Innehållsförteckning för November 2023 från Real Classic

There are times when I truly do doubt my own sanity. However, that has always been the case, it’s not a new thing. For example: today, a Sunday, the roads in Cornwall are decently dry and remarkably quiet, so what a great wheeze it would be to take the Commando - which returns to these blotchy pages next issue - out for a jolly spin, mainly to see whether my latest attempts to ‘tune’ it have been successful. The snag, of course, is that although I had reassembled the carbs and indeed refitted them, I’d not actually got around to replacing the fuel supply pipework. How hard can it be? Fret not, the whole sorry saga - and hopefully its solution - should appear in a future instalment of Idiot…

Someone gave my father an old VW when I was about five years old. Over a few years I watched him totally dismantle, clean, measure, repair and reconstruct that thing. My older brother’s friends started showing up on neat, wellengineered bikes from the Orient. My father’s appreciation for keen engineering overcame his wartime bias against Japanese and German products. He helped me buy a Triumph Mountain Cub which seldom ran and allowed me to get this Honda Super Hawk at the age of 13 in 1971. While other bikes came and went it stayed in many incarnations and was still running when I left it in the weeds behind a shed. I just finished a building a Superhawk engine and it will be on road soon. They are fine and…

If your memory is better than mine, you might recall that I had fitted a big bore engine into my Vincent Comet and replaced the Burman gearbox with aTriumph one. After an annoying piston seizure caused by a faulty BT-H magneto, I covered about a thousand miles with no further problems. I then decided to build a special around the big bore power unit and what Vincent call the ‘upper frame member’. This is basically an oil tank fitted with steering head bearings that bolts onto the top of the engine. My first job was to see if I could fit some modern forks, wheel and brakes. I bought Suzuki SV650 cycle parts and machined adapters to get the Suzuki bottom yoke to fit the Vincent upper frame member. I…

BSA ROCKET GOLD STAR PART THE FIRST ‘I’m not a Rocket Gold Star aficionado,’ said owner Andrew before we’d even started talking about his unique adventures with the final iteration of BSA’s pre-unit 650 twin. Despite building an RGS replica, and then resurrecting a genuine Rocket Goldie which emerged - somewhat the worse for wear - from the Manchester Ship Canal, Andrew is clear that ‘there are plenty of people who know far more than me. ‘The main problem with Rocket Goldies,’ he explains, ‘is the word “original”. Not everybody agrees on the definition and not everybody agrees on the specifications of a Rocket Goldie. There is a great deal of folklore about Rocket Goldies which has, to some extent, drowned out the facts. There are plenty of experts (and…

Frank’s reminiscences in RC234 about his motorcycling antecedents led me to do the same. I am writing this on 5th Oct, my 79th birthday. It was very early on a Wednesday morning 63 years ago that I first rode a motorcycle on the road. It was a BSA B31 and was a true example of a patinated relic long before ‘classic’ bikes had been created. The B31 was bought from Hooper’s Motorcycles on Jacob’s Wells Road in Bristol. This machine was followed by a series of challenging pieces of metal masquerading as motorcycles, often bought from many scrapyards still very much in evidence after WW2. As my income slowly increased I graduated to faster machines from some hands-on motorcycle dealers in Bristol during the 1960s. These were Kings of Oxford,…

A good friend, long ago, wrote a story for Another Magazine about his very own Vincent Comet. It was immaculate, sat alongside his other Vincent- a Shadow, I think-in his garage. He’d rebuilt and renovated the Comet because he felt that it would make an easier bike to ride on AJS & Matchless OC runs, where the Big Vin could be quite a handful. This never made much sense to me, not least because he also possessed more than one AMC roadster - as well as a couple of trials machines from the same stable. However, each to their own, as we enlightened folk have always said. His idea was that I would take out the Comet, he would take out the Shadow, and we would swap bikes so that…

YAMAHA / BELGARDA 660 You may have realised by now that I have an interest in Italian bikes. But does that interest encompass bikes which aren’t entirely Italian? The ones which display Italian influences or which were ‘only’ assembled in Italy? Think about those hand-built ‘Italian’ motorcycles like Bimotas. They often have Italian frames and running gear but use engines from Italian, Japanese and even Austrian manufacturers. In theory the builder chooses all the best bits from the best suppliers to make an ideal machine. That’s how the early motorcycle industry started in the first place, of course. The other description often used for such machines, usually in a derogatory way, is ‘parts-bin specials’ Like the Rocket Gold Star - seen elsewhere this issue - where bikes were built from…

