Vintage Thing No.82 - the Norvin

Virtually line perfect, Norvins look the part but probably don't offer much over the standard Vincent. Still, wooargh, though, eh?

The green shoots of spring are bursting through and nowhere is this more noticeable than in my piles of old photos that not only grow but creep around the house. The date and location of this snap of a Norvin at some show or other have long been lost but the look of the bike was enough to stop me dead in my tracks.

For many years, Norvins were my ultimate British bike until I discovered the Egli-Vincent and that's more European than British. The Norvin was a logical extension of the Triton - put the best engine you can find in the best frame you can find.

While this worked well for the marriage between Triumph engines and Norton frames, the Norvin didn't make quite so much sense. The standard Vincent frame was more of a small box behind the headstock. The engine didn't really need cradling in tubes.

What counted against the Vincent during the late fifties and sixties was the look of its front suspension. Against the dramatic lines of a Triton a Vinnie looked old-fashioned and it was largely the dictates of fashion that saw Vincent engine squeezed into Norton Featherbed frames.

Worst of all, the engine had to be butchered to fit. You can make a Norvin out of a Vincent but you can't make a Vincent out of a Norvin. The integral gearbox on the Vincent engine has a rather beautifully engineered swing-arm pivot with taper rollers having a design life of 100,000 miles. that has to come off with a hacksaw if it's to go into the Norton frame, which of course has its own swing arm.

But I'm glad these bikes were built. The result is one hell of a machine and was immortalised by Paul Sample when it chose one as the mount for the ultimate biker hero, Ogri. This bike epitomises the half-breed. No engine seems to look out of place in the Featherbed frame but the Vincent engine fills it beautifully. And that's the problem.

The Vincent engine is almost too much of a squeeze. In slimline frames the engine has to sit high to clear the frame rails, taking the centre of gravity up with it. Some Norvin builders lengthened the frame tubes or cut the cradle away together.

I can remember discussing Vincents with the motorcycle chassis designer Tony Foale. The standard machine appealed to him far more for its purity of design. Most of the Norton frame was superfluous to his critical eye.

There were worse Vincent specials, though. Tony was appalled by a Vincent vee-twin plumbed into a Seeley frame intended for a Manx Norton or an AJS 7R, which appeared in Classic Bike magazine in the mid-eighties.

"The carbies are right where the downtubes are. Look how he's had to lengthen the inlet manifolds to get them to clear the frame. That's just by the rider's knees. The carburation'll will be well off - why didn't he get Colin Seeley to build a frame that fitted?"

The Norvin remained a very attractive bike despite these compromises and a dealer engaged in small series production to produce the Viscount in the early sixties. All my reference material omits the name of this "dealer", presumably to protect his identity from lynch mobs.

But the Egli frame appeals more to me these days, although Nero - to my eyes the ultimate Vincent Vincent - is fantastic.