Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2022 i Classic Motorcycle Mechanics

Is it my age, do you think? Have I reached that time of life where I’m settling down to a more gentle pace of life? I rather think I am… For the last year I’ve been rattling around in my daughter’s little Ford KA. You know the sort. It’s a little 1200cc motor, £30 a year road tax and… Well, what a little beauty of a motor for just £2500. I found myself saying: “This will do me when I’m older…” And I keep using it. It’s filtering into biking, too. I’ve something to admit here: I’ve never liked single-cylinder motorcycles. There, I’ve said it. I’m not talking about two-strokes, I love single-cylinder strokers and grew up on them. I mean those vibey, all noise and no-go type of four-stroke…

LASER TOOLS ROTO-LOCK RATCHET My account manager at Laser Tools gave me this tool to try out, mainly for Biker’s Toolbox. He does this often, particularly with new tools, but it’s rare for me to get excited by a ratchet and he normally has them back, given the amount of such tools I already have. This time I said that he couldn’t have it back ‘cos it’s too useful; in fact, I have bought another with my own money for my man cave, so indispensable is the tool. Since building my second workshop I have had to double up on tools used constantly or I’d spend my life running between the two workshops with armfuls of tools. So why did I get so excited by this tool? The answer is…

This October’s Classic Motorcycle Mechanics Show will again feature the late John Wyatt’s Rising Sun Award. Respected restorer John – who passed away in 2021 – established his award in 2013 for the best restoration by a young person. Last year’s winner was Cameron Stephenson with his 1960 Triumph Tiger Cub. The winner will be chosen by John’s friend and long-standing concours judge Matthew Pinhey, and will come with a cash prize. Entries for the award can be made on the entry form sent to all show exhibitors.…

Shaun Donovan says: “I was looking for an old exhibition catalogue and found these old photos (as you do). One of them is me aged 14 on what was left of a James Flying Cadet 197cc. The other is me aged 17 on my first roadworthy bike, a BSA C12 with C11G engine. I had bought it for £40 from my student earnings at the Metal Box factory. My mum said her hair started going grey that day. The third photo is the bike minus the six-volt battery in our garage. My mum was a little happier. Due to the lack of a proper mudguard the coil was getting wet from the rear wheel and running was hectic, to say the least. I did crash it coming home from Art…

This is the new BSA Gold Star: a thoroughly modern take on a machine dear to many people’s hearts. Maybe grandad, dad or an uncle had one? The legend of the Goldie is such that this one really has a lot to live up to, but can it? The big thing is: does it look right? Oh, it surely does. From the outside looking in at the rows of bikes lined up at UTAC Millbrook Proving Ground’s launch location, there’s not much wrong with the all-new Goldie, replicating as it does the old DBD34 model from 1956. The lines are respectfully similar to those of the Golden ‘oldie Goldies’. Squint and you’ll think they’re one and the same. That tear-drop tank, the understated paint, that bold BSA badge and the…

Kawasaki’s Z1R could be seen to be the firm’s ‘first’ kinda ‘café racer’ inspired machine, even if – to us – it was a bit more than that. The Z1R (yes, we know some say Z1 R, or Z1-R, but we are going from Kawasaki’s official literature here) was a real Kawasaki first and foremost. So that mean lots of power – aclaimed 90bhp or so at 8000rpm, making it the most powerful Z machine yet. The base of the motor was a 1016cc air-cooled DOHC inline four in classic Kawasaki style, mated to four Mikuni VM28SS carbs, four-into-one exhaust, seven-spoke solid cast wheels (front now an 18-incher) and drilled disc brakes. Suspension was moved on the frame, strengthened in places, and the kick-starter now deleted – but handily stored…

Isuspect I’m no different to many classic enthusiasts in that I cannot resist a bargain and especially so when it comes to parts for bikes I already own. And if we’re talking about bikes from the 1970s then you might very well argue that any spares are worth having if you intend to keep the bike(s) in question for any length of time. A perfect case in point is Satan’s Suzuki Stinger, the 125 stroker twin that has blighted my life and these hallowed pages for far too long. I have stuff like points and condensers in stock simply because Suzuki, in its infinite wisdom, chose to source ignition parts from two manufacturers. I also have some pistons and rings ‘just in case’ but what I didn’t have until…

