Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2018 i Classic Motorcycle Mechanics

WHAT’S INSIDE Hello and welcome to this taster insert of Classic Racer which is free inside Classic Motorcycle Mechanics. I hope you enjoy it. I’m delighted that our corner of the classic paddock has been included in CMM because our motorcycling worlds are so intertwined and have become even more so over the past couple of years. Yeah, we all love old (and recently old) motorcycles and with the likes of Endurance Legends we can now enjoy Katanas, GPzs and GSX-Rs strutting their stuff on track. Classic Racer is wholeheartedly behind those sorts of bikes racing and in getting the fun and frolics out to a bigger audience. And so it is that Classic Racer and Classic Motorcycle Mechanics have more crossover than perhaps at any other time in our…

cmm Marketplace Oddly alluring! Every month we take a look at the classic motorcycle market with a range of industry experts. This month, Paul Jayson from The Motorcycle Broker and our very own Scott Redmond look at the quirky but attractive bikes we often fall in love with. The Moto Guzzi Le Mans (or lemon) Mk II is not the one to own, but it’s still a great bike and weirdly arousing. Of course, the one to own is the Mk I and even the very early red framed rare pre-Mk I at around £17,000. But if you haven’t got around £12,500 to spend, you can settle for the Mk II and have some change from £10,000. It’s all about the motor, Italian quirks and exotica. It will surprise you…

BOOK CORNER RIDE OF MY LIFE Frank is a motorcycle journalist who has been there, done that and doesn’t want to stop telling people about it. From riding classics to organising the Thunder Sprint: it’s all here: 132 pages, lavishly illustrated. www.classicmagazines.co.uk/product/5528/bookazine-ride-ofmy-life-frank-melling THE UNLIKELY 1 Engaging book looking at Gary Ilminen’s fascination with the Bonneville Salt Flats and his ‘late in life’ attempts to break a US national speed record on a 40-year-old bike. www.touchpointpress.com…

SEE YOU THERE! April 2018 1 Bike Day, Ace Cafe London london.acecafe.com 8 Normous Newark Autojumble, www.newarkautojumble.co.uk 8 Malvern Festival of Transport, Three Counties Showground, Malvern, Worcs, www.classicshows.org 8 Kenley Autojumble, The Portcullis Club Kenley Airfield, Caterham Surrey. www.facebook.com/KenleyAutojumble 8 British & Classic Bike Day + BSA Special, Ace Cafe London, london.acecafe.com 14-15 Prescott Bike Festival & Prescott Hill Climb, www.prescottbikefestival.co.uk 15 Kawasaki Sunday, Ace Cafe London london.acecafe.com 15 Suffolk Classic Motorcycle Show, Stour Valley Business Park, Brundon Lane, Sudbury Suffolk CO10 7GB 18 MAY ISSUE OF CLASSIC MOTORCYCLE MECHANICS 21 Rocket III Owners’ Club Meet, Ace Cafe London, london.acecafe.com 21-22 The 38th Carole Nash International Classic MotorCycle Show, County Showground, Stafford www.classicbikeshows.com 29 Italian Bike Day, Ace Cafe London www.ace-cafe-london.com…

SCOOPERMAN! The sunny side of the classic world, with the VJMC’s Steve Cooper Impetus, motivation, stimulus, incentive, momentum and drive: these and other adjectives or rather their antonyms can be the death knell of any motorcycle that comes under the heading of ‘work in progress.’ If you don’t keep an eye on the calendar then it’s oh so easy for ‘WIP’ to become ‘PSP’ or Permanently Stalled Project. And then when you do finally rip off the dust cover, pull the engine out from under the bench or dig the mudguards out from the furthest reaches of the attic you begin to wonder where to start. Frame? Wheels? Electrics? Gearbox? You can very easily go around in circles and rapidly get nowhere. Spending even more time deciding what to do…

