Innehållsförteckning för April 2018 från Real Classic

One of the very many perks of a magazine editor’s job is that I get to read all the stories first. And you may be surprised to learn that I have no system for choosing which I read first – usually the word processor lists them alphabetically, so that’s the order in which they get read. So Three Threes was a long way down the list. But it was well worth the wait. Martyn Roberts’ views of his bikes are as fascinating as owners’ views so often are. Read it and you’ll see what I mean. Initially, I scratched my head and wondered whether it was legitimate to compare a T150 Trident and an early Hinckley equivalent? Then … the Suzuki? And of course it is: comparisons are entirely legitimate…

SUPER SUNBEAM! I thoroughly enjoyed Frank’s article about the Sunbeam S7 but was rather amused by his comments on the cruising speed. Let me take you back to the early 1970s when I was an apprentice at the Copenacre Royal Naval Stores Depot just outside of Bath. Riding home, I regularly encountered a diminutive figure hunched over a plunger Bantam with ace bars, riding very quickly. His racing lines through the lanes and his ability to maintain momentum was superb. It turned out that Mike Curtis also worked at Copenacre and kept hinting darkly that he was working on something very special. One day he turned up on a very tidy S8; that evening he flew past my Matchless G80S, riding with the same panache he had on the Bantam.…

When and where: those are the key variables which dictate exactly how much you’ll pay for a classic British bike. It used to be that the precise model year and condition were all-important – and they still hold a lot of sway – but being in the right place at the right time can make a massive difference. If you want a bike built before 1930 which qualifies for the Banbury Run then there is no escaping the inevitable price premium which these machines attract. But if you want a girder / rigid motorcycle with vintage virtues and aren’t too fussy about its year of manufacture then you will definitely find one for our £5000 budget. You need to scour the regional sales; avoid the obviously over-priced machines on eBay…

Ah, the venerable AMC gearbox. More stalwart than superstar, it works well and gives years of service without complaint or need for attention. Even so, there comes a time when a strip down and overhaul is worthwhile, even if only to renew oil seals and wearing parts such as the kickstart pawl. AMC’s gearbox first appeared on AJS and Matchless models in 1956. It was designed in 1953 following the AMC takeover of Norton, but its origins go back to Burman and even Sturmey-Archer gearboxes. It is simple, robust and works well. Although more than adequate for the AMC and Norton singles and twins through to the 60s, the gearbox was pushed to, and arguably beyond, its limits with the Commando range. Nonetheless, it continued in use through to the…

For BMW, a brand synonymous with air-cooled boxer twin engines, the 1980s presented a major problem. Their venerable twins had powered them to commercial success for decades, selling the concept of a high-end ‘complete motorcycle’ to a sophisticated and wealthy clientele. This was easy in the 1960s and early 70s when the competition was often an air-cooled twin itself but, as the latter decade drew to a close, it seemed obvious that the future didn’t include a pair of sticky-out cylinders. The opposition had caught up with clever four-cylinder engines and were offering their own vision of the future. BMW’s domination of the sports-tourer niche was under threat. Bikes like Kawasaki’s GTR1000 and Honda’s Gold Wings made the Bavarian pushrod twins look and feel antiquated, so a new design was…

It’s always difficult when life takes over and make us ‘time-poor’. Perhaps this is made worse when we have to give up on projects that we have enjoyed and always looked forward to completing and riding one day. Selling bikes has never been easy for me. I want to keep them all – doesn’t everybody! When the time came to be realistic about things and let somebody else have a go at doing what I couldn’t, I was very interested to know that my bike was going to a good home and would be well-looked after. Imagine what a tremendous surprise it was to see my old BMW R65 on the front cover of RC167 in both ‘before’ and ‘after’ poses. How fantastic it is to see what a wonderful…

Although it obviously pleases me when people like my bikes, any outside appreciation isn’t why I build them. I build my bikes to please myself. In fact, I build my bikes to impress myself. In my head, I’m still the enthusiastic but unskilled teenage kid throwing junk together in his dad’s garage. I did up my first bike in 1965 when I was eleven, built my first chopper at 17, and I’ve never really stopped cutting bikes up since. And I still feel like that kid. Despite 50-odd years of hacksawing and spannering, moving on to welding and fabricating, moving on to designing and constructing, even starting my own bike-building business, until in the end I could create a complete motorcycle from simply bits of an engine and a large…

