Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2023 i Classic Bike Guide

GOOD DAY, OH FINE FANS OF OLD BIKES. September has been hot and dry, so we hope you’ve been making the most. Our month started with the incredible Goodwood Revival. Maria and I are car and bike nuts, and love dressing up for no good reason. The show was great, racing was competitive, and I love seeing car enthusiasts enjoying the Barry Sheene memorial bike races, with the riders having a right ding-dong. In the paddock we bumped into CBG contributor Chad, racing on a Manx Norton and TT winner, show compere and CBG friend Steve Plater coming second on his Matchless G50 with Glen English! It’s not a cheap weekend, but we think this truly unique event is worth every penny. Thank you to all who have contributed to…

STRAIGHT AWAY I NEED TO REVEAL THAT MY experiences with UK-built Royal Enfield twins have not been entirely positive. I’ve been trying to work out whether the ratio of good’uns to bad’uns is actually any different for RE big twins than for any of their more commonplace contemporary competitors, yet no answer springs to mind. But maybe a full third of the big Redditch bruisers to have been graced by my fundament have been less than delightful, sadly. Most of the others were okay, including a rather handsome maroon machine with the full Airflow treatment – properly factory-fitted weather protection – which I seriously considered buying. Until it ran onto a single cylinder as I returned it to base. Likewise, my very first-ever commissioned (and paid-for!) road-riding feature involved a…

ART IS AN EXPANSIVE WORD. Most admire painting as art, while others see landscaping or photography as an art form, too. For many in our world, or who have tried it, TIG welding to the level you see illustrated around these words is clearly an art form, especially when contained within bespoke exhausts, with a multitude of angles, on different planes, that must be the same length if the part is to fit, performance is to be untouched or even bettered, with a sound that stirs the owner at a level they want. To me, as a package, this is art. Tom Hitchcox wouldn’t necessarily agree with the above piffle, but he does take enormous pride in what Hitchcox Motorcycles creates – beautiful exhaust systems. The idea started from Tom’s…

CBG Workshop In the workshop A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF US WHO run bikes with hydraulic brakes may have done the odd refurbishment. Perhaps a caliper rebuild or possibly a master cylinder overhaul – but how easy was it to get those brake lines apart? That old bike in the back of the garage may not be too keen on being overhauled. Similarly, if you bought your latest project in pieces, or you took a punt on some brake parts online, chances are corrosion may have set in. Brake fluid is notoriously hygroscopic, meaning it absorbs moisture, which swiftly leads to dissimilar metals reacting to form a galvanic cell, i.e., a corrosion welded joint. Older bikes and cars may have steel pipe fittings connecting the various parts, with nickel pipes, and…

The rider of this Matchless V-twin, sidevalve outfit found himself passing the two soldiers and a lady walking to a country station, one of the men being trench-bound again after seven days’ leave. The sidecar owner insisted on taking the trio the remainder of their journey, a distance of two and a half miles. The registration points to the North West London area, but there are many Black Lion pubs, not to mention the many that will have closed in the last 95 years or so. It would certainly have given the lads a story to tell the boys back in the trenches.…

BONNEVILLE. MONSTER. COMMANDO. VESPA. Bullet. A select list of motorcycle and scooter models so iconic in their own right that adding the name of the manufacturer is simply redundant. The Royal Enfield Bullet may have been ‘resting’ since 2020, when the last-ever 500cc version was manufactured, but this was a mere hiccup in the Bullet’s unrivalled claim to be the motorcycle with the longest continuous production run in history, ever since its 1932 debut. And now the Bullet returns to Royal Enfield dealers around the world as an all-new design, based on RE’s latest generation J-Series air/oil-cooled 349cc long-stroke single-cylinder motor. This was introduced three years ago in the Meteor 350, with high bars and forward-mounted footrests as a custom hors d’oeuvre to the main dish. That came one year…

BOLTING A SIDECAR TO A TWO-WHEELER predates the motorcycle. There are two claims to being the creator of the first sidecar, one from 1883. Firstly, in the USA, GW Pressey of New Jersey, creator of the Star bicycle, a sort-of reversed penny farthing, with the small wheel at the front. He attached a side seat and wheel to his bicycle so he could take his wife out for rides. The Star has a further claim to fame as being one of the first motorcycles, being fitted with a steam engine by one Lucius Copeland, who then turned it into his own steam tricar in 1888. The other claim on inventing the sidecar as we know it was by a French army officer who came up with a similar bicycle attachment…