The way we were… Send us your nostalgic snaps of you back in the day with your steed! Either send to me at bsimmonds@mortons.co.uk  or via our vibrant Facebook page. C’mon! “The photo is circa 1970 and is of myself (in the helmet) and three of my mates in Falmouth, Cornwall. I’m sitting on my first bike, a Yamaha YL1 100 with fairing. My mate Dave is on his Honda C200 90cc (his Triumph 500 Speed Twin being off the road at the time!). My other two mates sitting pillion are Francis and Mike. I currently have two YL1s! Hope this may be of interest to the magazine.” Denzil Beckerleg “This is 1980, Hornchurch, Essex a week before my 16th birthday! I purchased the bike (RD50M reg: CMU…

Project Honda C70 part 6 C70 Sorted! Former BSB champ Niall has finished his Honda C70 and reckons it’s as good as any out there. Who could say more? WORDS AND PHOTOS: NIALL MACKENZIE My 1975 Honda C70 project is complete! It may not have been as straightforward as predicted in my last piece but after many additional hours of head scratching and sucking of teeth I’m very happy with the end result. This coincided with a recent announcement from Honda that over 100 million Super Cubs have now been produced since 1958. What’s even more incredible, in the UK at least, is that these simple little machines are as desirable as ever and no matter what their age or condition are still holding strong residual values. And I have…

Road to race RD500LC style! Super Stan is back with this interesting insight into how to make Yamaha’s V4 two-stroke into a race missile: for Wayne Gardner, of all people! WORDS: STAN STEPHENS PHOTOS: STAN STEPHENS AND MORTONS ARCHIVE In the late 1980s there were international motorcycle racing classes called Formula 1, Formula 2 and Formula 3. F3 was basically 250cc two-strokes, F2 350cc two-strokes and F1 was 1000cc four-strokes and 500cc two-strokes. There were basic rules which said that the engines must be based on road bike engines. When it became a European Championship I was approached by one of the top racers, Geoff Johnson, to build a race 350 YPVS engine for the F2 class and an F1 engine based on the RD500 engine. Harris Performance supplied both…

CLASSIC RACER 1975 GP: HOCKENHEIMRING The Read-Ago battle Over 150,000 spectators gathered on the grass banks and grandstands of the Hockenheimring Motodrom in Baden-Württemberg, south Germany to watch their heroes in action. Words and photography: Jan Burgers The 1932-built circuit was very much a unique outing amidst its rival venues. Hockenheim had two long straits and only five turns, four right-handers and just one left turn in the Motodrom. In simple terms it has become a real Mecca for race fans from all over the world. At this round of the 1975 500cc World Championship MV Agusta rider Phil Read once again turned up to the meeting on full song. A new modified cylinder head plus some new front forks on the MV-4 gave the bike just enough speed to…

Do you like quirky? It’s a question we have to ask this month. Why? Well, we have a few saucy but eclectic machines in the pages of your CMM this month. Firstly, there’s the Yamaha GTS1000A. Our man Chris Moss went for a ride and loved it – but it did take time for him to gel with the machine. Then there’s Jim Lindsay, who took out his own Moto Guzzi Le Mans Mk II and told us about his effusive love for this very quirky V-twin. We backed this up with some Marketplace research on values and just what people think of this Italian machine and other, cheaper quirky two-wheelers. So, what is your guilty two-wheeled pleasure? We’d love to know! Me? Well, I did rather enjoy Aprilia’s very…

QUIRKS FOR QUIDS! If you fancy a classic bike with a styling edge, where do start looking? Starting at the bargain basement end may I present the Yamaha SZR660? Despite having a Deltabox chassis based on the geometry of a TZ250 race bike the SZR660 was bullied by everyone from the off. The single cylinder engine came from the Yamaha XTZ660; it kind of emulated what people had been doing for years, taking a large four-stroke single and plonking it in a lithe chassis. If Yamaha thought that they had created a smash hit they were to be seriously upset. It pretty much bombed, but why? The bike had decent suspension, three spoke wheels and good brakes: it also had a big bottom – the seat unit still looks daft…

News Have your say and WIN Held gear! Complete the CMM reader survey and help us make your modern classic motorcycle magazine even better. Oh, and you can win a Held helmet or gloves too! Here at CMM we like to think that we bring you the best of the modern classic motorcycling world, from the 1960s through to the late 1990s – as well as the classic-aping retros – we give you all the news, reviews, rides and workshop tips and skills to help you get the best from your favourite hobby. But we know that this is YOUR magazine, so we want to hear from YOU about what you want to see more of in the magazine. Whether you’ve been a subscriber for years of you’ve picked up…

