Features

BSA B40 Derek’s riding goes back a long way, to before 1953 and emerging racing ambitions with a Mark Five 350 Douglas twin: “Not a proper racer like the 90 Plus, which was faster, but it handled beautifully, with all the weight of that flat twin low down,” he remembers. In those days you raced…

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Indian Chief At Christmas, a guy in the pub got talking about my bike outside. “The first motorcycle I ever saw as a child was an Indian, a huge bright red thing. My mother was ill and the doctor came to see her on it. I remember the sound of the bike coming up the…

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1952 Triumph Speed Twin In the 68 years since the new parallel twin set the fashion for decades to come, the world has been reminded to the point of complete boredom that Edward Turner designed it and that it went through a series of changes in its long life. So, let’s not go there yet…

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1956 Panther Model 100 Panther owners are an eclectic bunch. Take the owners' club stand at the Bristol Show for example. Next door, the Vincent OC, all precision, conformity and spit ’n’ polish. On the Panther stand, a double adult combo, two rare and immaculate pre-war Model 95s, and the ‘Panbeam’ – an intriguing amalgamation…

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BSA Super Rocket Bob Hall’s Super Rocket came from an impeccable source – a CBG Small Ad. “I saw the ad, called the chap and he said it was a really good one,” he remembers. “It was expensive though, but I went down to see it and took cash – got it for £500 less…

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Transform your ignition! Of course it would be rather pleasant not to have to do this job, but as they say in the army… “if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have signed up!” Realistically there is no one size fits all solution, but there are devices out there that can and will make…

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Men and machines forming the 1964 British Trophy team destined to ride in East Germany included (from left to right): Jim Sandiford, Sammy Miller, Johnny Giles, Ray Peplow, Ken Heanes and John Brittain A regular prelude to the 39th International Six Days Trial was the gathering of the British teams at the BSA sports ground…

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There are plenty of replica levers on the market Clip fixing and brake levers Some makers of early pioneer machines, such as Minerva, Sun and Hobart, often employed cycle-type brake levers rather than inverted levers as detailed last month to serve front brake and valve lifter or decompressor valve as appropriate. Others, exampled by Rudge,…

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Tri-umph engine and Nor-ton frame equals Triton, and this one’s immaculate Everybody has a dream bike – the machine they’ve always wanted to own. Maybe it’s the bike they aspired to when they first got into motorcycling, the star of an Earl’s Court Show or a high street dealer’s window display, theirs for a price…

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The 1960s produced a surge of interest in sprinting, drag racing and record breaking, which carried through right to the late Seventies – a time when straightline racing was afforded almost as many column inches in the weekly bike press as any other form of bike sport. Riders like George Brown, Alf Hagon, Ian Messenger,…

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