Innholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2017 i Motorcycle Classics

1964-1967 Suzuki K11 Sport 80 Suzuki entered the U.S. market in 1963 with a six model range that included the 80cc K11 Sport 80. Like the S90, the K11 used a pressed steel spine frame, but added a single front downtube. A telescopic “oleo” front fork handled front suspension duties, while a pressed steel swingarm and dual shocks handled the rear. Wheels were 2.25 x 17 inches front and rear with single-leading-shoe drum brakes. Under the hood was a 79cc air-cooled, piston port 2-stroke single with an iron cylinder, alloy head, gear primary and 4-speed transmission. Fuel required was 20:1 gas/oil premix at first, soon replaced by Suzuki’s Controlled Crankshaft Injection oiling system. Sporty touches included a high-level exhaust and exposed fork springs, though a rear luggage rack was also…

EEngineers and designers are always pushing the envelope of reality, sometimes ending up with crazy ideas. Remember the various hub-center-steering prototypes of the 1980s? These days, we have self-balancingmotorcycle designs being promoted by BMW and Honda. The motorcycling world hasn’t gone mad. It’s always been like this, and our two-wheeled history is littered with prototypes, some successful, some not. It’s a pattern you can date right back to the steam-powered cycle designs of the 1860s. One fascinating prototype that never made it into production is MV Agusta’s 300B of 1955, a motorcycle that seemed set to unlock the future, with advanced features such as electric-only starting and high camshafts with very short pushrods. Today, we take electric-start-only for granted and the high-cam, shortpushrod design long ago reappeared in BMW’s all-new…

I“It has the power of a postwar Harley. It goes faster than it will stop.” — Mike Terry, collector, about his 1921 Reading Standard Some antique motorcycles are time travelers. They do much better in current conditions than they did when they were built. One of these is the Reading Standard. The Reading Standard was built in Pennsylvania for 19 years starting in 1903, long before there were decent roads. Motorcycle frames had to be tough to put up with the era’s bad roads, and the Reading Standard’s frame was not tough enough. Collector Mike Terry, the owner of the 1921 Reading Standard featured here, has six Reading Standards, and the frames on four of them had been broken and re-welded. One had an extra support added. “It’s a keystone…

It’s possible that I may need a therapist, and I am hoping someone can recommend one. You see, I am prone to acting on impulse, most recently squandering a perfectly good $50 bill to rescue the 1964 Yamaha 125 Santa Barbara YA6 seen here, spending untold hours working on it with little guarantee of any return, and then taking it on a nearly impossible ride. The embarrassing thing is, I had the money for a better motorcycle. I knew this castoff would be needier than a snubbed Yorkie. And I assumed the ride would be long and painful. And yet, knowing all this in advance, I did it anyway. To frame my admission, it seems fitting to quote a line from a catchy Dierks Bentley tune: “I know what I…

Doffo’s focus is on handcrafted, award-winning wines. Doffo offers many of the wines most folks know about (Cabernets, Syrahs, and the like), but the winery’s real secret is the Malbec, a rich, dark, and full-flavored red wine well known in South America. South American Malbecs have been trendy in the U.S. for the last few years, but the Malbecs that U.S. wine snobs get all excited about are really run-of-the-mill $2 or $3 wines in Argentina. The Malbec produced by Doffo in Temecula is a substantial step up. Trust me on this; I’m one of those wine snobs and Doffo’s Malbec is nothing short of spectacular. The winery also produces a special red wine bearing the MotoDoffo name, a blend of their Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel, with four different…

Hard to kickstart Q: I have a 1975 Yamaha XS650 twin. It has had a tuneup and runs great. My problem comes when I want to start it with the kickstarter. Warm, cold or hot, it does not matter. There’s no way it will start. All I have to do is touch the starter button and it will start immediately. The coils are still original. Are they my problem? Mike Trunk/via email A: I’ve had this question numerous times the other way around, where a bike will have a bad electric starter, but will start fine when kicked, but I’ve not seen one that won’t kick but will start on the button. My first thought is that kicking it may not be spinning it fast enough, especially if the compression…

California Hot Rod I got the July/August issue the other day and was delighted to see the_ California Hot Rod on the cover! I was a loyal reader of Cycle magazine back in the 1970s. Cook and Phil were real guys who were combining brains, talent and a lot of hard work to compete at a national level and many of us were silent, if very enthusiastic supporters. For them to win Daytona was simply amazing. In 1980 I finally got it together and did about five years of amateur road racing at Loudon through AAMRR on my 1979 Honda CB750F (which I now ride to work). Simply a terrific article. Then the issue got better when I found the Vincent Black Lightning article. Cannot learn too much about those…