One of the joys of classic bike riding is the lack of distractions compared to modern motorcycles – no colourful TFT screens, displaying streams of data, operated by fiddly switches that get muddled up with indicators, horn and high beam. On the other side of the coin, sometimes it would be really useful to have a 12-volt USB socket on the bike so you could charge your phone on the move, when using it for sat-nav, or an action camera, etc. Fitting a reliable power source is relatively straightforward and brings with it several other benefits. We talked to the battery-saving experts at OptiMate about how best to go about this and some of the pitfalls to be avoided. Rather than connecting a 12V socket directly to the battery on…

Shoichiro Irimajiri has designed some of the most beautiful and successful racing and road motorcycles, as well as having had a hand in the success of some of Honda’s star riders, even setting up HRC. He rose from the designer's desk to run one of the world's most significant companies. His list of notable successes include designing the Honda 50cc RC115 twin engine; the 125cc five-cylinder RC147; and most of the 250cc six-cylinder RC166 as ridden by Mike Hailwood. He also designed Honda's first Formula 1 racing engine, the 12-cylinder RA271. More memorable to most street riders is his CBX1000, the six-cylinder motorcycle introduced in 1979. In the next issue of Classic Racer (on sale August 18) Peter Starr talks to Irimajiri-san about his life in motorcycles, his relationship with…

BIKE OF THE YEAR READER’S SPECIAL Look at this work of art… I mean. Just look at it. Surely this model rolled off Yamaha’s production line sometime between the late 1970s and early 1980s. It certainly looks like it could have, but it didn’t. Instead, this is the second bike build carried out by Kelvin Bonarski, a design engineer who has worked in the gas and oil industry for the past 30-plus years. Kelvin’s other Yamaha build was a 1966 Lambretta fitted with an RD350 YPVS engine, but it’s always been on Kelvin’s mind to build something really special, and this one certainly is, we think you will agree… So, how did this all start, Kelvin: “I got the idea from a friend telling me to watch Allen Millard on…

The original Top Gun film had it all, really: a thumping soundtrack; adrenalin-fuelled aerial scenes of dog-fighting jet airplanes; beautiful Kelly McGillis; and a Kawasaki GPz900R… And unless you’ve been living under a stone over the last year or so, you’ll have realised that the sequel to the original – called Top Gun: Maverick – has finally been released to great fanfare in UK cinemas and it’s still got plenty of bikes in… Both films are 36 years apart, but feature Navy Lieutenant (later Captain) Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell who,– as his call-sign suggests, is somewhat of a loose cannon. If you’ve never seen the original or the sequel, then you should. It’s splendid, harmless ‘brain out’ fun and one of the stars of BOTH films, along with the Grumman F-14…

As Iponder over life’s complexities: Bernoulli’s equation, Hooke’s law, TOWIE (that’s The Only Way Is Essex to the uninitiated), I flick the reality switch and set to removing a set of GSXR 1100 cylinder studs. With the top crank-case on my little single ring Ufesa hot-plate I step away for a minute and meander down memory lane, which is nowadays peppered with sizeable potholes, recalling the number of broken exhaust studs I’d removed; the GS750 cylinder barrels I’d sworn at (boy can they get stuck); the recalcitrant GSX metering screws I’d teased and cajoled into action over many years. Why has my memory been tweaked so? Well, I’ve been tasked by a pal to freshen up a GSX-R1100K motor that has suffered the ravages of time combined with possibly an…

Awell-known fast food franchise recently ran an advertising campaign with a slogan that read – ‘Like getting your money's worth?’ Well, this month’s offering rather neatly fits into the same slot! Kawasaki’s oh-so-sweet KE100 might have looked like an all-new model when it first appeared back in mid-1970s, but it was really a rehash of a basic blueprint that had been around for a decade or more before. The firm’s M series 50s, J series 85s and later 90cc G models all ran the same, basic layout – an iron barrel atop vertically split alloy cases cleverly aspirated via a rotary disc-valve mounted on the right-hand end of the crank. Early models also had something decorously referred to as a ‘fourspeed rotary shift’. This bizarre device was something apparently popular,…

After stripping the engine down to the bare bones it was a quick trip to my man, Steve Smethurst in downtown Salford in Manchester. I have known Steve since the late 1970s and have been using his cleaning and polishing services since. No finish is as good and durable as the finish that Steve obtains on these old aluminium engines. And even if it is £400+ for the basic engine parts, it is still worth it. Like I said about the frame in the last instalment, these motors are getting on a bit now and they need more and more TLC with every passing year. With this is mind, Steve is offering an extra polishing process on the outer fins of the top-end and parts of the crankcases themselves. This…

