Innehållsförteckning för April 2024 från Classic Bike Guide

I’VE BEEN TRYING TO REMEMBER WHEN TRAIL BIKES became so popular – popular enough to persuade manufacturers to build actual trail machines, rather than lightly disguised roadsters. Can’t work it out, despite wasting far too much time trawling countless histories of the major British manufacturers. The problem with a faintly bonkers mini-quest like this proves to be finding a workable definition of a trail bike. Is it when the factory fitted lightweight mudguards and added a ‘C’ for Competition to the model designation? No, of course not. I tried several other notions too, but eventually retired hurt. I’m also not sure when trail riding – as opposed to trials riding – became popular in the UK. Was it as late as the 1960s? Anyway, pushing aside lofty dreams of historical…

WELL, IT’S SAT THERE FOR LONGER than I care to remember, and now it’s going to finally get sorted. There’s been a 1968 Yamaha AS1 125cc twin on my bike bench since September 2022 and since that date I’ve done two things to it – nothing and begger all! Why the stasis, you quite reasonably ask? A lack of parts, possibly; something irretrievably broken, perhaps; or how about waiting on a third party to do what they promised? All viable causes for the inertia of the project, but no. I’ll come to my own excuse later in this meandering missive, but I have found, in something of an epiphany, that I’m not the only one affected by motorcycling’s very own CBA (er – Can’t Be Arsed). To cut to the…

Sean’s show - The return of the Shepton Shuffle I’VE BEEN GOING TO THE BRISTOL SHOW for well over a decade and this year was lucky enough to get into the Bath and West Showground on the Friday afternoon, just as the exhibitors and tradespeople were setting up, writes Sean. I’m always a little anxious if I’m exhibiting something or have a jumble stall and think I’m late, or it’s raining, or can’t find my pitch. So, I hung back a little and tried not to get in people’s way. The weather was cold, but clear and bright for once, with little breeze, which made for less aggro for those unloading. Everyone was in a good mood as they set up or waited for a bike or display set to…

AFTER A SUCCESSFUL CAREER AS A MULTI-disciplined road racer, Guy Martin has since become more famous as a tea-drinking daredevil TV presenter. During the TV series Speed, Guy broke several British and world records on land, sea, and in the air. But did you know this household name loves his old bikes more than the modern ones he raced? There’s no point in trying to conduct a normal, structured interview with Guy; his brain just doesn’t work that way... veering off, coming back, but always interesting. The hugely entertaining Lincolnshire man has been a very successful racer, is an LGV mechanic, and thrills millions with his TV shows and world record attempts. So, we get a brew on, mention a couple of subjects, then sit back and enjoy the ride.…

CBG Workshop AS FAR AS WE ARE AWARE, THIS IS one of the prototype Hurricanes that came from the USA, when the distributors had a Rocket 3 modified to show the factory what their market wanted. But by the time it came back to Blighty to look at productionising, BSA was no more and therefore the X-75 had to wear a Triumph badge. The National Motorcycle Museum secured it for all to see last year but wants it running. Although we have only been tasked with getting this BSA running and safe, restoring a bike in any way is a responsibility, so we have enlisted the skills of Hutch at HTE, who has the experience of such machines to do it justice. Restoring usually means researching photographs to find spec,…

AFTER SEVERAL CENTURIES OF MESSING about with increasingly elderly and increasingly cranky old motorcycles, anyone might suspect that I would know how to do stuff. Experience, so they tell us, is the greatest teacher of them all. This isn’t my own experience, plainly, but it is nicely self-motivational and modern. And can anyone learn from the experience of others? Really? I recently acquired a Triumph, an inevitable Bonneville. One of the profoundly unfashionable examples from 1972, when previously too-tall frames were shrinking, and the previously too-tall fork legs were staying the same. This does at least provide endless opportunities for experts to gravely tell me that everything about my bike is wrong. It gets harder and harder to maintain that calm, polite facial expression as the years mount, but I…

THERE’S ALWAYS A GREAT STORY when it comes to building a bike like this. In this case, it’s partly a personal one of years of training, not just in the skill of the craft but also in the study of another man and his company’s achievement: designing and building one of the most seminal motorcycles of all time, the Brough Superior SS100 Alpine Grand Sports. My relationship with this brand started about 15 years ago. I began building replica Castle forks for a couple of clients (Castle forks, the best forks of the time, were copied from a Harley-Davidson design but improved on by Brough and used exclusively by the Nottingham manufacturer); one building up an original Brough Superior SS80 missing its forks, and another building a replica SS100. Once…

THIS YEAR MARKS THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF one of this writer’s most satisfying International race victories. It was the Lightweight Battle of the Twins race, run on the steep bankings of the Daytona Speedway, in Cycle Week 1984, and was achieved on a quixotic creation whose improbable success was made more satisfying by being achieved on such a tight budget – when it was still possible to go World Championship racing all over Europe out of the back of a Transit van. Or actually, in the case of Maurice Ogier’s 600TT2 Laverda, out of the back of a three-cylinder, two-stoke Wartburg station wagon made in former East Germany that was equally individual, if considerably less high-tech than the bike it carried back and forth across the English Channel from Ogier’s base…

CBG WorkshopHints & tips FROM HUTCH'S WORKSHOP MY 1947 350 ENFIELD MODEL G had its rebuilt engine fitted back into the frame over the Christmas period, along with the gearbox and inner primary case. When the bike was stripped, what seems like an age ago, to get the engine out I just boxed and bagged all the primary parts without looking at them in any detail. It was the engine that needed the attention, but now they all need to go back together. Before the big strip, there were no problems that I recall with the clutch and primary drive in use when the bike was last ridden, though these things can always be masked by your attention being drawn to other, more serious issues. And I wouldn’t expect any…