Innehållsförteckning för September 2024 från Classic Bike Guide

Welcome GREETINGS ALL, MAY YOUR OIL BE merrily returning and your plugs a lighter shade of pale. All of us here in the Classic Bike Guide gang hope you’re finding the time or excuses to get out for a ride. Yes, there are the myopic holidaymakers to avoid with rabid kids in the back seat, and the harvest means that if you see a tractor or farm machinery, keep out of their way… the drivers have probably been up much longer than you! But hey, a few hazards on the road keep you concentrating, so they say. Oli’s been resting and recuperating, but we’ve been finding the excuses. The BSA B31 is still great for local journeys and the back road runs, as well as our ‘chippy’ trips to Wells…

Guerilla warfare Have you been idly musing about how Royal Enfield would respond to the launch of the incredibly popular Triumph 400 singles? Muse no more, for Enfield has launched a modern middleweight roadster – the Royal Enfield Guerilla 450. The 40bhp 450 is powered by the new 452cc single-cylinder, liquid-cooled Sherpa engine from the latest Himalayan adventure bike. It has a four-valve DOHC set-up and a six-speed gearbox It also features a stepped bench-seat, 11-litre fuel tank, LED headlights, indicators with integrated tail lamp and an upswept silencer. Royal Enfield’s designers have given it a stripped-down look, a low seat and mid-set footpegs. The conventional 43mm telescopic front fork is paired with a mono-shock at the rear and there are 17-inch alloy wheels. Making a break from RE’s usual…

BSA WAS TASKING BERT HOPWOOD IN THE 1950s to develop new visually and technically innovative motorcycle concepts. Said engineer doesn’t really need any introduction in classic motorcycle circles. Many a Norton buff will know that Hopwood penned the firm’s legendary Dominator parallel twin post-Second World War. He joined BSA in May 1948, then the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer, to take on the role of its chief engineer. Eager to pump new blood into BSA’s product range, in 1949 Hopwood sketched a 250cc horizontal cylinder single with short overhead camshafts, simply coded the MC1. The same year, another great designer, Doug Hele, also transferred from Norton to BSA. He was subsequently given free rein by Hopwood in 1950 to turn the MC1 concept into reality as the template for a possible range…

THE SHETLAND SHOW IS A JOY, A CLASSIC vehicle fan’s paradise. Many classic riders and drivers come on the ferry, but most exhibitors are local, and many local classic owners have more than one machine to show off. The cars – and farm machinery and traction engines – sit around, burnished and beautiful in the early summer sunshine. The condition of everything has to be seen to be believed… why does Shetland have so many amazing classics? For a good part of the year, the weather there is challenging, and you might not want to take to the road. In winter, the sun does not rise, and it stays close to darkness all day long. What better thing to do with your time in such circumstances but retire to your…

If you watch MotoGP or British Superbikes, or even waltz into your local dealership these days, you are most likely to see aerodynamic aids – or wings. The science behind these winglets is incredible. Because a bike doesn’t stay in one place, tilting around corners and pitching for acceleration and deceleration, they must be useful when needed, yet not work against the rider in another situation. They also work in conjunction with the carefully designed fairing and seat unit to help the rider slip through the air in the cleanest way possible on the straights. And you can see that while most manufacturers are doing things slightly differently, they haven’t got it right yet. But it is nothing new. In the 1980s, the superb New Zealand engineer John Britten had…

ROYAL ENFIELD’S UNIQUE STATUS AS A manufacturer with a range mostly consisting of making yesterday live again in a modern context means that its bikes naturally lend themselves to period customising. Except you don’t need to worry about rejuvenating the worn-out mechanics of a yesteryear model when building an Enfield Custom – just take a brand-new bike off a dealer’s showroom floor and you’re ready to go. Hence the groundswell of interest by customisers in using bikes powered by RE’s new-gen J-series 350cc air/oil-cooled two-valve SOHC single-cylinder Euro 5+ compliant motor. But for serious retro bike builders, older is often better, resulting in ever more of its previous-generation air-cooled OHV pushrod singles to appear in highly modified and ultra personalised form, often featuring in bike building competitions all over the…

