Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2025 i Classic Bike Guide

GREETINGS ALL, MAY WE FIND YOU primed, pumped up, and in gear. The clocks have turned back, the leaves are all waiting for us on a bend when we least want them, and the 6v systems won’t take a brake light, let alone the power needed for heated grips… Still, managed to get out yesterday and it was dry, suspiciously warm, and as the sun went down, bathing the view in golden light, it was a reminder of why we still love riding. This month we have a great racing motorcycle that took one Mick Grant to tame it, then really pushed the rivals and helped put Kawasaki right up there. The KR750 did a lot, considering there were reputedly only 12 made. We’ve got Frank’s recollection of the Triumph…

There was a time when the new offerings of the world’s motorcycle manufacturers were shown at Earls Court for The Motorcycle Show. The Cologne show took over briefly as the British industry faltered and failed, and today – in Europe, at least – the big reveals take place in Milan at EICMA (Esposizione Internazionale Ciclo Motociclo e Accessori). This year’s show showed the importance of the heritage and retro market, with three former British brands now revived by Indian owners wheeling out new offerings. Norton For many, the big launch was of the new Norton range, with the old 961 Commando and V4 bikes replaced by a new range of two new V4s and two parallel twins. These are 1200cc Manx and Manx R vees and the 585cc Atlas and…

Pre-unit and unit construction A pre-unit motorcycle is one in which the engine and gearbox are separate units, connected by a primary chain. They tend to be earlier bikes, whereas a unit construction engine is one made with the crankcase and gearbox in a single casting, yet the gearbox is a separate item within that casting, still driven by a primary chain. Pre-unit motorcycles had largely died out by 1969, though a few manufacturers such as Velocette and Norton persevered. Primary drive This is the method by which the engine sends the drive to the gearbox, via a chain and the clutch. The chain usually runs in a chaincase with an oil bath and can be adjusted for tension, in the case of pre-unit models by moving the gearbox, or…

MATT HAS THREE DAMN BMWS. They take up so much room with those pots sticking out each side, but I love the blue of this one, boringly named ‘blue metallic,’ and it came from Germany fitted with an original ‘S’ nose fairing – much lighter-looking and less bulky than Matt’s huge barn-door RS. I was curious why he’s always liked them so much, the looks are starting to grow on me, and, well, it’s here, and if he wants an easy life, well… First was to see what we had. Matt put it on the bench and we raided his BMW store. The silencers were knackered, so some aftermarket ones he’s got can go on – in fact, they look nice. I’ve no intention of putting panniers on, so I…

The King of Cool. Every so often you need to remember the greats – and here is one of the greatest, for reasons many never knew. McQueen’s stunt pilot father left soon after he was born, and his only respite in childhood between violent stepfathers and poor schooling was when he went to stay on a farm during the Depression with his mother’s parents and his great uncle in Missouri. He learned a lot from his great uncle, who gave Steve a watch inscribed ‘To Steve, who has been a son to me.’ Steve once said his great uncle was “very good, very strong, very fair.” Joining the Marines, trouble still found McQueen, learning discipline the hard way. But the man came out while serving… he would have surely continued…

After all the news of the ‘big’ manufacturers comes a truly fantastic story. British manufacturer Langen Motorcycles – famous from bringing out the first two-stroke for decades – has unveiled its latest bike, the four-stroke production LightSpeed. Shown as a concept in 2023, the LightSpeed is now complete, homologated for the UK, and available to order. Limited to 185 units, each motorcycle will deliver 185 horsepower from a 1190cc liquid-cooled V-twin, weighing just 185kg. The result is a power-to-weight ratio of 1000bhp per tonne, delivered through a handcrafted chassis and Langen’s in-house electronics package which features traction control, cruise control, and launch and wheelie control. Founded in 2018 by Christofer Ratcliffe, Langen designs and hand-builds limited-production motorcycles that celebrate individuality and mechanical beauty, reviving the lost art of creating machines…

It seems improbable that a machine which, back in its heyday a quarter of a century ago, was viewed as a fearsome, fiery, barely controllable two-wheeled missile should nowadays be considered a nice old thing – but that’s how Mick Grant, the man who more than any other European rider is identified with Kawasaki’s KR750 watercooled triple, and achieved most success on it, views the bike he took to a succession of TT and short circuit victories right from its debut in 1975 – and which now occupies a place of honour in the Yorkshire star’s illustrious collection of bikes he used to race. “My first introduction to Kawasaki was actually in 1974, when I packed up riding with John Player Norton and joined Stan Shenton and Boyer’s of Bromley…

