Innehållsförteckning för May 2018 från Real Classic

You might have wondered how far the retro styling thing could go, or how bad it could get. Last night I found out. We watched a programme called the ‘Frankie Drake Mysteries’ and the heroine rode a strange bike called a Janus. It left a trail of smoke and sounded like the fabled 500 Norton from the limerick and was hideous in the extreme. I googled it and they are made in Goshen Indiana. The model Frankie rode is powered (if that is the correct word) by a 50cc moped engine. It seems they make a whole range of these abominations, the latest powered by a Chinese 250. I could include a picture but you might be tempted to put in the mag. I dare you – on second thoughts…

There’s a much quoted adage from the ocean racing yacht world. ‘How do you make a small fortune from yacht racing?’ ‘Start with a big one!’ If the adage applies to super yachts then it is even more apposite for a privately-funded Formula 1 car racing team. If you really want to up your game, become a motorcycle manufacturer when you have absolutely zero expertise or prior experience. Then you really can whizz through some serious piles of cash. This is just what Thomas Alexander Fermor-Hesketh, the Third Baron Hesketh, managed to do… and with some considerable aplomb. Lord Hesketh inherited 3300 acres of Northamptonshire countryside including the Grade I listed Easton Neston House, Towcester racecourse and the entire village of Hulcote. After briefly working as a stockbroker in San…

Back in 2013, I was living in New Zealand and scanning the online auctions. I came across a 1949 Triumph 5T which, although it wasn’t pristine and shiny, was original and almost complete. I contacted the seller, who explained the story behind the bike. He was in his late 60s and was the second owner. His father bought the Speed Twin new from Tozer, Kelmsley and Melbourne in Wellington on 17th June 1949. I flicked off a bid, and two agonising days later got an email confirming the bike was mine. The owner had agreed to get the bike MoT’d and re-registered as it hadn’t been on the road for 10 years, but he ran into a bureaucratic nightmare which stopped that. I thought this wouldn’t be a problem as…

Spurred on by the success of refurbishing the instruments and their pods, I thought about painting the side panels and the fuel tank – the tinware – and wondered: How hard can it be? I had zero experience of painting anything apart from the usual, uninteresting jobs around the house to score Brownie points. It was obvious that there were three important factors to obtaining a good finish: preparation, preparation, preparation. The tinware with its various dints and dents was duly prepared with lots of fine surface filler and even more rubbing down. Let’s face it: this work isn’t particularly interesting. There’s plenty of advice out there, which I ignored except for one truly excellent gem: use Klingspoor wet and dry paper. When you think you’ve reached a point where…

Back before Brooklands awarded a gold star to a BSA single; long before Valentine Page designed the Empire Star and its siblings; before even the Blue Star was born, BSA were sticking stars on their special motorcycle engines. Legend has it that this procedure started unofficially with a fitter who wanted to keep track of the motors which had upgraded engine internals. It caught on and was adopted as an official factory process, developing into something of a selling point in the showroom. The small red star stamped on an engine or gearbox demonstrated to the customer that his machine really was equipped with the performance parts which commanded a price premium. That was important in the cash-strapped days of the Great Depression, when the ‘works tuning service’ typically cost…

It may be impossible to comprehend now, but there once existed a time when Harley-Davidson was just another motorcycle. The marque was well-known right from the beginning for sure, and earned popularity by doing what most successful makers did; racing, taking risks, and by welcoming the priceless gift of publicity. Harley was ahead of the game when motorcycling’s market shifted from simple utility to lifestyle, from pure function to personalised status symbol. The Wisconsin manufacturer attracted more wild riders and would-be outlaws than its competitors. The latter scene was born in Hollywood, and the resulting public perception of ‘the kind of person who rides a Harley’ also signals where many buyers were lost. At least, those buyers who aren’t drawn to generating that kind of attention. That isn’t to say…

New Year’s Day saw me, as usual, with camera at the Vintage Stony event, busily looking for motorcycles that I hadn’t photographed before. Leaning insouciantly on its sidestand was a machine with the word ‘Bandit’ on its sidepanels. Photographs were taken, confident that I recalled something about a BSA with that name. The engine was an 1965 A65 twin – so I should be able write confidently about it for the RC website. It was therefore something of a surprise to find that BSA had never made a Bandit. The Bandit would have been a Triumph, and BSA’s version of the same machine was called a Fury. Confusion reigned and I turned to RCHQ Bude. Thereafter, thanks to the wonders of the information superhighway, I not only discovered who the…

A lot of people don’t know about the Triumph T15 149cc Terrier, which arrived on the scene a year before its much better known ‘sports’ version, the 199cc T20 Tiger Cub. In its rather short day the Terrier had very good performance, much better than the available two-strokes of similar capacity. The Gaffers’ Gallop of 1953 proved this when three senior factory men did an End-to-End ride (plus a bit more at either end), to record 1008 miles over five days, at an average speed of just under 37mph and an average fuel consumption of just over 108mpg… and all without the benefit of motorways – which had not been invented. As I have got older (but not necessarily wiser) and increasingly weaker, I have found the light weight, good…

Praise the lords for the genuinely expert among us. They walk, largely unrecognised, in a permanent sunshine of admiration – at least from me. And here’s why… Frustrated beyond belief by the endless wrestling with some of the parts fitted to the Matchless CSR I’d originally intended to take for a ride on the very last day of last year, and completely bewildered by the discovery that its carb should be held on by bolts, not studs, and that the plainly stock bolts on a replacement inlet manifold I acquired were correct – and that the threads were not BSC – I faced two stark alternatives. Seek expert advice or imbibe strong drink in large quantities. After a pleasantly short but fraught hangover I recovered, and dropped a begging email…

AN ARMY INDIAN Greetings from a former colony! I thought RC readers might find this interesting. According to the owner, who’s been pursuing this bike for 25 years, in 1940/41 the US army called on American manufacturers to produce a bike for the war effort. The specs included shaft drive for use in sandy environments – beaches, deserts, etc. Harley-Davidson produced the XA model with shaft drive and a horizontally opposed engine, the same as BMW. Indian motorcycles produced this, the 841. Shaft drive, sidevalve engine disposed across the frame, 750cc. This design arrangement pre-dates Moto Guzzi’s big twins by about 35 years. They produced 1000 examples for army testing. Then the Jeep four-wheeler was put forward, and no contracts were issued. The current owner has rebuilt the Indian with…

Enlivened by Frank’s comment that he thought Rowena’s BSA B25SS was a good-looking little bike, I just had to put paw to keypad. It may well be a decent bike to ride, but to me it looks like a load of disparate parts thrown together in desperation. I mean, that dangling throttle cable – really? – and the blobby tank which looks like the front right corner underneath has been bent up to miss the aluminium… thing… is that the famous electrical box? Wow. RealUgly. At least that fuel tank has been replaced now by something a bit better-looking. So what is my response? The Honda CL250SC, which belongs to my own other half! We think it is a neat little bike of the same sort of street scrambler-ish genre,…

➤ 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…