CBG Workshop In the workshop RECENT USE OF MY BSA B25 Starfire indicated that things weren’t quite running as they should. There was a certain amount of smoke coming out of the exhaust and sticky deposits were collecting around the tailpipe, which, to me, implied excessive oil consumption. The engine is also very noisy, and although I’m told ‘they all do that’, it does concern me. This article is about the frustrations of working on an old bike – and why you should never jump to conclusions about what’s wrong. My initial deduction was that the bores were worn, and that the clattering noise was piston slap. Work had already been carried out to replace the valves, springs, collets and guides when a valve had snapped. I resolved to pull…

FOR REASONS THAT ARE HARD TO FATHOM, American motorcycle manufacturers seem to struggle making motorcycles that are not big V-twins, with established companies resorting to foreign firms to provide small and medium-capacity bikes. Most famously, Harley-Davidson bought Aermacchi, while Indians had a small sidevalve single made by Blackpool’s Brockhouse to sell as an Indian, tried a Vincent engine, and imported rebadged Royal Enfields. In the Clymer years, Indians came with engines from Velocette and Royal Enfield and Italjet frames, and there were Taiwanese-made two-stroke Indian tiddlers. One of the more unusual efforts to slap on the Stars and Stripes was American Eagle Motorcycles – a great name for a motorcycle company, even if it didn’t actually make any motorcycles. It was established in 1967 by former Honda and Suzuki concessionaire…

ROYAL ENFIELD IS THE SMALLEST OF the four indigenous Indian motorcycle manufacturers in numbers of bikes (no scooters!), behind Hero, Bajaj and TVS in that order. But it’s the only one to market larger-capacity four-stroke models, 350cc and up, so has a much higher-than-average sticker price for each bike delivered to its customers. A total of 88% of these are in India; any Royal Enfield is very much a status symbol in a country where 67% of the 1.43 billion inhabitants (which has now officially overtaken China as the world’s largest) rides a powered two-wheeler, of whatever vintage. No wonder annual pre-Covid sales of all powered two-wheelers peaked there in 2019 at 22 million units! Indeed, besides India and China, the annual production numbers for the three Royal Enfield plants…

AMC PURISTS WILL HAVE SPOTTED THAT THIS very presentable 1957 AJS Model 30 twin is not all that it appears. Take, for instance, the smaller singles model petrol tank, the all-alloy primary chaincase (perhaps from a later Model 31, the 650cc version) and even the two-into-one siamese exhaust, which certainly suits the all-black style of this handsome 600cc ‘Ajay’. A deeper look reveals other departures from the factory mould, such as the all-black dual seat, Commando Roadster handlebars and the BSA chain guard. However, there is a significant reason for nonstandard parts being fitted to this popular 600cc AJS twin. What follows is an interesting tale of one man’s persistence against very testing and difficult odds! Classic motorcycle restorer Sandy Bloy has the luxury of an industrial unit, where he…

IF YOU WERE A TEENAGER OF THE 1970S AND THE sight of a Kawasaki triple doesn’t fire those recollective synapses, then you probably have a hole in your soul – it really is that simple. Even if two-strokes aren’t your thing, there’s no denying the visceral impact of the maddest bikes of the period. We can all dream about the chest-beating 750s and the trouser-compromising 500s, but for many the smaller 250/350/400 versions were more practical, viable and/or accessible. Be honest here, who hasn’t aspired to owning one? It’s a little like that line from the 1970s rock film That’ll Be The Day: ‘Show me a kid who didn’t want to be a rock star and I’ll show you a liar!’ Triples are most emphatically like that. Almost without exception,…

CBG Workshop Back to basics HOW TO TELL HOW OLD YOUR tyres are? Motorcycle tyres wear out from use, but if you own several motorcycles or don’t use them much, they could suffer from old age. All motorcycle and scooter tyres manufactured in the last 30 years will have an Ⓔ mark and a date stamp to show when they were produced, unless they are ‘not for road use’ tyres. To identify the production date stamp, look for an oval stamp on your tyre’s sidewall; the numbers represent the week and year of manufacture. For all tyres made after 2000 this will have four numbers – for example, 4420. This would mean the tyre was manufactured in the 44th week of 2020, between October 26 and November 1. Tyres with…

IT SEEMED SO STRAIGHTFORWARD AT THE time. After only several months of intermittent effort, the Norton Commando was ready to roll again for the first time in many, many years. I wrote that in vague terms because I don’t actually know when it last rolled under its own steam. Steam? What? I digress… Being ‘ready to roll’, and ‘actually rolling’ can be very close together or they can be some time apart. Time is flexible, as all Doctor Who? fans will understand. But in this case, as well as feeling faintly triumphant, despite the bike being a Norton, I was also impatient. I dragged on the obligatory protective stuff, fired the old monster up again and headed out into the quiet rural lanes of local Cornwall to see how well…