Last call for Barber We’re making final preparations for our annual pilgrimage to the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum near Birmingham, Alabama, and the 13th Annual Barber Vintage Festival, Oct. 6-8, 2017. The 2016 event had an estimated attendance of 73,000 bike fans, making this the largest vintage motorcycle event in North America. The event’s almost explosive growth is easy to understand. To begin with, there’s the world famous Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum, an amazing collection of 1,400-plus motorcycles spanning every decade of the industry from its humble beginnings more than 100 years ago to today, all housed in a spectacular, state-of-the-art, 144,000-squarefoot building. And it just got bigger, thanks to a new five-story, 86,000-square-foot addition. Then there’s everything else happening during the Barber Vintage Festival, including the American Motor Drome…

BSA’s dead end: In the U.K., BSA’s industry-leading designers Bert Hopwood and Doug Hele developed the innovative MC1 250cc prototype in 1954. Its double overhead cam, horizontally mounted single-cylinder design featured bevel-gear-driven camshafts and four radial valves. Intended as the potential basis for a family of sophisticated racing and road models, it was stillborn. Harley designed a winner, then forgot about it: When Harley-Davidson finally decided to build its overheadvalve Sportster in the 1950s, it dug out a pre-war prototype test mule. Based on a flathead 45, it had logged more than 4,000 miles of road testing in 1939. Electric dreams: Indian invented the first electric starter for a motorcycle back in 1914. Available on that year’s Hendee Special, by 1915 it had already been taken off the option list,…

The Hi-rider is an important part of motorcycle and Norton history, whether you like the styling or not.” — Chuck Bohn, proud Hi-rider owner Most motorcycle factories believe in evolution in design. Bringing out something completely different is risky — if the public doesn’t like it, management has to explain the flop to angry shareholders. Yet despite the risks, every once in a while something unique and unexpected sees the light of day. The English Norton factory made its name building sport and sport touring bikes, but in 1971 Norton did the unexpected: the company introduced the Hi-rider, a factory custom inspired by the chopper craze and designed to appeal to the American cruiser rider. According to British journalist and author Mick Duckworth, in the late Sixties Dennis Poore (the…

AAsk pundits why the British motorcycle industry collapsed in the late 1960s and most will point to management’s failure to innovate and modernize in the face of increasing foreign competition. If it had just been that simple. Innovation is a tough row to hoe. There’s no question the British industry had the talent and the resources to come up with new designs. What held them back in many cases was not their own inertia, but the conservative nature of the motorcycle- buying public and an unwillingness to accept designs that broke the mold. Edward Turner knew this. His 1937 Triumph Speed Twin was expressly designed to look like a typical twin-port single of the period, easily the most popular type of bike on British roads. The Speed Twin won by…

RRoyal Enfield’s status as a manufacturer whose product line consists of making yesterday live again Rmeans that its bikes naturally lend themselves to period customizing. Except you don’t need to worry about rejuvenating the worn-out mechanics of a yesteryear model when building a custom Enfield — just take a brand-new bike off a dealer’s showroom floor, and you’re ready to go. Enfields have been featured in bike building competitions all over the world, and last year RE’s Down Under distributor, Urban Moto Imports, staged a RE-only bike build-off. Mid Life Cycles of Melbourne, Australia, conceived and created this delectable bobtail “Brass Rajah” Royal Enfield 350 — one of eight entries for the contest from RE dealerships in both Oz and New Zealand, which had to be entirely constructed within a…

IRON HORSE SOCIAL CLUB & MUSEUM, SAVANNA, ILLINOIS Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin are sometimes listed among America’s various flyover states, stretches of real estate generally viewed from above. You get in a plane, and then you sit back to enjoy the ride, taking time to peek out the window as the plane inches its way across this great country. Your whole journey can be summarized in a simple phrase: flyover. Or you can ride a motorcycle. That, of course, opens options to let you be more intimate with where you are and where you’re headed to, and also to experience the sights, sounds, even the smells of your surroundings. The result is pure motoring nirvana, because the ride justifies the destination, and the destination justifies the ride. There’s another level…

Yoshimura Research & Development is among the most recognizable brands in the motorcycle aftermarket industry today. Moreover, race bikes campaigned by Yoshimura have won multiple AMA and World Superbike championships. And who among the sport bike elite hasn’t, at one time or another, considered equipping their bikes with at least one speed component or another from Yoshimura’s inventory? In a nutshell, today, Yoshimura R&D is a big business. But financial success didn’t happen overnight. It was a long, winding road to the top, and the story has its origins during World War II when a young man named Hideo Yoshimura aspired to become a fighter pilot for the Japanese Imperial air corps. Fortunately for motorcycling today, a parachuting injury forced young Hideo out of pilot training, and into airplane mechanic’s…

