Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2016 i Real Classic

It began as a quest. A quest inspired by you, gentle reader, for a light enough motorcycle which would be simple to run, easy to wheel around and which would save all that tiresome kicking nonsense by having an electric starter. I’ll state my own case immediately. This is not a quest which resonates with me. In The Shed are both electric start Nortons and even a Triumph, too. None of them is particularly difficult to wheel about … apart from the Norton Commander, which is one heavy lump for a rider with tired legs. There’s also a Matchless G80 with its own self-starter, as well as an RE Bullet. The choice is decently wide, but is not wide enough for a lot – an increasing number – of readers,…

We have a saying around here that bikes find you, rather than the other way round. That’s what happened with my Excelsior Universal 150cc Villiers two-stroke – known as Wilf. Back in 2012, a pal who is also a devoted Italian tiddler fan happened to mention that a gentleman in the London area (yes, there are a few!) had an Excelsior tucked away in the midst of his scattered collection. For some strange reason I have always been attracted to the wonders of Bayliss and Thomas, better known as Excelsior. This grand old company goes way back to 1874 in Victorian times and continued building bikes right up to its demise in 1964. My memories are only post-WW2, when Excelsior were one of the many small motorcycle manufacturers who concentrated…

DOUBLE-BUBBLE Roy has been keeping us royally entertained (yes, that was deliberate) with his poetic efforts this year: see RealClassic.co.uk for his wandering wordplay. Here his faithful XBR, aka Arfa2, led him to the holy grail of the Compass Challenge – a fine example of the two-fer! We need to lay down now, as we’re feeling semantically challenged… BOOBY PRIZE? Meanwhile, displaying his perfectly firm grip on reality, RC member #10, that man Bill Nelson, sent an entry for the Norton Challenge. Which we haven’t run for around three years. Keep up at the back. NORTH/SOUTH DIVIDE? JohnJ’s amble aboard his Enfield spanned the distance from ‘South Land’ (you may know it as ‘Sunderland’) to the far reaches of North-Humberland. Fittingly he came up with a full set of compass…

Study the timeline of a popular motorcycle and it generally follows a familiar arc. As a brand new design there will be innovations and features that should, in theory, further stretch the boundaries of motorcycling; usually performance. Subsequent models will include modifications to overcome shortfalls in the original design that are only exposed by these early purchasers acting as high mileage test riders. The machines often get heavier and slower as the market or legislature demands more complex gadgetry, with the last version bearing little more than a passing resemblance to the bright vision of the original designer. Yet the later bike is likely to be the most fully developed and reliable example of the model. History is littered with such stories. Think of the first Z1 variants from Kawasaki,…

The introduction of Triumph’s groundbreaking Speed Twin in 1938 left the rest of the major British motorcycle manufacturers playing catch up. BSA’s answer to Triumph’s new parallel twin was the A7… but not the bike which Bert Hopwood designed, sibling to the A10. No, the original A7 was quite a different machine from its much-loved descendant. BSA came up with their own take on the vertical twin format with a long-stroke iron head engine, the basic design of which is generally credited to Val Page. However, Edward Turner, Herbert Perkins and David Munro are all also known to have had input into the design. With designers of this pedigree you would have expected BSA to have got it right first time. Design work started in 1939 which, obviously, meant the…

For me, motorcycling started with the BSA A7 my dad had in the late 1950s, which was rebuilt it in the garage. Dad worked for BSA in the engineering department (not on bikes). I rode to infants’ school on the pillion seat, and the A7 did regular 300 mile round trips from Birmingham to Poole with my mum on the pillion; me, dog and luggage in the front of the sidecar and my little sister in the small back seat. I loved that bike. Roll on to my 16th year. Wanting my own transport and not having any money, I rebuilt a Triumph Tina scooter –the Triumph factory was very helpful for spares. A year later Iwanted areal bike and bought a C15 with tall handlebars. I passed my test…

Some stereotypes are hard to shake. Rhinestone cowboys flying low in 240 inches of Caddy convertible might be a cult symbol, on a vast continent where the endless horizons and tumbleweed trails of the wild west lend themselves easily to such extravagance. Still, bigger wasn’t always better to US riders and the machine featured here proves it. History, no matter how cruel, shows a dramatic change in the road bike market well before Honda’s immortal four, sealing the fate of those few manufactures of small machines still in existence. Given that timeline, it seems the pint-sized two-strokes of Spanish engineer/entrepreneur Francisco ‘Paco’ Bulto arrived when a customer base still thrived, but Bultaco’s offerings turned out to be far more than most expected. There’s a common theme inside Pete Phillips’ workshop,…

Once again, I’d travelled across the country, supposedly to look at an immaculate barn find. Once again I was disappointed when it turned out to be anything but. It has always amazed me what some people think classifies as ‘top money immaculate.’ I am really unsure whether they don’t know or simply hope that the prospective purchaser doesn’t know. Similarly, just how many barns are out there containing long-forgotten motorcycles? It appears to have become the norm to declare any rusty old relic as a barn-find, as if this immediately gives the bike some sort of credibility. Either way, enough was enough. It was time to have a rethink. My original idea that it would probably be cheaper to buy somebody else’s completed restoration than do one myself was now…

Before fitting the levers and switches I sat on the bike with bricks in various places under my feet to decided where to put the footrests, taking into account that I had to get the exhausts past them. The bike was then wheeled outside to get a better view and to eye up the exhaust. It was at this point I decided that the tank did not cut the mustard. I wondered if it looked wrong because it was still in the original red (it had been too cold to spray it with black cellulose). So I wrapped it in a bin liner to make it appear black and took another look – it was just plain wrong! Warehouse Motorcycles only had later tanks in stock, none of any use…

Sparks are mysterious things. And I’ve never really understood why ignition systems spark the spark plug. I can recite the theory, but it never makes sense to me. This is because when they taught fizzicks I always fell asleep and because I am very dim. Unlike the sparks generated by Mr Lucas’s finest on the B25SS. I mentioned last time how irritating it was that when Iretarded the ignition the sparks went away, then when I advanced it they returned. There’s an obvious explanation for this. It’s because Mr Lucas hates me personally from beyond the grave. It’s also possible that there’s a short between the live and earth sides of the LT circuit. Apart from… I can’t see any contact. There is no visible short to drain away the…