LET’S START WITH A NOTE: THIS IS how someone who has never rebuilt a gearbox before, using old manuals, word-of-mouth advice, the exploded diagrams, and the interweb copes – and is doing it a bit at a time. Treat it as a sometime amusing tale of an idiot playing with things he doesn’t truly understand… a reference this is not (but hey, in the end it worked!). I have an apology to make. Last month, I fibbed about getting the output sprocket off the shaft. It’s 38mm, or inch and a half, and I struggled. My neighbour, Mervyn, kindly leant me an open-ended spanner from his traction engines, and with the sprocket held in a chain, the casing held in a vice, and a mallet on the spanner, even with…

FOR AS LONG AS I CAN ALMOST REMEMBER, my personal approach to old bikes has been to seek and destroy British machines while pretending to repair and ride them. Not exclusively, but mostly. Certainly, as many as nine out of 10 of my lengthy collection of ancient clunkers were made in Britain. I don’t believe this is simply a case of blind prejudice; more a question of familiarity. And possibly a lack of metric spanners – although that does sound like a feeble excuse, even to me. Back in what we must apparently refer to as ‘the day,’ I rode to work and play aboard several bikes made in faraway places – as far away as Izhevsk, in fact – but only actually chose a single Japanese machine to be…

MOTORCYCLING HAS NEVER really had a front man. Rossi, Sheene, Hailwood, McGuiness and many more racers, all heroes, rule their time of racing but don’t transcend to other parts of bikes or, crucially, outside motorcycling. Evil Knievel and Eddie Kidd were incredible showmen and used a bike – but they weren’t pushing biking. We love a good photo of the King of Cool, Steve McQueen, sitting astride his ISDT Triumph, but then there are loads of photos of the Hollywood legend. In fact, A-list celebrities always abound on bikes, like David Beckham, Keanu Reeves, numerous footballers, and no less than our future king. But they ride bikes… they’re not known for biking. Ewan McGregor rode round, up, and down the world with Charley Boorman, and the first series really caught…

Large shifts in motorcycling rarely come along. Gearboxes and clutches brought useability, better oil and metallurgy allowed more reliability, telescopic forks and swinging arm suspension gave more comfort, and fuel injection (after a while) brought more exact riding manners. Big changes, but not large shifts. In 1959, a small company called Honda started selling bikes in the UK, following a few innovative shops importing bikes themselves from Europe a couple of years earlier. The models were small: 50cc bikes, through 125cc, and up to 150s. The market hadn’t seen this before; bikes had all been from British companies. These new bikes from the Far East looked different – and don’t forget, 14 years earlier, Britain had been at war with Japan. Memories, for some, were hard to forget – and…

FOR AS LONG AS CAN BE REMEMBERED, THE most popular British marque has been Triumph. Its first twin – the cheerily monickered Speed Twin – certainly did change the ingrown world of British motorcycles when it arrived in 1937. And postwar, of course, Triumph led the spreading popularity of parallel twin engines – then, as now, when you can still stroll into your possibly friendly Triumph emporium and purchase a new Speed Twin, which even looks quite like a Triumph twin from ye olde days, but isn’t. Not really. The very first Triumph twin to pass through my own hands was a late-1950s Tiger 100. It never ran properly, sadly, being entirely worn out, as were all my machines back in the very early 1970s. Just old bikes. Charming old…

A WORD OF WARNING: BEFORE I start this episode of my Morini resurrection, some advice. If you decide to take a motorcycle apart for storage, with no clear plan about how and when you will be able to reassemble it, do not strip it down to its component parts. Keep it in one big lump. Do not put those parts unlabelled in a selection of cardboard boxes and plastic crates with no lids on and then spend the next 30 years dragging those boxes around through various damp flats, sheds, bedsits, garages, and houses across South Wales and the south-west of England. If you are stupid enough to do this, please clean things off properly, put those clean parts in some nice sturdy boxes, meticulously label the bits and pieces,…