Innehållsförteckning för October 2023 från Classic Bike Guide

KEV, CARLY AND THE TEAM FROM ACE CLASSICS London organise this event every year for family and friends, Carly being the ultimate host, making sure everyone is fed and watered. The weekend gives everyone the opportunity to meet up, swap stories, talk bikes and – more importantly – let their hair down, racing around a makeshift track and fields within a safe environment. Cup of tea in hand, I have a walk around the small paddock, admiring some of the bikes that’ve turned out this year. Kev’s busy organising the bikes. Some riders are fettling with their machines last-minute, while others relax in the glorious sunshine, having prepared their machines weeks previously (Ian – that’s you). Sean Halker’s BSA B33 caught my eye, complete with his to-do list written on…

Products ■ £149.99■ bellhelmets.co.uk How can you write about yet another open-face helmet? Aren’t they all the same? Well, no, and we are lucky in that we get to test many of them, so we may as well pass it on to you! And this one looks the absolute whatsits in the flesh. It is the trusted Bell Custom 500 open-face helmet, this model featuring a limited edition custom paint scheme by American maestro Roland Sands (RSD). It’s not a new design, but when a friend was looking for a new open-face lid – after I’d got on my high horse and ridiculed his 15-year-old knackered bucket he pretended would protect him – this one came up as the best value by a long way at one pence shy of…

GERMANY’S HELMUT DÄHNE IS A man of many parts. Always a fast, elegant, yet extremely dependable rider, readily identifiable by his trademark red leathers, later with their white flashes, his performances in major European road races throughout most of the 1970s – and especially the Isle of Man – underlined the performance of the new generation of Boxer BMWs he became so closely identified with, helping add a sporting allure to the Bavarian’s ‘pipe and slippers’ image. Moreover, he did so with bikes he built and prepared with his own hands, in his own time, in his own workshop – even during the 15 years he worked for BMW as a development engineer, before joining the Metzeler tyre company in 1974 as its race manager. But in the late 1970s,…

CBG Workshop DESPITE ALL THEIR SUPPOSED FAULTS, hydraulically-damped telescopic forks have been with us since 1935 when BMW fitted them to the R12 and R17 models. Intriguingly, we’re no nearer accepting anything else that’s been offered, either. The key to a smooth operation (stiction), as well as keeping pressure and fluid inside all kinds of telescopic forks – both conventional, ‘right way up’ units or more modern, ‘upside down’ forks – are a pair of high-grade steel tubes that are precision-ground and coated in a highly resistant surface coating known as hard chrome. Some high-end modern bikes have titanium nitride coating to reduce stiction further, but it is still over hard chrome. The hard-chromed surface goes through tens of thousands of reciprocal passes through the tight-fitting fork seals, blasted with…

If you’re into the beautiful motorcycles and lovely people – then the Classic Motorcycle Mechanics Show is the only place to be this October 14-15. If I’m honest, it’s the highlight of my biking year… 26,000 fellow classic motorcycle enthusiasts milling around, chewing the fat and looking at some gorgeous motorcycles as well as a guest of honour – what’s not to like? Like Classic Motorcycle Mechanics magazine itself, the focus of the show is all that’s best in modern classic motorcycling – so that’s bikes from Japan and Europe from the 1950s through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and even into the early 2000s. We follow the rules of the Vintage Japanese Motorcycle Club (VJMC)… so we stick to its rule of ‘anything 15 years or older’ being eligible…

THERE ARE SEVERAL EXCELLENTLY SENSIBLE ideas which we should all apply to ourselves, rather than exclusively to others. First: never buy a bike for a lot of lolly without riding it. Second: never declare in public that if your favourite manufacturer ever launches the bike they keep announcing, then you’ll buy one, definitely. This is excellent advice, yet I ignore it far too often. Let me tell you a story of one of the bikes which has stood out the most in a long life of riding them. This is a tale about a machine that was a very long time coming, and which, when it eventually arrived, I bought without even riding one. Why? Insanity must be close to the top of the list, but also because I really…

SUZUKI, LIKE KAWASAKI, WAS LATE TO THE 750 four-stroke party, and its two-stroke offering was much more softly spoken than the Kawasaki H2. Significantly, it had far more substantial engineering, too. Launched at the 17 th International Motor Show in Tokyo in 1970, an event designed for the car industry rather than the motorcycle world, the GT750 immediately had a real impact, managing to out-cool Honda’s CB750 and Kawasaki’s Mach III. The prototype GT had a transverse, inline three-cylinder two-stroke motor with five gears, a rumoured 75bhp power output and electronic ignition. The engine was designed by Etsuo Yokouchi, the genius who produced Suzuki’s 250 and 500 twins and later the RG500 racer. Quite a resume. The big attention grabber wasn’t the engine; it was the radiator.…

