Innehållsförteckning för March 2022 från Real Classic

I took delivery of a Honda CX500 in April 1980, the first new bike I had owned then (and I have only owned two!). I could just about afford it, with some redundancy money and the sale of my BSA Thunderbolt. Before then I’d always owned British bikes, BSA in particular. I wish I hadn’t sold the Thunderbolt. She was a beauty: a 1970 model with lots of chrome and a great front brake. At the time most of my biking mates rode Japanese bikes and had a tendency to skit at British bikes: ‘They leak oil and are always breaking down.’ My Thunderbolt did neither. As I recall it was always my tools which I carried to fix their bikes: they didn’t need tools because their bikes never broke…

It was 1971. I was fully 16 years old and I had my very first motorcycle; 50 quid very well invested on a fiery bolide, the legendary 1965 BSA Bantam 175 D7. But what I really really wanted was a BSA Rocket 3, one of the Flash Gordon ones with ray gun silencers, metallic red paint, 130mph and everything. One day, it would be mine. It was 2021 (tempus really does fugit like the flaming clappers). I decided on a capricious whim that I would shift my perfectly working and fully usable Triumph TSS 750, together with my BSA B25. They were flogged on unmercifully to finance the machine that was my adolescent flying fastness. I visited the good offices of a well-known internet auction site, together with my good…

I had an idea floating around for quite a while about how to improve the 6” sis brakes fitted to various Redditch-made bikes in the mid-1950s to early 1960s. The standard brake, the one with the floating brake cam bush, isn’t too bad when correctly set up per the book, but there’s room for improvement. I started thinking along the lines of 2ls brakes – but using only RE parts that were available when the bike was in production. I did a series of drawings and finally ended up with a design using modified RE brake cams. One side of the cam would be filled in to create a half-moon shape that would act as the new anchor for a brake shoe, the brake anchor itself being replaced with another…

Oh my, a T150! In my slightly unusual motorcycle world, the sight of a Trident awaiting the placement of my posterior upon its padded bottom perch is always a welcome sight. More than that, the sound of a Trident idling on three cylinders is even more welcome, if a little less common. Why the welcome vibes? Because I always enjoy riding Tridents, particularly Tridents belonging to someone else. My experience of actually living with the UK’s best effort at a 1970s superbike has been – shall we say – patchy. But if their idiosyncrasies are someone else’s problem, than hooray and off we go. And of course this is an unusual Trident. Not that they aren’t all unusual, almost by definition, but this one is a 1972 T150V with a…

War’s good for business, sad to say, provided your factory doesn’t get bombed, and your workforce isn’t conscripted to go and fight on the front line. So building motorcycles for your nation’s Armed Forces has always been a prized endeavour for any manufacturer, especially in peacetime, albeit often achieved against the stiffest of competition from rival firms in terms of price, delivery times and overall performance in the all-important comparative tests with rival products. Leaving aside the obvious benefits in terms of prestige and brand recognition, it’s prized because once you’ve won the contract to supply the bikes in question, you then have a substantial ongoing order which can form the crux of your business, and underpin it for years to come. Well, provided you quoted a really profitable price,…

When it came to rebuilding the engine, the vast number of bikes sold in the US (over 500,000) meant there was no shortage of ‘How To’ videos on YouTube. I made notes and realised I’d wasted money on a piston ring compressor – fitting the barrels can be accomplished with nothing more sophisticated than a lollipop stick! The worst part of the rebuild turned out to be removing the ancient baked-on gaskets. This really is an accursed job with no obvious shortcuts if you want to preserve the mating surfaces. I saved time and money by not splitting the camchain, since it is possible to wriggle the camshaft out once the end bearings are removed. The stuck starter motor was caused by the commutator breaking up, so a replacement was…

➤ WE WANT MORE STORIES about real life classic bikes. We like profiles of a single model or a comparison of two machines. Most magazine features are between 1000 and 2500 words. If your story is much longer then it’s probably not for us. Shorter stories appear in the letters section. ➤ TO SEE WHAT WE MEAN look at the Dunstall Commando or Honda CX articles in this issue. ➤ DON’T WORRY about your writing, grammar or punctuation; we’ll make sure that your article reads the right way. Just concentrate on telling a good story and we’ll do the rest. ➤ INCLUDE AS MUCH INFO as possible. Tell the RC readers exactly what model your classic bike is, when it was built and its history since then. What condition was…

The years of the Great War were relatively good to the Birmingham Small Arms company. As a gun manufacturer that may appear obvious, but they were helped by what some may regard as a rather shortsighted failure of the British government to pay attention to world events. It had run down stocks and was in the process of doing away with the old Lee Enfield rifle and replacing it with… er… the German Mauser. The upscaling of arms production to overcome this shortcoming was quite staggering, with BSA eventually knocking out in impressive 10,000 Lee Enfield rifles a week, along with 2000 Lewis machine guns. Throw in the BSA folding bicycle used by troops in the conflict, plus military motorcycles used everywhere from Flanders to South Africa, and BSA were…

My plan for this month’s Shedisode had been to confront your disbelieving gaze with endless shots of the Sunbeam and me, its endlessly delighted rider, drifting down the sunny winter lanes of North Cornwall. Without a care in the world – apart from possibly potential frostbite. However. The answers to my Sunbeam struggles have so far failed to materialise, so I shall instead tell you again how great is our T25SS, possibly the greatest Triumph ever made. It’s great. Are you convinced? Thought not. Last month I left you as I returned from a sparky spin around the lanes aboard this very machine, sparks restored and sparking in pretty much the right place, judging by the whizz that the little bike has. And that’s true: it’s certainly decently rapid, especially…