 attendees being exceeded, it forced the move to the picturesque Ragley Hall, Warwickshire, in 2019. This move has supercharged the event, even with the intervention of the coronavirus pandemic, and now has more than 15,000 attendees this year. This has brought the industry in…

AROUND THE NATION THERE ARE STILL SHEDS and barns holding motorcycling gold. There’s a barn near me with a low-mileage T150 Trident and a spotless Daytona rubbing handlebars with a real Indian Enfield (an official rebadged 1950s Meteor complete with a fringed saddle) that doesn’t run and which the owner won’t part with. There’s a large shed with 50 or more Velocettes in it, too. With a Morini that’s well into its third decade as a restoration project, I’m in no position to question such behaviour. Sometimes, those items of gold are more exotic than others, and others are just fascinating, such as this remarkable creation. It has a long and intriguing heritage stretching back to the 1960s, has had the hands of motorcycling’s more creative geniuses pass over it,…

CBG Workshop To convert my old race bike back to an original road bike, I had found parts I’d stashed away more than a decade ago, yet somehow many small parts had gone missing. I also needed a front subframe. It holds the headlight, the fairing and the dashboard, but also the horn, relays, a myriad of electrickery and the mirrors. Mine had been dramatically cut down in the endless pursuit of lightness, an intriguing and addictive (and expensive) pastime you can never win. So, while pretending to work one day, I found a subframe on eBay. Nearby in Norwich. And it also came with the correct-coloured fairing, headlight and so on. Odd, I thought, so I quickly checked the seller’s other items and found the rest of the bike,…

Lying on my back in the middle of the road, a light drizzle settling on my visor, I knew instinctively that the bike was a write-off. I’d watched the old boy potter along the pavement and get into his car. But then, instead of driving forward, he reversed right across my path. The write-off was a 1975 Triumph Trident T150V I’d bought seven years earlier. The writing-off was on the Isle of Man, where I was enjoying my first TT with my new wife. My new wife! Oh my god, where was she? She was okay, hopping about behind me glowering at the gouges in her new AGV helmet. But it could have been so much worse. We got the bike back home eventually, where it became clear that the…

CBG Your guide to WITH NORTON’S FUTURE NOW IN THE hands of Indian manufacturer TVS, the historic British marque seems set for a new, much more financially secure lease of life, with a range of at least three all-new model platforms set to be launched at the Birmingham MCL Show this November, with deliveries commencing in 2025. This makes it most timely to take a look in the rear-view mirror of history at the Norton prototype, code-numbered P92 (Project 92). This was conceived exactly 50 years ago in 1974, but never reached production, and consisted of a BSA motor carried in a Triumph/ BSA frame, using Norton’s Isolastic engine mounts. Yes, it was a parts bin special – but as Sammy Miller, the owner today of one of the three such…

CBG Workshop “Throughout the 1960s, the majority of TR6 Street Scramblers were made exclusively for the American market,” said Triumph TR6 enthusiast Allan Seggie when I photographed his TR6C Special for the December 2020 issue of CBG. “The yanks loved them, and Triumph twins were more popular than Harley-Davidson’s own home-grown V-twins. Triumph exported thousands of Bonneville and Trophy models across the Atlantic in the 1960s, and Triumph twins were subject to constant tweaking by US enthusiasts. “Thus began a craze that resulted in variants such as Street Cruisers with lights, twin carbs and low-level exhausts – or Desert Scramblers without lights but having high-level exhausts, slim mudguards and a single monobloc carb. “Unfortunately, most TR6 production ended up overseas to meet US demand, with just a trickle being allocated…

The original working title for this piece of dog-eared prose was ‘On Unintended Consequences’ but as you can see, I decided against it. Because there is always a point, a purpose, to everything we do to our bikes, is there not? Don’t answer that. One of the more recent arrivals in the shed I like to call The Shed was fitted with the wrong headlamp brackets. They were correct for a later version of a similar machine, but not for the exact year and model. So what, I hear you ask, caustically? Headlamp brackets are headlamp brackets, are they not? They hold the headlamp in place. This is why they’re called headlamp brackets and not big end bolts, for ridiculous example. Headlamp brackets only rarely improve a bike’s performance. So…