Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2024 i Classic Bike Guide

Welcome GREETINGS, OH REVELERS OF OLD motorcycles. May your seat be dry, your lights emitting some glow, and your thermals unmolested by moths. In the Classic Bike Guide workshop, we must live by lists of things that need doing, or it doesn’t happen. Efficiency is not natural to us. Sometimes it’s dull stuff like grown-up chores, but mostly it’s cars and bikes. So, we’ve been trying to use them all recently, to see what stuff needs working on. Many folk take their bikes off the road come October, which we totally understand, as do many with old cars, but we keep ours going; perhaps that’s why they don’t look very good… Last Sunday, Boy and I had just rocked up to a classic car meet in ‘the Moggy’ to find…

Andy’s 2025 calendar The 2025 Andy Tiernan calendar is available now, and this year’s theme is Royal Enfields through the decades (1900s to the 1960s inclusive). The six motorcycles are all magnificently drawn in pencil and painted in watercolour by Mike Harbar, a former Suffolk local now resident in Australia and producing art at www.classiclinesartist.com. Proceeds go to the East Anglian Air Ambulance. Individual copies of the calendar can be obtained from: Andy Tiernan Classics Calendars, The Old Railway Station, Station Road, Framlingham, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP13 9EE. The cost for one is £12, which includes UK second class postage. For one calendar and postage to Europe, the total cost is £17. For the rest of the world, the total cost for one calendar and postage is £20. Cheques should be…

THE BSA GOLD STAR 650 HASN’T CHANGED SINCE I rode it soon after the launch, almost two years ago, writes Matt. Yet it feels totally different; what’s changed? My perception, mainly. This time I wasn’t finding out about a new company, a new bike, and comparing it to rivals to give you an idea of if it’s for you. I was just riding the Gold Star for the sake of riding. Secondly, its price has changed, quite dramatically. At launch, when the music had stopped and you could finally buy a BSA in the UK, it was more expensive than its direct £5500 rival, Royal Enfield’s Interceptor 650, by about £1000. That’s confidence in one’s own product – good to see. But with Enfield having such an established product, a…

HONDA STUNNED THE TWO-WHEELED world at the October 1968 Tokyo Show by revealing its inline four-cylinder CB750, the first series production Superbike of the modern era. But barely six years later and exactly five decades ago on September 21, 1974, the Japanese company unveiled something completely different and almost as significant at Cologne’s IFMA Show – the GL1000 Gold Wing. It was the first in a family of bikes which continues in production today, albeit in six-cylinder 1833cc guise versus the original flat-four, 999cc model… 650,000-plus motorcycles later, the ‘Wing continues to be a valid range-topper. Initial sales of the GL1000 were underwhelming, less than 5000 bikes finding American owners in 1975. As much as anything, it was because nobody in Honda appeared to really know who the bike was…

IN 1971, SOMETHING OF A GOLDEN AGE came to a crashing halt for 16-year-olds in the UK. At this point, the Sixteener Laws were introduced to limit 16-year-olds to 50cc mopeds until they turned 17. The laws were intended to stop young motorcycle riders taking to the road on increasingly powerful 250s. With next to no British industry left and almost nobody making mopeds in the UK, this seemed like a simple method of making late teenage years safer – and more boring. The Government reckoned without the Italians and the Japanese, however. The Italians had a small bike culture missing from the UK. The Italians were already making 50cc sports bikes, for which there had been next to no market here. Why buy a 50 when you could buy…

From our archive With the ISDT being held in Germany in 1936, hopes were high for the home teams as they had won the last three years in a row. So, with all the intention of being a German victory for the Nazi government, it was a shock for the dignitaries when Great Britain spoiled the show. Not only did Vic Brittain on his Norton, George Rowley on his AJS and Stuart Waycott on a 500cc Velocette win the International Trophy with a perfect, no-marks-lost ride over second placed Germany and third placed France, but the Scottish team of MacGregor, Leslie and Edward, all riding Rudge bikes, won the International Silver Vase from Holland and the British ‘A’ team! This team included A Jeffries, later of the BMW dealership fame.…

FEW, IF ANY, MANUFACTURERS TAKE the concept of reviving and rethinking past models to such extremes as Praga. While most mainstream retros run on thoroughly modern chassis designs, the Czech company’s hand-crafted ZS 800 rolls out of the factory as a hardtail, with girder forks and drum brakes. This is very different from anything on the market. There, that got your attention. Whatever you may think of motorcycles that lean on heritage to justify their existence, this one is impossible to ignore. The ZS 800, a loose reincarnation of Praga’s 1928 BD 500, is an oxymoron of contrary and daring engineering; it blends ancient design concepts with exotic state-of-the-art materials and weighs little more than a scooter. Seemingly devoid of compromises or restraint, it also comes with a starting price…

SINCE THE MODEL’S LAUNCH IN 2019, THE Triumph Speed Twin has been the factory’s big twin bruiser, a retro roadster with a lot of street cool. With the higher-performance Thruxton coming to the end of the road, Triumph is showing its time for the Speed Twin to add a little refinement and adopt some snappier threads. Named after the original the 1938 Speed Twin, the bike with the Edward Turner twin-cylinder engine that established Triumph’s street racing credentials, this 21st century parallel twin has been gathering fans sinch its launch, being pokier than the 900 and 1200 Bonneville models, yet not as uncompromising as the 1200 Thruxton. It’s been getting minor upgrades ever since it was launched, but now Triumph has given it a slight change of style and the…

FANCY SOMETHING REFRESHINGLY different? We all love old bikes, right? We ride them, restore them, build them, and rebuild them. Some of us keep our bikes rigorously standard, while some of us modify them for performance or looks. And, it turns out, some of us build custom bikes out of them. There was a time custom bikes and choppers were the bane of classic bike riders. I can recall being accused of ruining our heritage back in the 1960s and 1970s. But Brit bikes were cheap back then: I paid £40 for a Triumph twin, a fiver bought me a clean Matchless 350 single, and I got hold of an M20 combo by swapping a fake German helmet for it instead of paying the £9 asking price… all of them…

IF YOU WENT TO PUBS THAT WERE HANG-OUTS for motorcyclists rather than ‘biker pubs’ in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they were a good place to see where trends were going. Back then we didn’t call them trends; it was just about having the latest hot bike, not the big stuff, the Z900s or bevel Ducatis or Honda 750s, but the stuff younger riders could actually afford – with the biggest issue often being the cost of insurance. British iron gave way to Honda 400 fours and Z650s, and they gave way to Yamaha LCs, with and without L-plates, and then almost overnight, in 1982, all that white bodywork suddenly vanished and the rows of bikes turned red. Kawasaki had launched the GPz 550 four. A reduced-capacity version of…

BACK IN THE DISTANT, FARAWAY AND almost entirely legendary 1990s, I was oppressed by cruel fortune into riding at least (at least!) two new motorcycles every month. That’s as well as – rather than instead of – the couple of oldsters demanded by the actual day job. I can hear you sneering already, comments like, ‘Oh if only…’ and ‘It’s alright for some…’ and things like that. Gentle Reader, this is not a complaint. I am simply revealing how things were. And the snag with writing about brand-new motorcycles is that they are almost all of them almost entirely flawless. It was a great day if one of them was so strangely strange that it was easy to tell tales about it that went beyond a simple rewrite of the…