Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2021 i Real Classic

he T140 special featured in RC210 was built by Nige at D&N Engineering for one of his customers. That particular bike harked very much to a certain period of flat track racing, what with its Gene Romero styled paint job an’all. Whereas this particular bike deliberately straddles two eras, and is one Nige built for himself as a keeper – for reasons which will become as obvious as they are poignant. The concept is a simple one. The Real Reader might recall 1977, and a somewhat abortive attempt to introduce at least the spirit of flat-track racing to this country. Bulmers Cider were sponsoring grass-track racing in the UK at the time, to promote its Strongbow brand. Somewhat randomly, the company sponsored theTriumph factory to build six or seven flat-track-styled…

At the risk of irritating some readers (see Frank’s telling-off in this month’s letters pages), I’m going to say that right now really is a good time to buy that classic bike you’ve been hankering after. It’s the middle of winter when the market is always slow; bikes typically fetch 20% less in January than they do in June. On top of that, the much-anticipated ‘price correction’ has finally arrived. For the past decade, people have been predicting that the trend of rising classic prices simply couldn’t continue. For a while back then it did look like the cost of classic motorcycling was somehow linked to the size of the universe and it would go on expanding indefinitely... However, global events finally applied the brakes – and just in time,…

As a big fan of Triumph’s Tiger Cub, it naturally follows that the somewhat similar, BSA-made engines of the same basic shape and design – but bigger and bigger aaaaaannnnd bigger – also caught my eye. The final incarnation of the design was a massive 620cc beast of a motocross machine built by CCM, but I only got as far as a BSA B50MX. Most of my BSA unit singles have been in the 250-441 cc range and all – apart from the B50 – were pre-oil in frame. My first encounter with a 250 BSA would have been a trials C15T when I was approaching 13. I needed more power than my tired Bantam field bike had to offer. The C15T looked quite big and heavy compared with the…

The acclaimed relaunch of the historic Indian brand by Polaris has been one of the two-wheeled success stories of the past decade, in marking the latest chapter in 120 years of tribal turmoil representing the fortunes of America’s oldest and most historic motorcycle brand, ever since the Indian Motocyde (s/c) Company was founded back in 1901 in Springfield, Mass. This time around, Indian really is back for good, and posing a serious challenge to the two-wheeled supremacy of its two years younger Harley-Davidson rival. But imagine shoehorning an engine into the rolling chassis of a modern Indian Chief, replacing its OHV motor with a smaller-capacity yet higher-performance powerplant aimed at securing bragging rights over Harley-Davidson. Unthinkable, surely? Yet that would be today’s equivalent of just what happened just over 70…

A long time ago, in a city far, far away... I shared a flat with a truly great guy; ace guitarist, enthusiastic motorcyclist and enormously smart. A doctor, in fact, although not of the medical variety. Barrie’s doctorate was in the then cutting-edge art (or possibly science) of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Even today I have trouble spelling that. Barrie rode a Norton, a 650SS, often considered to be the best of the pre-Commando Norton twins. It looked great, complete with its leather-lookalike tank cover, Dunstall Decibel ‘silencers’ and swept-back pipes, all topped off with one of those truly vile quilted plastic foam seat covers. This last wasn’t a performance enhancement; it was an attempt at preventing rainwater soaking the highly absorbent Norton seat. It failed. The actual performance kit,…

Well, here we are with a finished motorcycle. Not much happened since last month’s episode apart from a strip down for paint and upholstery, but that wasn’t without its issues. Choosing the correct paint colour is vital in any build. There’s not necessarily only one correct colour, but there are a multitude of wrong ones. Quite often the bike will start to tell you what colour it wants to be during the build. Every time you push the bare metal machine outside to gain perspective on stance and profile, it will whisper its preferred shade into your consciousness. This may not necessarily be the colour you were originally planning, so you need to be open to listening to it. Other times you can have the bike sitting there more or…

There’s something about V-twins. I have one, a modern Italian jobbie with electronic almost everything, Frank W has a Matchless Model X that I rebuilt for him, and now a chap I last saw in Holland thirty years ago turns up with a dismantled engine and gearbox from one. This came from a 1938 AJS Model 2A which he and his brother took apart, with the best of intentions, some twenty years ago. Their plan was to recondition the whole thing, but it didn’t progress much further and the boxes of bits ended up in the dark corner of a shed. The photos show similar machines from the era, with almost identical engines to the ‘38 model. As AJS and Matchless models were at that time made in the same…

At some point in every bike project there comes a moment of truth. In fact, there are several moments of truth, but listing them would seriously reduce the dramatic effect. I found myself standing and staring at the Sunbeam S8, a rusty dusty survivor of several Shed relocations and years of neglect. Too many years of neglect. I was brought up a Roman Catholic – I deeply understand guilt. Enough of that. I closed last month’s Shed doors revealing that the Sunbeam was a runner again, after a mere couple of decades. But, as you know, there is running and there is running. The engine starts and runs. This is good. It’s no more rattly than I would hope for an all-alloy ohc engine from the mid-1950s, and it doesn’t…