Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2022 i Real Classic

I am delighted to reveal that in my life I have consistently failed to follow my own advice - even when that advice was sound and usually sensible, too. Many - if not most - of the questions I'm asked have to do with motorcycles, which is probably not entirely a surprise, to be honest. And probably paramount and indeed most sensible among that advice has been that no one should ever buy a bike without seeing it, riding it, and discovering whether they like it or not before parting with actual money. This is particularly sensible advice when considering the purchase of a machine which is almost a half-century old. Photos are all very well, of course, but they can be very misleading. I usually add a caveat: buying…

RealClassic ROYAL ENFIELD TRIALS WORKS REPLICA I was confident that my time with this slightly striking Bullet would be mostly under water. My ride over had been through a decent deluge, and indeed my ride back saw more of the same. How appropriate, thought I, to take out a pristine replica of an ancient singular trials machine and get it dirty! The joy - one of many, in fact - of borrowing bikes for stories is that I never have to clean them. How nice. For me. Sadly - or not - by the time I set helmet upon head and hands into gloves, the roads were dry and the sun was paying an unexpected visit. Oh well, my grand plan to discuss the Bullet's abilities on streaming wet, muddy and…

LAVERDA CORSA In the UK, the words'Laverda’ and ‘Slater Brothers’ are almost interchangeable and our thanks go to Roger and Richard Slater for their assistance compiling this feature - especially for allowing us to interrupt the peace and quiet of their retirement years! In 1983, Richard met up with Piero Laverda and his general manager Mike Shorten at the NEC show. ‘Mike made a point of asking me what - in my opinion - would it take to sell a new popular model,’ recalls Richard. ‘I think I had been selected to answer that question as we were well under way to tarting up 20 unsaleable 1200Ts. We had turned them into a very presentable model by buying in some Italian plastic work, blagging British Aluminium in South Wales to…

RealClassic NSU 250 REBUILD PART TWO Fixing one problem led me to another. The clutch was slipping against the newly restored compression, but it didn't take long to discover that there was no clearance in the operating cable. With that fixed the clutch action was much improved. When things seem that easy to address I start to worry: have I really solved the problem or just treated the symptoms? I would need to get the NSU onto the road to know for sure but waiting for the DVLA meant that might take some time. Adjusting a rocker to restore the compression is one thing. Knowing what the clearance is supposed to be is entirely another. Finding information for a machine designed before WW2, very few of which would have been imported…

WE WANT MORE STORIES about real life classic bikes. We like profiles of a single model or a comparison of two machines. Most magazine features are between 1000 and 2500 words. If your story is much longer then it's probably not for us. Shorter stories appear in the letters section. TO SEE WHAT WE MEAN look at the Laverda Corsa,Triumph twin and Sunbeam stories in this issue. DON'T WORRY about your writing, grammar or punctuation; we'll make sure that your article reads the right way. Just concentrate on telling a good story and we'll do the rest. INCLUDE AS MUCH INFO as possible. Tell the RC readers exactly what model your classic bike is, when it was built and its history since then. What condition was it in you bought…

RealClassic NORTON 99 DELUXE ‘Better looking, more powerful, more comfortable than ever.’ That was Norton's claim for their much-improved Dominator 99 when it took centre stage at Earl's Court in the autumn of 1959. They were bang-on with the latter pair of propositions which proved to be absolutely true, but the opening claim is rather more subjective. Our feature bike, for instance, hardly rushed to find its first owner: it was despatched from the factory to Godfrey Motorcycles in East London in the spring of 1960, but it then sat in the showroom for two years before someone actually bought it. That simple snippet of history accurately represents the overall fate of the Deluxe Dominators. They were presented to the public with a flurry of positive promotion but were delisted in…

RealClassic LAVERDA CORSA All my Laverdas are very different bikes with, I feel, different purposes for different reasons. Some years ago I was at Donington race track for a Laverda weekend on my 1981 Jota. When the time came to leave I mentioned I would be going down the back roads to Hinckley and then onto the main roads back to Warwickshire. A gentleman from Cheltenham asked whether he could follow me on his RGS1000 Corsa and off we went. We had a great little ride and got as far as the M69. I pulled onto the motorway and up to what was a comfortable speed for me on the Jota - not a slow bike by any means. The gent on the RGS just rolled on past me as if…

RealClassic SUNBEAM MODEL 14 I did not enjoy riding the Yamaha Serow 250 reported in RC218/219. Everything about the bike was whizzy, modern and too immediate. If I wanted to ride ancient un-tarmacadam-ised roads then maybe I should use older, less modern machinery? I sold the Serow and I searched for a 1937/38 AMC 250cc four-stroke single. This would be a rare machine because the AMC factory switched all production at that time to the WD 350 for the impending war effort. All reports of the earlier 250 and 350 machines were very complimentary and I felt that such a machine was exactly what I was looking for. Sadly, this did not happen. However, I came across this 1937 Sunbeam 250 Model 14, which was probably one of the last true…

TRIUMPH TIGER OVERHAUL RealClassic PART THE FIRST My very excellent Triumph Tiger 650 still started and ran well, so why was I seriously thinking of taking it apart? Well, even though there was nothing dramatically wrong, accumulating wear and tear had been on my mind for the last five years or so. I recalled my grandfather saying: ‘If you do it before it needs doing, it will never need doing. ‘That sounded a bit bonkers to my youthful ears, but made more sense now: the Triumph was well into ‘stitches in time’ territory. Edwardian wisdom aside, there was no ignoring the rusting tinware and exhausts, and the state of parts that caught the worst of dirt and salt from over a decade ofyear-round riding. The once spotless engine still ran well…

RealClassic DUCATI M900 MONSTER Originality of design is at least as much a gift as a science, especially when it comes to concocting a new kind of motorcycle that nobody else did before. The problem is that you never really know till you've translated your ideas into metal if it's all going to work out right, for one man's flight of fancy can be another's passport to oblivion - weird, rather than wonderful. Even then, the ultimate accolade awaits: the verdict of the buying public in the Showroom GP. On that basis, exactly 30 years ago Italo-Argentine progettista Miguel Angel Galluzzi must have been a mighty relieved man after the acclaim accorded to his Ducati Monster, as it began to reach dealer showrooms around the world early in 1993. This came…

You know how it is. You've turned 60 so you build what you think is your last ever race bike. Then you build another one. And then you put a bigger engine in it. Job done. And then you think, yes but what if I built…? It's a sickness of course. I've spoken about it before, and I'm sure the Real Reader suffers the same illness at times. If you're a bike builder it's worse of course. It's bad enough seeing (another) bike you want to buy, but when your head won't leave you alone, when it keeps you awake at night with ideas for designing this, and ways of building that, it sort of escalates the problem. I'm well aware that at 67 I can neither keep building nor…

Where were we? And how is it that some months feel so much longer than others? Let's start off with a progress report on the Matchless G2 CSR which has been a joy and a delight for a little while now. It still is! The little red roaster looks like being this winter's classic wheels, replacing the rather more scruffy Triumph T25SS, simply because unlike the Triumph, the Matchless is one of those machines which I can simply wheel out of The Shed, switch on stuff and it just starts. It does. Only this very afternoon (several weeks before you're reading this) I wheeled it out for a local errand, did the fuel tap thing, freed off the clutch, and it fired up first kick. After maybe three or four…