MOTO GUZZI Le Mans MkII GRAZIE GUZZI! What is it about a classic Moto Guzzi that draws you in? Jim Lindsay expresses his affection for this very Le Mans Mk II. WORDS: JIM LINDSAY PHOTOS: GARY D CHAPMAN, MORTONS ARCHIVE How age changes you. When I first rode the Moto Guzzi Le Mans Mark II in 1979, I was an impatient lad of 25. I loved the looks, the unique engine layout and the maintenance free promise of shaft drive. At the same time, I was irritated by the quirky handling (I preferred Ducati’s 900SS or the softer Darmah) and my adrenal glands required four-cylinder power from Japan, or perhaps the raw urge of Laverda’s 180 degree triples, even if my riding ability barely qualified me to use it. How…

Moto Guzzi Le Mans history 1960-1963: Moto Guzzi 3 x 3 The transverse V-Twin engine first made its appearance in the odd looking military tractor. The engine was conceived by Guzzi’s legendary designer Giulio Cesare Carcono, the man responsible for the famous racing Guzzi V8. 1975-1976: Moto Guzzi V750 S3 This is the direct forerunner of the Le Mans, and descended from the V7 Sport designed by Carcano’s successor Lino Tonti. In keeping with Guzzi practice, it shared many components with other bikes in the range, including the linked braking system from the 850T3. 1976-1978: Moto Guzzi Le Mans Mk I The Le Mans debuted at the Milan show in 1975 and went on sale in the UK the following year for £2000. That equates to £13,210 today taking inflation…

WORK SHOP cmm Q & A Our very own wizened sages, Messrs Mark Haycock and Steve Cooper are here to answer all of your woes, be they mechanical or spiritual. Every month we will be giving advice, as well as some general tips. Don’t forget to send in your own tips too. 1972 Honda CB350K4 Q:I am the lucky owner of a 675 miles from new CB350K4 US import. As you can imagine it’s been in storage since it arrived in the UK. I want it on the road in spring and as it is 46 years old it needs a good clean and sort out. The need for new tyres has opened up a can of worms however: it still wears the original Bridgestones, which look perfect, but…

Allen Millyard Award-winning motorcycle engineer! Cams & crank time! Problem-solving aplenty for our man Millyard in his latest column where he’s building a super-sexy six-cylinder motor! I started making my Honda RC174 six cylinder replica last July and one thing that has been on my mind since day one is: ‘how am I going to make the crankshaft and camshafts?’ I remember this happening to me once before when I was making my Kawasaki V12 and I ended up completing the whole bike without a crankshaft because I couldn’t figure out how to fit all the parts into the available space until a while later a solution came to mind. My Yamaha FZR250 donor engines have plain metal bearings and a forged steel crankshaft so this ruled out the possibility…

Project Honda CB750 K2 part 10 Cog swappin’ Poor Mark still has his rear-end woes to contend with! This month he starts to sort the chain and sprockets on his K2. Should be simple, eh? WORDS AND PHOTOS: MARK HAYCOCK. One of the worst bits on the CB750 was the rear chain. This was apparently undersized, lacking the slightest trace of lubricant (hence the shrieking noise when moving the bike around), rusty and worn out. Apart from that it was okay, but I replaced it anyway! Photo 1 shows a comparison between old and new, and as you can see I went a bit over-the-top and bought a DID VX series gold-plated X-ring chain which should last another 100 years at my annual mileage rate. I suppose I am fairly…

IT’S MY BIKE: Martyn Stephens It’s almost 20 years since I bought a basket-case Yamaha DT1 250. The bike was a real mess, spent its final years in the States as an off-roader. Stripped of any road going parts, it was a real wreck. The engine had crankcase damage (poor alloy welds) behind the gearbox sprocket where a chain must have jumped the sprocket. The tank had been blasted so it was impossible to tell what model the bike was and the oil tank had been painted black, which led me to believe it was an early version. The engine produced a spark when turned over by hand, so I felt relieved that it wasn’t seized. I discovered the bike needed a huge number of components. Any ideas of…