In 2010 a chap called Stuart Hooper achieved 139mph on his beautifully streamlined 700cc Velocette, beating the previous record for a Velocette set back in 1971. Stuart then went on to establish further records on a supercharged version of the machine, reaching an awesome 193.061mph more recently. That’s an amazing achievement on a beautiful machine, one which is light years away from the previous holder’s motorcycle. However it begs the question as to who had previously held the accolade for The World’s Fastest Velocette. Herbert James Munro is best remembered for his 1920 Munro Special, The World’s Fastest Indian. What is not widely known is that while Burt was working and competing on his Indian Special, he also applied the same obsession to a 1936 500cc Velocette MSS. In 1971…

From May 20th this year, your 40 year-old classic motorcycle (or car, for that matter) will no longer need to pass an annual MoT test provided it’s registered as ‘historic’. Previously the cut-off date for vehicles no longer needing an MoT has been 1960, but following government consultation last year the exemption from the roadworthiness test has been extended to cover almost all vehicles with the taxation class ‘historic’. We’re going to look at the reasoning behind this change, the implications for old bike riders, and the exceptions to the rule that might catch us out. And just for fun, we’re going to put a 65 year-old BSA through the modern MoT, just to see what happens. WHY THE CHANGE? We all agree that vehicles used on the roads need…

The recent spate of interest in AMC hybrids (in RC166) seems to have largely ignored the fact that some were sent out dressed up in AJS livery. In 1970, I gave £120 for a four year-old AJS to take me to college from Dorset to Bedfordshire. The machine was, if I recall correctly, designated as a 1966 33 CS – not CSR – and it was an electric blue, AJS badged, Norton Atlas-engined, low geared, vibratory stump-puller of a motorcycle. It featured low-level exhausts with Norton silencers and that wonderful AMC primary chaincase – totally accessible and utterly oil-tight. The tank wasn’t the beautiful competition version on last month’s Matchless-badged bike, but a 3.5 gallon road item. Carburation was supplied by a pair of Monoblocs, one chopped, so with a…

➤ WE WANT TO PUBLISH more stories about real life classic bikes. You don’t need to be an inspired writer to see your story in RealClassic, but you do need to say something relevant. We like profiles about a single model (or maybe two very similar ones; a pair of Triumph twins, for example), which should be at least 1000 words in length. Most RC features are between 1000 and 2500 words. If your story is longer than that then it’s heading towards being a series (or a book!). If your thoughts run to under 1000 words then they’ll probably appear in the letters section. ➤ TO SEE WHAT WE MEAN look at Oily Boot Bob’s Crusader stories, the Velo MAC or Norton Big4 articles in RC142. These are just…

Commando. What better name for a motorcycle? Unlike Johann Foreigner, to whom a commando or ‘Kommando’ is, among other meanings, a dreary work detachment, to those of us in the English-speaking world, it is a dare-devil combatant, an unseen hero, someone to venture behind enemy lines when things are getting a little sticky. And things were getting sticky for Norton in the mid-60s. The Japanese invasion was in full swing, the parent company, AMC, was in financial doggy-doo, and Norton desperately needed a new machine. Stefan Bauer, the then new big cheese at Norton’s engineering department, was tasked with developing a new bike to fit this bill. Working with some of the best brains in the industry, a new bike was designed, which was eventually given the moniker Commando. Like…

I was once told at a continental bike rally that I was brave to travel such a distance on an Enfield twin without spare cylinder head gaskets, particularly as I was carrying a passenger, camping equipment and tools. I was quite new to the bike and perhaps blissfully unaware of this problem. Some months later when I was removing the cylinder heads in preparation for a rebore, I found a clever modification to the solid copper head gaskets (the barrels and heads are separate on RE twins) which may have helped my long distance trouble-free touring. The thickness of the copper had been reduced for a large part of the gasket, leaving a 3/8” wide band nearest to the cylinder hole and around the pushrod locations. I recalled a conversation…