Innehållsförteckning för January 2025 från Back Street Heroes

We have so many other great titles too! Get 6 issues of one of these mags for just £20 The personalities, legendary bikes and the race track heroes who mattered then… and still matter now. Classic, twinshock or Evo, it’s the place for you to dive into the dirty side of biking. Real-world tests of the latest bikes and kit, places to go and features not to miss. The tools and techniques used by model makers, light engineers and restorers. The best rail news, features and images covering the UK’s preservation movement. Real bikes. Real riders. Real rebuilds. Real Rides. RealClassic! Running, riding and repairing Japanese, European and US classics from the 70s onward. For those who like building model boats, or just enjoy soaking up this huge hobby. Enthusiast-led content,…

ABOUT EIGHT OR SO YEARS AGO, OUR LAUREN, EX-STAFFER OF THIS PARISH, WAS GIVEN THE UNENVIABLE TASK OF HUNTING DOWN SOMETHING OR OTHER FROM OLD BSH FILES IN A SERIES OF OLD FILING CABINETS. ONE OF THEM WOULDN’T CLOSE PROPERLY, AND SHE FOUND A LOAD OF OLD BLACK N’ WHITE PICTURES FROM THE OLDEN DAYS STUFFED DOWN THE BACK OF IT, PUT THEM TO ONE SIDE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE, AND THEN FOUND ‘EM AGAIN A FEW MONTHS AGO, SO WE THOUGHT WE’D BUNG A FEW O’ THEM IN TO TAKE YOU BACK IN TIME TO THOSE HEADY DAYS – NO CAPTIONS, NO EXPLANATIONS, JUST SOME GREAT OLD PICS FROM THE MAGAZINE’S EARLY DAYS.…

This month’s Star Letter wins a pair of WEISE NOMAD 120 GLOVES (RRP £69.99) Warm, waterproof and well designed, Nomad gloves have got what it takes to keep you riding through the cold and wet winter months. Featuring full grain leather and textile construction, with a waterproof Hipora® membrane and 120gsm Thinsulate™ inner liner. Plus a two-layer storm cuff closure system and touchscreen compatible fingers. Find out more atwww.weiseclothing.com DEAR BSH, One of your articles recently was describing the advent of the MX bikes in the old days, so I thought I’d send you some old pics of my DT250MX – I don’t know how those forks never sheared off when I used to jump it! My first jump I’ll remember as long as I live. I got my speed…

Now, I’m not going to go into what a brachial plexus injury is again ’cos I’ve already talked about it a couple o’ three times but, suffice to say, it usually puts an end to someone’s riding career in no uncertain terms, and it’s all credit to him that not only has he worked out a way to keep doing what he loves best in the world, but has also continued to build custom bikes, one-handed, too. I’ll let him tell you about this bike, his long-term dream Shovelhead Harley, shall I? “For as long as I’ve been into bikes I’ve wanted a Shovelhead. I was lucky enough to go the States a few times when I was younger (my Dad was American), and remember seeing them there, and then,…

AT the Ace Cafe a couple o’ three years ago, at one of NCC London’s excellent Diamond Day custom shows, I saw, from the other end of the car park, an old looking, but obviously custom, bike roll in, and thought ‘Ooo!’ and set off towards it. On the way over, though, I got distracted, by someone or something (‘squirrel!’), and by the time I got to it, the rider’d buggered off. ‘Mmm,’ I thought, ‘that’s bloody clever – leaf-spring front end on a little Honda single, done as a flat-tanker… it looks… I wonder, like something Matt’d build’ and looked around for him ’cos I know he’s been to Diamond Day a few times and, relatively speaking, he doesn’t live that far away. A few minutes later I spotted…

For 2025 (although it is, of course, 2024 as I write this and has been all year), Indian have revamped the Scout range in a rather mahoosive way: new engine, new frame, new suspenders (steady…), new wheels, and new bodywork, managing to keep the feeling that made the Scout Rogue so good, but making it more so. The new Scouts, of which there’re five – the Classic, the Bobber, the Sport, the Super, and the top-spec 101 (pictured) – all run the new 1250cc (up from 1133) engine, dubbed the SpeedPlus 1250. Although it shares its liquid-cooled, DOHC V-twin layout with the older engine, it’s substantially newer with a higher compression ratio (12.5:1, up from 10.7:1), and makes 105hp (up from 94), and 79lb-ft of torque (up from 71.5)… well,…