In the beginning came the Cub. Honda’s most easily recognizable motorcycle first hit the streets of the U.S. in 1958 and was an instant success, selling 24,000 units in its first five months. And while the step-through, 3-speed 50cc Cub worked perfectly for urban commuters, motorcycle enthusiasts, especially in the U.S., wanted more. Honda’s twin-cylinder range of CA touring and CB sport bikes was well established by 1964, but there was room in the market for something between the Cubs and the twins. Enter the Honda 90. The first 90, the C200, arrived in 1963 with an iron cylinder and head, pushrod valve operation and a conventional 4-speed transmission instead of the Cub’s 3-speed automatic clutch unit. It also looked more like a traditional motorcycle, though with a pressed steel…

Fifty years ago, the crowd at London’s annual Earls Court show, then the most prestigious motorcycle show in the world, lined up at the Norton stand, gawking at a silver bike with an orange seat. A separate stand displayed the bike’s new and innovative frame, and a third display explained the trademarked rubber engine mounts —“Isolastics” — that kept engine vibration from annoying the rider. That silver bike, dubbed the Commando, was the prototype of what became one of the most popular British motorcycles of the Sixties and Seventies. Fast, smooth and sexy, the Commando was somehow considerably more than the sum of its parts, and a surprising number of the possibly 90,000 built over a 10-year stretch are still on the road. This year’s Quail Motorcycle Gathering featured a…

D Don Stockett has had a lot to celebrate recently. He not only won an Antique Motorcycle Club of America (AMCA) Winner’s Circle award for this 1970 Honda CB750 K0, scoring 99.50 points, he also managed a narrow escape from road rash on the same bike. Some weeks before the AMCA Fort Sutter (California) National meet where he won his Winner’s Circle award, Don rode the CB750 K0 in The Quail Motorcycle Gathering pre-show Quail Ride. During the ride, he went a little too hot into a decreasing radius left turn and barely avoided running the bike onto the gravel as the centerstand scraped the pavement. “It’s a big, heavy bike and it’s hard to correct in a corner,” Don says. Viewed from a perspective of almost 50 years of…

Anybody familiar with Royal Enfield’s singlecylinder, unit-construction engine knows what the “beat” means. It refers to the mood and spirit that’s been engineered into every Royal Enfield engine for more than 100 years and counting. As one Royal Enfield spokesman stated in 2009 when the allnew 500cc unit-construction engine first appeared: “We had to retain ‘the beat,’ which is the distinct and time-honored sound of a long-stroke, single-cylinder, British motorcycle.” In truth, today’s Royal Enfields are not British bikes; they’re motorcycles designed and built exclusively in India. It was in 1955 that Royal Enfield, a British bike company originally formed in 1901, first shipped its tooling to the coastal city of Chennai, India, so that bikes could be built there for the Indian army. But by 1970 the original Royal…

TThis is a story about Marcelo and Damian Doffo, a father-andson team with a passion for vintage Italian motorcycles and fine California wines. With admirable characters, vintage motorcycles (and lots of them), vintage motorcycle racing, a motorcycle museum, fine wines, and an epic story spanning three continents, what’s not to like? In our two-wheeled classic motorcycle world, it just doesn’t get much better than this. It all started more than a century ago when Marcelo Doffo’s grandfather, Bernardino, immigrated to Argentina from Italy. Bernardino Doffo settled in the Pampas region of Argentina and farmed wheat, corn and cattle. Marcelo grew up on that farm, taking in the agricultural arts and his shared Italian and Argentinean heritage. Times were different: There was no electricity or running water, and people got around…

Honda CB450 swingarm bushings have a reputation for wearing out prematurely. Early CB450s like our subject 1970 CB450K4 used metallic bushings, while later ones apparently switched to plastic, a material more than a few manufacturers embraced for ease of installation. Whether early or late, CB450 swingarm bushings don’t appear to last more than 10,000 miles or so. Our subject bike doesn’t appear to have led a particularly difficult life, yet with a mere 13,000 miles showing on the clock the swingarm bushings were shot, exhibiting an easy 1/8 inch or more of slop on the swingarm pivot pin. Although a small amount of play won’t show adverse effects, too much results in a wandering rear end, the back wheel moving left and right, generating an uncontrollable steering input. Typically, once…

9/1 Back for its 12th year, join us for the fun at the Bonneville Vintage GP, Sept. 1-3, at the Utah Motorsports Campus in Tooele, Utah. Norton will be the featured marque of the Motorcycle Classics Vintage Motorcycle Show on Saturday, celebrating 50 years of the Commando, plus trophies in six classes and a People’s Choice award. Sunday will feature a custom bike show. Both days will feature AHRMA racing, along with the CB160 races with Le Mans starts both days. On the web at bonnevillevintagegp.com 9/2 Visit the Owls Head Transportation Museum in Owls Head, Maine, for the Vintage Motorcycle Festival and Antique Aeroplane Show, Sept. 2-3. Owners of pre-1997 motorcycles are encouraged to exhibit and will be admitted free of charge. In 2016 the show attracted more than…