October means autojumbles. The sheer joy of rummaging around in old plastic crates hunting for that elusive side panel, trying to work out if that grubby old clunker is a diamond in the rough or a horrendous money pit, and coming home with a rusty exhaust to save your good one and a couple of cans of ACF-50. Oh, and some latex gloves, a gasket or two and couple of boxes of those dehumidifying things. Hopefully see you at Stafford, at the NMM Live event and the Shepton Autojumble among others. Watch out for the damp patches! September 23 Squires Café monthly autojumble: Pitches are £5 each for sellers. South Milford, Leeds LS25 5LX. Visit www.squires-cafe.co.uk. Also on October 28. 23/24 British Historic Racing: Rounds 11 and 12 of the…

IN LATE 1969, BOB GRANT, FROM THE TRIUMPH importer on the US West Coast, had an issue with a dealership in Memphis, Tennessee. The dealer had not ordered any Triumph TR25W Street Scramblers – a bike that was basically a BSA Starfire 250 with a high pipe and Triumph badges. The dealership was supposed to stock all the Triumph models they made. Bob wrote: “Your experience with the TR25W is not unique. It has been a somewhat troublesome unit for everyone. However, it is a Triumph and that is what we sell. There are a lot of people who would agree with your comment that we should dump them in the ocean, but this would not be practical… In spite of some mechanical shortcomings, the TR25W is easy to sell…

CBG Workshop BACK IN THE EARLY SUMMER, WHEN June was busting out all over, everyone was hopefully out and about, riding their bikes in the sunshine. A couple of weeks into said good weather, a very pretty Jubilee Bonnie arrived in my yard, having lost its sparks. A chat over a cup of tea with the owner (tea is a great way to get all the information that can often help diagnosis) revealed that the Triumph had run rough and vibed a bit for a few miles before coming to a complete stop, and no matter what he had tried, no further life from the spark plugs could be found. As the bike had not cut out suddenly, this did not initially suggest an electrical failure. Over a second cup…

Email || editor@classicbikeguide.comWrite to || Classic Bike Guide, PO Box 99, Horncastle, Lincolnshire, LN9 6LZ This month’s Star Letter wins... The writer of this month’s Star Letter wins a Weise Drift Jacket worth £199.99. Combining the look and feel of high street fashion with the impact protection expected from a premium motorcycle jacket, the Drift is laminated for reliable waterproofing, too. Find out more at www.fab-biker.co.uk Tut tut, Tiger I was reading letters, page 53 in the September issue, ‘What have I bought’. The text says a 1969 Tiger 100 but the picture shows a 1954-56 Tiger 100? Ray Hewitt Apologies, Ray, I just thought a photo of a Tiger 100 from the archive would brighten up the letter but chose the wrong year – Matt Helpful blokes! A source…

CBG Workshop THE COMMANDO STARTED LIFE IN 1968, featuring the outgoing Atlas 750cc engine, as the planned twin-cam engine would not be ready in time. Now, if there was one feature that had dominated the Atlas experience, it was vibration. A 360-degree crank, big, heavy pistons and an ‘interesting’ approach by Associated Motorcycles (AMC) to the noble art of crank balancing resulted in many engines that shook – really badly. Mounting it in the simple, tubular and comparatively lightweight Featherbed frame, totally devoid of the nice, hefty lugs that might otherwise have dampened the resultant vibrations (apart from the swinging arm wheel-spindle ends of the later models) resulted in a bike with plenty of power and excellent handling thanks to its road-going version of the Manx chassis, but one that…

CBG Workshop TO MY ENORMOUS DELIGHT, THE Aermacchi has been running flawlessly since I fitted the angle grinder motor brush springs. I threw on a cheap chain for the time being, and all seems very well indeed. I therefore turned my attention to my Starfire and put on a new old stock front brake cable from Saddleworth Motorcycles, and apart from some smoke and a bit of a rattle, that’s going quite well too. So I visited my chum Sean and matters turned to his latest purchase, a Kawasaki Z250C. If you don’t know the Z250C, it was a short-lived 250cc four-stroke single, developed out of the Z200 single and the KL250 trail bike. It is a curious beast, with the most unusual feature being alloy wheels with a drum…