In case you think you’ve missed something, yes, there has been a hiccup in the sequencing of the TS400K project. We’ve had several master classes from Ferret on the bike’s wiring which were, hopefully, hugely valuable to all the home mechanics who hate electrics. We’re now back on the tools going through the Apache, carrying out sanity and safety checks. The Apache made its way to rural Bedfordshire thanks to my good mate Andy Kirkwood who, if anything, is even more bike mad than me. His company, Global Robots, sponsors the likes of TT and Macau GP winner Peter Hickman so I knew the crate would be in good hands. Andy’s van driver and sometime bike courier Neil Milson picked up the crate from Southampton and was excitedly ripping it…

FORCITE MK.1S HELMET This is an interesting one. Sure, we love old retro stuff in CMM, but we also realise the need for modern advancements, like up-to-the-minute tyre technology, sat-nav and the rest. The Forcite MK1S is being billed as the most advanced motorcycle helmet ever created and it’s available from September. It features smart technology, with audio, visual and road alert systems integrally combined in the helmet. This means you don’t have to stick a GoPro on it if you want a 1080p camera, nor do you have to butcher the lining to stick some sort of high-end audio/communication system in it (Harmon Kardon speakers no less.) And you’ve got a subtle head-up display with a series of flashing warning systems inside the helmet itself, seen in your peripheral…

Tom Garland’s Suzuki GSF600F Bandit This Bandit is a Mk1 first registered in 1996 and probably one of the first batch to be imported as it has no rear grab handles or centre-stand, so Suzuki was obviously trying to sell it as cheap as possible from the start. This was a typically butchered example when I picked it up. It has been abused, cut up, dropped (at least once, badly) and generally unloved by the majority of the 18 previous owners the DVLA had recorded! The whole bike had to stripped down to nut and bolts and built from the ground up. I wanted to keep it as stock as it’s a modern classic in the making. The only indulgence was a chrome oil-cooler cover and braided brake lines to…

“You won’t like this one very much I suppose – what with you being a two-stroke man!” says Dave the owner. Well, it’s a reasonable assumption given my perhaps unhealthy obsession with older stinkwheels. And, to possibly reinforce this, I’ve just got off two of Dave’s trail bikes …yes, two-strokes – naturally. I’ve ridden several 550/4s over the years and some have failed to impress; Okay, so the odd one has made me smile but in the main I’ve come away feeling – meh – as the kids say. I always loved the look of the original 500/4s and felt the F1 550s were something of poor(er) second. I get that Honda was focused on car production at the time and had to rehash what it had rather than run…

G’day! And so, this is it… the end of a project that I’ve loved every minute of. As you can see in the images, the yellow terror has polished up very nicely indeed considering it was a complete wreck. Sure, it is no show winner, but it is just how I wanted it, right down to the crossbar pad and black handlebars. This resto was more about building what I had back then and want right now than what Suzuki put on showroom floors all those years ago. I did want some originality though, and that was no easy task. The XT model came out with a range of graphics, depending on country, and here in Australia we had a few varieties thrown in. So, what people got didn’t necessarily…

Quick recap: bought this Japanese market Ducati 400SS many years ago, struggled (and failed) to get it registered in France, then the fuel tank sprung a leak. Fixed that and found the carb diaphragms had perished. Took it apart and then lost interest. Now it’s time to do something about that. I’ve realised that I’m never going to get round to giving it the full strip and rebuild that it deserves, but I really need to get it back together and running, and put it up for sale – I’ve got projects queuing up behind it, and I need to free up both bench space and cash – time for a flurry of activity. The first thing was to try and find all the bits. It’s so long since I…

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Have you noticed that project bikes often seem to look much better in photos than in real life? It is only when you get close that you see all the things which need to be sorted out. Let us look at a few disparate mini-restoration projects on the CB450. The most extensive point which required attention was the paint finish and I know the usual approach is simply to take the bike to bits, farm the parts out to a paint finisher and put it all back together again. But as I said at the start of this project, my approach is: ■ I want to do as much as I can myself I do not want to spend an enormous amount ■ I do not need to create an…

As those of you misguided enough to read the outpourings of my diseased mind on a regular basis will be aware, my love affair with my pretty, but not so comfy 23-year-old super sport bike is coming to a natural end. The feisty baby R1 really is the preserve of the younger, less fat rider who has taken less tumbles than yours truly and whilst I did really enjoy hooning her around Castle Combe, when news came that I would be losing a lock-up, I had to slim down my toy collection. As the pocket rocket hadn’t had an MoT for some years, as you don’t really need one for track days, I booked her in for an inspection of roadworthiness. At the allotted time I donned my leathers and…