If you have the memory of an actual elephant, and if you waste such a fine memory by remembering what I write about while recovering from dangerous escapades in The Shed, you might recall that when I acquired my obviously fabulous Royal Enfield Woodsman all of its paintwork was the same colour. This is, as you may know already, not entirely unusual. It looked nice, I thought, especially the unique and marvellously bizarre left-side panel, the one through which the exhaust wanders on its way to what Watsonian laughingly called a silencer. It’s not very silent. In fact it’s only silent when the engine’s not running, but a chap cannot have everything. Being an observant fellow with plainly too much time for idleness, I had observed that the exhaust pipe,…

Some years ago the BSAOC invested a large amount of members’ money in transferring the factory despatch books to microfiche. They have copies of each book giving details of almost all BSA motorcycles despatched between 1924 and 1973. When Brian Pollitt was the BSAOC’s dating officer he had a chance to examine the records to answer some common questions about the RGS – and hopefully dispel a few myths. For instance, how many were made? How many went to the USA? How many were scramblers? What colours were they? Did they all have GA10 frames? How long were they in production? ‘Apart from the first two test machines, all other Rocket Gold Stars have the frame number prefix GA10. The very first one was despatched on 31 January 1962 with…

Somebody wanted to know about the SUN, Well, there’s not a lot to know but we had one. In the early 1950s we four lads in a Lines village wanted wheels. I was first with a war-time Matchless G3 with girder forks. Low geared but quick off the mark. My mate, Albert, risked 12 quid on a 1936 Norton 16H which clattered and smoked, painted shed black. Getting the book, some tools and parts, we spannered away until we got it to do 70mph. Stopping in the dark, the exhaust stub glowed red! My little brother was rich and bought a nice DMW with a mighty Villiers motor and Earles-type forks. Very smooth. Young John found the Sun, also Villiers powered. A few years old, slim, red and chrome with…

I’ve been meaning for an age and a day to investigate the idea of signing up to a Blood Bikes group and, about a year ago, I finally got my derriere into a higher ratio and actually contacted a local group. I should, at this point, say that I undertook and achieved the RoSPA Gold motorcycle qualification many, many years ago sometime shortly after the scheme was introduced, probably some time in the eighties. So I got the Gold and have quoted the achievement every year when renewing or buying my multiple bike coverage (I rarely have fewer than four bikes on the road and ready to ride) and I’ve, hopefully, enjoyed the benefit of a small discount in recognition of the advantages of a formal riding ‘qualification’ ever since.…

1938 ZÜNDAPP K800 Since it emigrated to China back in 1984, Zündapp has become the forgotten brand in Germany’s two-wheeled history book. Yet after commencing bike production in 1922, it was for many years the country’s largest motorcycle manufacturer - albeit post-WW2 in the Western half only. As recently as 1977 they produced as many as 115,000 bikes in a single year, before sales of its by then predominantly two-stroke range suddenly slumped in the face of Japanese competition, sending it just seven years later into the hands of the liquidator. But for over six decades Zündapp was at the forefront of the German motorcycle industry, and it surely ranks alongside BSA, Norton, Indian, Moto Guzzi, Triumph, Gilera and Harley-Davidson, as well as its BMW rival, as one of the…

MOTOGIRO D’ITALIA Prticipating in the legendary Motogiro d’Italia has been near the top of my bucket list for years. Listening to my friends rave about their experiences on the ride made me deeply jealous - riding classic motorcycles around Italy for a week sounded like a wonderful dream come true. The logistical and financial challenges of making such a pilgrimage from my home in Texas and securing a suitable motorcycle for the ride had kept my dream on hold. Miraculously, the stars aligned towards the end of summer 2022 when my mate, Mateo, presented me with an irresistible offer. He’d bought a lovely little home in Montefegatesi, a charming ancient town near Pisa, and generously offered to host me and provide a loan classic bike if I registered for the…

MATCHLESS-BSA FLAT-TRACKER PART THE FIRST…