Innehållsförteckning för December 2023 från Real Classic

There are many like me who like to continue their riding in winter. I purchase some heated socks from Heat Performance. The socks were bought primarily for skiing but they work equally well when motorcycling. They have a battery pack attached to the top of each sock and a remote control unit to adjust the heat setting. Low is pretty good in most conditions, medium is more like ‘toasty’ and high is only really for short use. On the low setting the batteries have enough power for around 10 hours; on medium they last 7 hours and between 4 and 5 hours on high. The UK site is heatperformance.co.uk and I have no connection with the company other than being a very happy customer with warm feet! Stu Thomson, member…

I had been casting around for a lighter bike with an electric foot for the usual reasons (age 84, arthritis, etc) having gradually descended from a BMW R100 through Royal Enfield Bullets to smaller classic Jap 250s. In his column in your sister magazine The Classic Motorcycle Roy Poynting had mentioned that he'd bought an AJS Tempest Roadster for holidays to hang on his camper van. He appeared satisfied with it and I value his opinions, so I went to check them over at a local dealer. The result was I bought one for its obvious quality of finish, lightness and for nostalgia as I had an Ajay 500 single back in the early 1960s and the good black enamel with gold lining seems superior to even that. Trolling back…

If you didn't read last month's instalment, go find a copy because there's invaluable information in there from Brian Pollitt of the BSAOC which you need to know before kicking any tyres and certainly before you splash any cash. In brief, built for little more than 18 months in 1962 and ‘63, the final version of BSA's pre-unit 650 twin was so good that people have been recreating the things ever since. Less than 1600 genuine Rocket Gold Stars were manufactured. If you search for one on the marketplace today you'll that find ‘replicas’ and ‘tributes’ out-number originals by around three to one. Hence provenance is everything: look for a long history and supporting documents which pre-date the classic boom years. Back in the 1990s, unscrupulous souls soon discovered that…

I was reading David Bullivant's letter in RC235. The bit about him getting his sidecar home rang a bell. In the late 1960s my next door neighbour, Ron, part-exchanged his Vespa for a beautiful BSA A10 fitted to a Busmar Astral sidecar in Nutley Blue. He had never driven a sidecar, nor had he ever changed gear with his foot. So he asked me to ride it home for him. Unfortunately, I had to work late on the allotted day. Ron didn't have a phone, so I rang home and asked my dad to tell Ron that I would do it the following day. However, when I arrived home the outfit was outside next door. I strolled over to inspect this lovely outfit and its proud owner came out to…

I recently charged a large Motobatt battery destined for a 850 Moto Guzzi. The battery was fairly new. I left it overnight and to my surprise found it completely dead in the morning. It was on a trickle charger delivering well below an amp. Why? Consulting the Motobatt website, they seem to stress that the charger must be intelligent and deliver exactly the right charge constantly during the charge period. I've since bought a Motobatt charger. My question is: if the battery needs this sophisticated device, then how does the charging system on a 1970s Guzzi or Norton manage to both charge and give the battery its correct service life? Incidentally a friend nearly lost his house due to a battery failure on his golf buggy. The fire brigade said…

I can go for a few months without reading anything but The Shed and PUBTalk in RC but I'm now in a devouring stage and I can't read enough. It's partly due to my work and lifestyle, partly due to the content of any given edition. I'm not really that interested in 1970s and 80s Oriental motorcycles. I think it was The Harley Sportster touring article that got me going again. Then along comes another Odgie series and I'm hooked in again – but it was the Dandy and the Matchless AFS articles that sparked a thought. Both speak of the idiosyncrasies and difficulties of riding these motorcycles. As does Odgie, thus the need to lighten the MaBSA. I love riding a motorcycle that challenges me. I love riding my…