WIN A NORTION! The National Motorcycle Museum’s announced its latest raffle, and the first prize this time’s a genuine, and very desirable, 1972 Norton Commando Norvil 750cc production racer. Tickets cost just £2 each, and you can get them from the National Motorcycle Museum at www.thenmm.co.uk Second prize is a £1,500 voucher to spend with Sealey Tools, and third is a Sealey Tools “Patriot” roll-cab tool cabinet (worth £719.95) in your choice of five flag designs (Union Jack, George Cross, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland). Good luck! RESURRECTION! Those of you who used to read AWoL will remember that, in a very early issue, they ran a feature on a particularly inyer-face rat/survival bike called ‘Eraserhead’, with its one-off Harris-style wrapround and forks with external shocks, that, not long after the…

It’s very different now, of course, with a theory test administered by computer, C.B.T., an off-road manoeuvrability test, and walkie talkies to listen to the examiner following on his ‘bike, but some of you’ll remember that, in the dim and distant past of another century, it was so much simpler. The car test was always a bit of a lucky dip, and if you failed it you could still hold your head up in public the next day (unless, of course, you failed it multiple times), but the bike test was so easy that only a total wazzock could fail (and even then you had to be really, REALLY useless). Allegedly it wasn’t hard, said those know-it-alls who’d sailed through; just turn up on a bike that looked like it…

Back in the early days of custom building, the only way to get your ’ands on a custom bike was to, for most folk, either build it yersel’ or get a really good mate to help you/build it for you. There were custom shops, of course, who’d do a lot of, or all if you really wanted, the work before you, but just going out and buying a chop, or a custom of any kind, wasn’t anywhere as easy as it is today. I s’pose you could argue that this ’ere magazine, Back Street Heroes, started to change all that back in the ’80s with the Smalls ads where people could advertise their bikes (and themselves, too) to an audience who were looking for something a little out of the…

Rich, the owner, says: “Growing upincider drinking country, I had the luxury of having an orchard to ride about in. My father, adyed-in-thewool BSA man, plonked me on a motorcycle as soon as he could, a rigid Norman Villiers 2-stroke 125, and I literally rode it until the wheels collapsed. That was in the 1980s and I was aged about eight, and I’ve been riding British motorcycles (and drinking cider) ever since.” As soon as he was old enough he had a succession of British bikes, but that first, the Norman, with its rigid frame, made a lasting impression, and he always fancied something like it for the road. As with most people who mess around with old Brit bikes (and, yes, most of the rest of us, too), he’d…

IT is, you see, a system called Telelever, and uses a single shock unit in place of the combined spring/shock functions of traditional forks. It still has forks, but their primary function now is to make a stiff frame for the wheel to sit in, and to allow the rider to steer the bike (always useful), as the shock unit’s connected to a wishbone, itself connected to the bike’s frame via a yoke at the back, and to the crossmember of the forks at the front using a ball-joint. When you hit a bump, then, the suspension forces’re transmitted through the ball-joint, across the wishbone, and up through the shock into the frame, and this means you effectively reduce fork flex under braking to near zero which, in turn, reduces dive,…

Last time I mentioned that, if you pass a current through a coil of wire, you create a magnetic field, and that if you move a coil of wire through a magnetic field, you induce a current in the coil. This’s the principal that alternators, starter solenoids, and starter motors all work on, using some variation or another. It’s also how ignition coils work. An ignition coil’s actually two coils of wire (Fig.1), one inside the other, so to avoid the confusion of talking about which coil in the coil is the coil we’re talking about, I’m going to call them windings. You have a primary winding, and a secondary winding – when power’s applied to the primary winding, current flows through it and a magnetic field forms around it.…

HJC I20 FURIA MODULAR HELMET The all-new HJC I20 is designed to give riders a different approach to the classic open-face/half helmet. This streetfighter-inspired helmet comes with a removable mask and a wide-vision, anti-fog coated sun visor (smoked) that manually operates with pull tabs located on each side of the helmet. The shell’s lightweight and offers a superior fit, using a 3-shell breakdown from sizes XS up to 2XL, and’s ready to accept the SMART HJC Bluetooth systems. Available in an eye-catching or a more subtle grey, the Furia costs £199.99 from anywhere that stocks the HJC range or www.oxfordproducts.com CUSTOM CRUISERS SIDE-BAGS Custom Cruisers’re offering these new fibreglass, UK made, side-bags originally designed for H-D FXRs, but which can be adapted for any twinshock bike. They can be made…

Following the management buy-out of the early 1980s, however, Harley got itself a new management who themselves got where Harley needed to position itself. Out went the ugly 1970s styling and unreliability, and in came new ranges, and through the roof went the sales. Whereas they’d historically eschewed the custom-look fraternity, it finally embraced it, with models like the Springer Softail, and it’s kept them coming ever since. At the same time, eventually they had the good sense to acknowledge its constituency by advertising in the kind of magazines from which it’d previously distanced itself. Likewise, they had the good sense to be friendly to the Riders’ Rights movement in Europe, providing a Buell to Simon Milward when he was FEMA’s General Secretary back in the 1990s. Sad to say,…