Monster Raving LOOMY! With prices of new parts escalating Scoop makes his own wiring loom from scratch. Is he mad? WORDS AND PHOTOS: STEVE COOPER It’s probably fair to say that few of us get any real pleasure out of mucking about with the electrical systems of our machines. Many of us probably regard the rat’s nest inside our headlamps, fairing and frames as something akin to magic coloured string and we’re just blissfully happy it works. Well, until it doesn’t. Where that blind trust falls down is if you’re into a restoration and the existing loom is falling apart or has obvious faults. In this instance it was the infamous Suzuki Stinger that perpetuated the ascent of a rather steep learning curve. My good mate and fellow Stinger afflictee…

Pip Higham Tuner, engineer, rider ‘Jazz isn’t dead: it just smells funny.’ Frank Zappa Of course I blame the Sixties: this was the era that unleashed Frank Zappa and the like. There was John Lennon’s ‘Crabalocker Fishwife’ about which enough has been writ to put The Gettysburg Address well in the shade. Bikes in the Sixties were not afraid to flash a healthy dose of spontaneous alliteration at potential buyerati. Royal Enfield’s marketing mob were right there at the sharp end with their Crusader, their Continental (GT, what else) and the mighty Constellation, a 700cc tour de force. I’m just surprised they stopped there, I mean, what’s wrong with ‘The Climax’ or maybe ‘The Cataclysm’? Instead they went a shade off-piste and named the 736cc replacement for the…

CLASSIC RACER ICONIC METAL THE KATANA in detail Making the racing Katana hasn’t been about getting an old bike and tuning it a bit – this motorcycle is much more about reinventing the wheel (and chassis) than relying on old glories. BODYWORK The bike has a custom fuel tank with original Katana panel modified and remoulded. The whole of the seat area came in for quite a bit of work being shortened by 50mm and raised higher than on the stock bike. SWINGARM This has been made by Sweet Fabrications to TCS’s spec. It’s been built to look very similar to the original’s extruded style used by Suzuki in the 1980s. TCS has future-proofed this retro-lookalike and ensured that the design can take a 200 profile tyre if they want…

cmm Archive All hail Sanctuary! WORDS: BERTIE SIMMONDS PHOTOS: MORTONS ARCHIVE AC Sanctuary is a Japanese tuning shop formed by Hiroyuki Nakamura, a 50-year-old wizard for whom turning classics into up-rated ‘modern’ classics was always a hobby. Way back when, he was a mechanic for a bike dealership in Chiba, east of Tokyo and a massive fan of Kawasaki’s air-cooled four-cylinder bikes. He loved them so he began to tinker with them, melding old and new in a perfect symbiosis of modern chassis parts and beefed up powerplants with a dash of aggressive styling. When people saw what he was doing with his own bikes – others began to ask him to do the same to theirs and his business grew. By 1995 the scene was growing in Japan –…

Stuff The latest riding kit, top tools, tyres, retro clothing and more! W2 DZ RAINPROOF BOOTS With winter showing no sign of releasing its icy grip on us just yet, these could be just what you’re looking for. W2 is an Italian brand established in 1985 that happens to be used by top-level racer Yonny Hernandez. Not that he’d whizz around race-tracks in these – they are the W2 DZ Rainproof boots. So that means they’re made from leather, have a rainproof membrane, double zippers for closure and an anatomical, removable foot-bed. Black only, sizes 7-11. www.bikeit.co.uk SHARK SKWAL 2 HELMET The new Skwal 2 allows you to be seen at night – as it features its own LED lights front and rear! The helmet itself has been improved for…

The Bringsty Grand Prix is go! On April 7 the Bringsty Grand Prix revives a series of scramble-cumenduros run just outside Bromyard in 1946 and 1947 when the local Herefordshire economy and people in general were trying to recover from the battering of the Second World War. Run over a challenging 1.5-mile course on Bringsty Common (which includes bogs, water-splashes and the steepest of hills) the event is exclusively for vintage and classic bikes and is allied to the bi-annual Bromyard Festival of Speed. The Bringsty Grand Prix takes place just off the A44 near Brockhampton, Worcestershire, at 10am on Saturday, April 7. Tickets – £10 for adults – can be pre-booked at www.bromyardspeedfestival.co.uk Entries are still being accepted for Pre 1960, Pre 74 and Twinshock classes with details available…

