Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2025 i Real Classic

Do you need professional help? Would a twelve-step programme be a good idea for you? Are you certifiable? Well, if you own an old British car then one or more of the above would certainly apply. Why else would you spend countless hours dealing with the quirks of British motorcars and fighting the devilspawn Lucas? Hopefully you will continue to avoid the men in white coats who think you should be confined and to convince society that you are pretty much ‘normal’. Sooooo, if working on a British car does not satisfy your masochistic tendencies, and pulling your fingernails out at the root does not add the additional pain you desire, what do you do? Well, you can do as I do and restore British… motorcycles! Ahh, the hunt for…

In 1994, I had been in the doldrums as far as motorcycles went. The previous two years saw me riding a Yamaha XJ600, a bike that I did not like: a poor man’s version of the far superior XJ900. The reason for this was financial. I’d had two motorcycles stolen and another written off when it was rear ended by a driving instructor when I stopped at a junction to give way. However, my finances started to pick up and I was in the market for a new bike. The local Triumph dealer in Edinburgh took one look at the XJ600 and said no to a trade in. So I paid a visit to Scotbike in Glasgow. I had been swithering between a Moto Guzzi and a Triumph and they…

Some of what is relevant here comes from a long time ago, when my father bought such a machine locally for £35, if I remember right, around 1975 as his first ‘after getting married and having kids’ bike. His machine is still with us and was probably not much over ten years old when he bought it, but it had been stored in such a way that rust had got at it, and it needed a good bit of tidying and basic maintenance before it could go back on the road. Once up and running, Dad used this machine quite a bit, even doing a 150 mile round trip commute on it quite frequently while studying for his Mate’s ticket in Llandaff, Cardiff over several months. Traveling from our village…

One hundred-odd years ago at the dawn of the Roaring ’20s, before Harley started hogging things there were three main players in American motorcycling, out of the more than 200 different manufacturers of varying degrees of financial solvency and technical prowess which had attempted to carve out a place for themselves in the exciting and potentially profitable new arena of mechanised personal transportation. The so-called Big Three consisted of Indian, Harley-Davidson – and Excelsior. So, alongside GM and Ford, read Chrysler – or to BSA / Triumph and AJS / Matchless, add Norton. The Excelsior Supply Company was formed in Chicago in 1876 by George T. Robie, and initially distributed sewing machine parts before, in the early 1890s, it branched into the booming bicycle business. Chicago had become the centre…

For a couple of years – my 16th and 17th, in fact – almost every day I passed by a house which had a Viceroy in the driveway. It looked amazing, and as was the way with all sixteen year-olds I had no idea what it was. It just looked like the world’s most improbably beaky scooter. One of my more courageous teenaged chums simply walked up to the house, pressed the bell, and asked the presumably lady of the house who answered what it was. ‘It’s a scooter,’ she announced and closed the door. Expertise and communication skills have gone downhill since then. Only a little while later – we were all studying for our A-levels, which pins down the date a bit – my pal Geoffrey decided to…

Unlike many WW2 bikes (Norton 16H, Matchless G3 derivatives, BSA’s venerable M20) the military offering seen here never took part in that conflict. Instead it trundled into service in the (sort of…) peacetime that followed. Like some of those earlier machines, this one is equipped with a sidevalve engine, although in this case it could be described as a ‘front valve’. Unlike the other military motorcycles, this one is a twin and not a single. As you’ve already noticed, we’re talking about a Triumph TRW, a Mk2b version from 1956 according to its papers. This is not the first of these bikes I’ve owned. A later Mk3 from 1964 had a place in my garage before it went to my uncle. He found most motorcycles became heavier and harder to…

A350 and 500 Alpino were advertised to be sold as a pair. They dated from around 1977 / 78 and had been imported at some time from Spain – quiteafew years ago – and were in need of lots of TLC. They would probably be worth more in parts than as finished machines, but I like to save bikes if that’s possible. These models areabit thin on the ground in the UK already. Looking through the parts that came with the bikes, there were about 90% of the components needed to build the 350 version and about 65% of a 500. The latter had a damaged engine (a seized exhaust valve and piston damage) but a complete rolling chassis… minus brake calipers, discs and some other small parts. Even the…

If I asked our knowledgeable readership to describe the definitive post-war British motorcycle design, I’d bet the farm on the most popular answer being something with an ohv air-cooled parallel twin. Of course, there would be the odd weirdo who’d nominate the water-cooled sidevalve Velocette LE, or perhaps an Ariel Arrow, but they’re the sort of riders who pack a picnic before going out for a ride. Oh. All the major companies – Triumph, BSA, Norton, even AMC and Enfield – used a version of the vertical twin to power their flagship creations. Imitation is of course the sincerest form of flattery, coupled with the understanding that a narrow twin produced far more power than the equivalent single, yet still allowed the use of a bicycle largely designed for their…

Allow me to introduce my 1971 MZ ES250/2 Trophy which was quickly dubbed the Frankenstein MZ, due to being at least partially assembled from bits of other, deceased motorcycles. I’d never owned an MZ before and this one was bought on a whim from fleabay. I don’t know any other MZ owners so I’d no idea what to expect. I do have a mate who tells me he was offered a 250 Trophy for £5 in the late 1970s, but apparently back then £5 was considered too expensive for an MZ. The prices seem to have risen somewhat, but I thought this one looked odd enough to be interesting, and I needed a project to tinker with over winter. When the rest of the world is turning to electric power,…

Over the last half-century or more, I have fitted lots of exhaust systems to lots of bikes. Some fit perfectly, others simply didn’t. A minor strangeness is that several of the ill-attaching pipery sets were NOS factory spares from the appropriate factory, not some bad bit of bodged bendery found at a jumble somewhere. An example? Back in the mid-1980s I was delighted beyond description to find a genuine new old stock siamesed exhaust for the 1966 AJS 650 which provided my regular riding back then. A CSR system, in fact. I dreamed of great improvements to sound and performance and a reduction in weight due to the single silencer. It didn’t fit. Either the left or the right pipe would fit, but not the two together. As you know,…