Lots of Commando owners down the years have wondered how and why it took so long to fit a starter motor to the Commando. The Mk3 arrangement was the second attempt. Owners of many earlier models will have noticed a steel blanking plate covering the old magneto / points housing. Norton's first attempt at a self-starter drove through the timing gears, as did Triumph's rather later Bonneville T140 device. Sadly, the drive proved challenging when subjected to some serious testing. Top Chap in the test department was Bob Rowley, so we asked him to recount a little background. ‘I did a large amount of testing with that, when it worked it worked, but with the slightest sniff of a backfire it broke. The final failure came when I demonstrated its…

Like FW, I'm not a big fan of having no reserve fuel tap either, so I made a dipstick for my own Enfield EFI Electra. Starting with the bike on the centre stand, an empty tank, and the stick resting on the bottom of the tank angled to the right-hand side, I poured fuel in till the reserve light went out (about 2.5 litres) and marked the stick. Then I added another 5 litres and marked the stick again. Eh voila! Before setting off I can check quickly whether there's a gallon or more (or less) before I need to fill up. Generally I find that once filled, it'll be 200 miles before it hits the reserve light properly, ignore the flickering before that (feature of the model, sir!). The…

As an Italian motorcycle fan I much appreciate Stu Thomson's contributions to RC and his superb attention to detail. His latest project is a bit different from previous rebuilds, being a model I had never seen or heard of before. The Yamaha SZR Belgarda has a slightly more tenuous Italian connection, being a Japanese bike in Italian clothing. When Stu listed some rivals to this Japanese / Italian beauty, I was somewhat disappointed to see that he considered a Ducati Supermono and a Bimota, both of which cost a fortune in their time. As an MZ afficionado (see RC229 for my MZ story) I have owned several of their twostroke models, but also a four-stroke in the guise of a fully-faired Skorpion Traveller. The Skorpion range, designed in the UK…

Regular readers may already be aware of my near obsession with Triumph's tiddlers, in particular the Tiger Cub. I have owned many of these lively little machines over the years and you can read more about some of them in RC208 and on the Real-Classic.co.uk website. Some have been and gone but a handful have turned in to long-term keepers of various specifications. One of these is my Trials Cub replica. Inadvertently, over the years, one machine spawned another. The Cub seen here is not the one I originally bought for £80 when I was 15 years old, although it looks almost identical. That first – rather scruffy and well-used – off-road machine ended up on the road in my name just a couple of years later. When its tired…

Two events for the price of one this month, because there is no shortage of them at this time of year, but it does mean that there will be no ‘in the workshop’ bit for lack of space (which is also true of the workshop itself). That is not to say that there has been no progress of the Flying Flea resuscitation, for it has been progressing and is now a bit ahead of the reporting in this column. Perhaps some catching up can be done in a slack winter month? The veteran Invicta had been checked out as previously reported in this column, but that didn't prevent a disastrous start for this year's Pioneer Run! Before even arriving at Epsom the M25 had been missed, because picking up a…

FRANK WESTWORTH Well, it's like this. There are but a few things in life that a chap can never, ever refuse, and one of these is the offer of a free lunch. Free lunches are to be savoured, treasured even, and unless there are seriously serious reasons not to, I am always up for one. The only real excuse for refusal is distance or deadlines. I have been known to ride for a couple of hundred miles, tempted from rural isolation by the offer of a free meal. Fortunately, lunch this time involved a round trip of less than 40 miles. Not a problem for a chap with a Woodsman waiting, poised to provide raucous and bouncy transport along several miles of country lanes followed by an almost invigorating blast…

Motorcycling has spawned many subcultures. Choppers and café racers and classics and cruisers, streetfighters and sports bikes and scooters, adventure bikes and oops, ran out of alliteration there, sorry. Anyway, we all like what we like, and sometimes we like more than one thing, amazingly enough. There are many who fear that our young people are not getting into motorcycling the way that we did, for the sheer exhilaration of the thing. But then there is the fanbase around the Honda Grom. This is a Grom. Actually, it is a Honda MSX125, because that's the UK market name. In the USA they call it by the name Grom, which sounds like the name of a character from Game of Thrones, but it's now the accepted name for these little beasts…