I sold them: Mick Hemmings When Mick Hemmings left his job as an advertisement salesman on Motor Cycle News to set up his own motorcycle business in Northampton, the Mick Walker dealership in Wisbech was one of the largest Moto Guzzi dealers in the UK. Mick Walker was regarded throughout the industry and by his customers as one of the nicest blokes you could meet. “When I was setting up,” Mick recalls, “I did not have anything in the way of stock so Mick Walker let me have some Derbis and a Moto Guzzi to fill the place up a bit. At the time I was running a Norton Commando and Mick was the go-to man in my area to get stuff fixed, like the ruined…

READER’S RESTORATION Tasty turbo! Top resto man and journo Will Barber was asked to restore a super-rare Kawasaki. He shared part one of his story with us. WORDS: WILL BARBER/BERTIE SIMMONDS PHOTOS: WILL BARBER What we have here is Chris Kitchen’s 1979 Kawasaki Z1-R TC, imported into the UK from Australia in March 2017, and it was my job to get her sorted. So here we go! First of all, what is the Z1-R TC? Well, she’s less well-known than the 1980s raft of turbo bikes. By 1977-78 the Z1-R was looking a little long in the tooth compared to the opposition and the reasoning (well, in Canada and the USA) was that to boost (ahem) the bike’s flagging sales they should add lots of extra power by slapping a…

Project Big Zed part 6 More heavy metal! Ralph once more marks, saws, files and gets infuriated with the big-bore Z1000A2! WORDS AND PHOTOS: RALPH FERRAND Last month I started to fit a PMC frame stiffening kit to the mighty Z1325 custom bike. This month there will be more fabricating and machining, to the frame of the original Z1000A2, but I’ll start with making a new set of engine mounting plates. The originals were not very thick mild steel plate and I thought that for this puppy I would upgrade to lightweight but stiffer 10mm aluminium alloy plate. I started off by wiping engineer’s marking blue on the face of the piece of 10mm aluminium bar selected for the job. I initially marked the hole centres with a scriber. I…

Project Kawasaki Z1300 A5 part 1 Sickly six Our Ralph lusted after a Z1300 and found this Godier Genoud five years back – but now it’s got a temperature! WORDS AND PHOTOS: RALPH FERRAND Anyone who has read my outpourings in this honourable organ will be aware that I am a massive Zed head. Although the bike I have loved most is my 1977 Z1000A1, my Z1300 comes a close second. When I was 17, I was a dope smoking, long-haired, soap-dodging Hell’s Angel lookalike. I was also ruining my hearing with loud music and destroying my liver with seriously excessive quantities of alcohol. It was then I met some lads from Merthyr Tydfil who were doing some contract work locally. They were a bit older than me but seemed…

Project Suzuki DR600 part 8 Delay the decay! Bits of PB’s DR600 that aren’t the engine finally get some love! What took him so long? WORDS AND PHOTOS: PAUL ‘THE ARTIST’ BERRYMAN Two bloody years! That’s how long I’ve been devoting all my attention to getting this DR600 running properly. If you read last time’s article you’ll know it’s had a new cam-chain, which doesn’t sound like a performance mod but it’s cured the previously miles-adrift cam timing. That one small improvement has led to many significant benefits; it’s a different beast now, cruising and top speeds are way up, overall liveliness is much improved and it’s even more of a hoot to thump-thump-thump around the local country lanes. I’m genuinely hopeful the motor is now just about as good…

COMING CLASSIC Triumph Daytona 600/ 650 BERTIE’S BLATHER Big, bold and British, but enough about Bert; the editor makes a case for a UK bike which shone oh-so bright for a very short space of time… This – slightly angular looking – beast is the Triumph Daytona 600/650. Now, it has a somewhat unique place in British bike design as it wasn’t around long before being replaced by the seminal Daytona 675 triple. Okay, okay, I know that we are talking about bikes that are quite ‘recent’ in a classic mag, but this page gives you the heads-up on cheap stuff that you should tuck away now… So bear with me. Why go hunting for a Daytona 600/650, then? We mentioned that ‘unique place’ in British bike design.…