Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2026 i Classic Bike Guide

MAY CLASSIC BIKE GUIDE WISH YOU A Merry Christmas and a happy new year... hope you have enough paraffin for the heater and your favourite Motorcycle Grand Prix of 1982 video still has enough life in it for another cold day. Usually, the annual trip to the NEC bike show – or MCL, as it is now called – is a day for us to say hello and thank-you to those in the industry who have helped us make this magazine. We could only make a Sunday this year, so it became a family trip with children and father-in-law! Bikes were sat on, compared, freebies were collected by the kids (oh, and thanks to Arai UK for my cap – always wanted one!), and there was most certainly a vibe…

THE NEXT STEP FOR PROJECT Morini was to fit the cam drive belt and the flywheel magneto –and possibly even complete the build. One of most intriguing things about working on the Morini is that some parts of the engine are incredibly clever, while also very strange. The flywheel magneto the Morini uses is a simple, yet curious device of a type usually used on lawnmowers, scooters and mopeds (Maria’s Benelli 125 two-stroke has the same – Matt). It contains a selfcontained ignition generator that produces high-voltage sparks without an external battery. This combines a rotating permanent-magnet flywheel spinning around a set of windings, one of which is linked to an electronic ignition trigger. Instead of coils, transducers are used to send the power from the magneto to the spark…

LET’S BE HONEST ABOUT THIS. HOW OFTEN have we heaved a grand sigh of relief when finally – finally! – someone has agreed to take a bike off our hands? Silent cries of ‘good riddance!’ and a bright, optimistic vision of the golden uplands ahead. Or something like that. Actually, I’m usually faintly sad when a bike departs. Some machines really have left a deep and indeed abiding impression, and occasionally in the wee small hours I wonder what happened to them following their last clamber into the back of a delivery van. Oddly enough, very few of my genuinely old favourites reappear on my old bike radar, but some have, occasionally with comic descriptions, too. Like a Matchless which I rescued from salty oblivion by the sea and rebuilt…

‘Yer maun’ Joey Dunlop was many things. The epitome of an enigma, this petite, often unkempt man, won more TT races than anyone in history had done before him. Yet he hid, when possible, from the fame and notoriety that followed such success. Instead of chasing cameras, he would often be tucked away, looking over his bikes between practice and races, especially the oft-temperamental two-strokes. Or in the back of his van, despite being a factory-backed rider with mechanics, hospitality, and ‘people to do that for you.’ He could ride in mixed weather conditions like no other. He could jump from a 125cc two-stroke race machine to a 750 road-based bike in the same day and win. He rarely made a fuss, rarely crashed, and looked awkward in the limelight…

WHENEVER A LEADING motorcycle designer, one of the men responsible for creating the two-wheeled works of art which eventually end up on a manufacturer’s production lines, concocts a bike just for himself to use, it’s usually something pretty special. Often it’s so good that Joe Public ends up getting the chance to buy a copy too, and maybe it’s no coincidence that many of these have been Ducatis – bikes like Miguel Galluzzi’s original Monster, Pierre Terblanche’s go-anywhere Multistrada, or indeed French designer Thierry Henriette’s Boxer V2 Vintage, which he created in 2010 out of a Ducati GT1000 desmodue Sport Classic to carve a path along the urban freeways, city boulevards, and tight-knit warren of historic streets and squares in Toulouse, the capital of France’s Languedoc region nestling up against…

Quiz the seller What do they know? How long have they had it? What’s the best way to start it? Why are they selling? Find out if you trust them, but also, they should be a great fount of knowledge, which will help. What have they replaced recently? Keep questioning them to find any holes in a story. “It was my late father’s” – that’s fine, but where are the photos, the stories... and why can’t they find the paperwork? I bet they found the will. Does it start? If it doesn’t, ask, ‘why not?’ “Just needs a carb clean” is not a suitable excuse when selling a motorcycle costing many thousands of pounds. You’d much rather hear: “I don’t know what I’m doing and would rather somebody else sorts…

LAST MONTH, THE NORTON ES2 gearbox – the AMC unit used in many later Nortons including the Commando, various Matchless and AJS – was stripped, checked, cleaned, and put back together. Being my first gearbox strip and rebuild, it undoubtably could have been done better and there were probably quicker ways but doing it myself is how I learn, and here at CBG, our workshop tales are warts and all. Theory is, if you see us muppets doing it, you’re more likely to have a go yourself… Cleaning all the gunk out wasn’t too bad, and even replacing the bearings proved straight-forward; I just ran out of time, and pages, to report the last part. The gear clusters are all in place with forks, the inner cover is too, and…

“The very basic suspension was grand; not too squishy at the back, not too firm at the front, which was a bonus on our neglected roads, and the brakes were far better than they have any right to be on a bike from 1971.” ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT classic motorcycles is that sometimes those motorcycles turn out to be unexpectedly splendid. Many years ago, just after I’d passed my bike test, I went to a local bike shop in Exeter and was faced with choice between a one-year-old Suzuki GT250 with just 800 miles on the clock and a Honda CB500T. I bought the Honda, which sent me on a very strange journey, and I have often wondered where I would’ve gone had I plumped for the Suzuki…

THE VELOCETTE MOV WAS BORN IN the early 1930s, yet it begat the famous range of OHV singles that were still being sold into the 1970s. And the bike you see here is a race replica of a home-brewed Velocette single that beat the Hall Green factory’s bikes hands-down at Thruxton. In the early 1930s, the Velocette catalogue list featured the upmarket two-stroke GTP and the prestigious overhead camshaft ‘K’ series super-sportsters. But, as they do today, two-strokes had a particular fanbase, while the K series, with their sophisticated OHC ‘cammy’ engines, were aimed at those with deep pockets or a serious desire to win on the race circuits. The MOV was intended as a mass market motorcycle, but with something a bit special in reserve. After the failure of…

FOR MANY OF US, A MOTORCYCLE’S electrical systems are, to varying degrees, something of a mystery. If we’re being honest here, there’s a large section of the classic motorcycle world that really doesn’t want to be touching anything that’s either AC or DC-related with a stick coated in the proverbial! Quite possibly, those afflicted by classic bike enthusiasm grew up hearing tales of ‘Joe Lucas, Prince of Darkness’ stories, which is hardly going to encourage anyone! This includes me, despite the fact I’ve never owned any motorcycle thus equipped. My background is almost exclusively Japanese two-wheelers, but there were still significant levels of wavering doubt in the back of my mind. However, fate played its hand with two machines in the garage forcing muggins here to jump on a learning…