■ CBG Workshop THE TRIUMPH IS NOW UNBENT but awaiting a proper paintjob when time and funds allow. The Aermacchi starts after only a couple of dozen or so kicks, the Moto Guzzi is as reliable as ever, the Morini is earmarked with ‘winter project’ status in the dining room, and I have sold the Starfire, somewhat unexpectedly. Which left me with some time for my long-neglected Yamaha XS650 Special, which has been sitting in the back of the shed for patiently awaiting resurrection. It ran when parked, as they say, so I popped in a freshly charged battery, recklessly added some fresh E5, and pushed the starter. And it started. Admittedly on only one cylinder. Petrol gushed from the left-hand float bowl drain tube, and I also noticed that…

CBG Your smokin' guide to... LONG, LONG AGO, IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY… OKAY, so it was a mere half-century ago and the galaxy was actually the county of Somerset, which is hardly alien at all when considered from most angles, but I thought this was a striking – not to say silly – way to introduce a tale about what must be Triumph’s least likely twin. And it was indeed just over that half-century ago that my pals (names removed to protect the guilty) were negotiating with a civvy employee of HM Forces to liberate a tiny stack of BSA spares from the large army camp at Norton Fitzwarren. As you may know, of course, the camp is long gone and with it the impressively huge stack of…

CBG Your super-orange guide to: SOME PEOPLE LIKE A CHALLENGE, AND Rob Harrison’s Triumph X-75 Hurricane is his first British motorcycle restoration. “I’ve wanted one ever since I saw a picture of one in a copy of a book called Superbikes of the 1970s,” he said. Not only is his first British restoration, but it is also his first British bike. After a series of spectacular projects – an early Honda CB750 built from an engine and a few boxes of bits, an H2 Kawasaki Triple, and a Z1B – he landed on the Triumph and entered a whole new world. Rob’s Hurricane was built in October 1972, shipped to Baltimore on November 13 that year, and then sat in a showroom in Chicago until March 1973 before it was…

LIKE MANY PREWAR BRITISH MOTORCYCLE manufacturers, Rudge-Whitworth did not survive the Second World War. Having started out as two separate bicycle manufacturers in the Victorian era, the firm subsequently went on to build some astonishingly fast and very high-quality motorcycles. Most notable was the 500cc Ulster, which had a four-valve cylinder head and the innovation of radial exhaust valves from 1932. The sophisticated 500cc cylinder head was ‘bimetal,’ using a bronze skull with an aluminium rocker tray and fins cast on. Produced in parallel (Special) and semi-radial (Ulster) versions, both had ‘Ulster porting’ for extra performance. The Ulster had an oil feed to the head to the rear of the pushrod tube, while Special heads had the oil feed to the front of the pushrod tube and used a larger…

MONTROSE, TUESDAY AT ABOUT 5.30PM, there’s rain… and I hit the road with a mighty whack on my left shoulder. There is some crunching of glass and plastic, and the engine stalls. The lady in the car behind kindly stops and blocks the road, and a bloke runs over and does the “don’t try to move” thing. I manage to get my visor up and splutter that I haven’t hit my head and could someone please help get the bike off my leg. I am helped up, and there is the tell-tale smell and blue sheen on the road of spilt diesel. The bike is wheeled to the side of the road, and I think my arm and knee are hurt. The lady calls for an ambulance, but it seems…

■ CBG WorkshopPart Two ROUGHLY HALFWAY INTO MY TR6 rebuild, ‘third hand Ian’ turned up to help me muscle the bulky engine back into the frame. The front mounting bolt slotted into place much as expected, but the lower one kept jamming as we attempted to tap it home using a rubber mallet. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent we had damaged the bolt’s thread when we could no longer turn its nut by finger pressure alone. Frustrated, I removed the bolt and spacers, and cleaned up the threads using an old grinding paste trick. Frustratingly, the restored bolt jammed again on our second attempt. We then jiggled the loose engine about using a long tyre lever while we wiggled the sticking bolt through its frame and engine mounts, aided by…

TIME WAS THAT I WOULD BUY NON-running bikes because they were all I could afford. Sometimes they got fixed. Other times, the grim reaper of defeat trotted in, laughing, and the sorry wreck was either passed on to a friend or returned to the breakers, where it had been before I wasted (much) time and (very little) money on it. Subsequently, I bought non-running bikes because it was the only affordable way to acquire a machine I actually wanted – like an AJS 650 CSR twin, for example – rather than what I could afford in a running condition. Like an AJS Model 14, for instance. It was also mostly fun and introduced me to very many like-minded lunatics who revelled in returning old junkers to the road. Some were…