Engine Punk

This bike belongs to one of Pete Low's mates (sorry, I didn't catch your name) and he brought it along to the Calstock Bike Show (see post for 12th August). He'd only just got it and was very pleased with it, for it had been standing outside a house in London for two years and he paid 800 quid for it. The engine ran well and the only major fettling he had to do was to the brakes, which needed overhauling. Overall, he was delighted with his purchase, which was worth the price for the engine alone. However, he was disappointed with the brakes, which were sourced from a Yamaha XJ900. I have a slight history with Norton Motors in that I was interviewed for an industrial placement during my industrial design sandwich course. I was due to work at the Shenstone factory for a summer when it the engineering training board that was to have subsidised my pay realised that Norton Motors had not been making payments to its scheme. I believe subscriptions to the engineering traini...

Just look at this beauty! As a Vintage Thing it's practically over-qualified. This gorgeous 1000cc JAP v-twin powered, wideline Norton Featherbed won best competition bike at this year's Calstock Bike Show and when they fired it up in the tent there were huge grins all round. It sounded like a racing Morgan trike, which isn't surprising since they use the same engine - really crisp and nothing like the "potato, potato, potato" of a Harley V-twin. These engines also went into Brough Superiors and many Shelsley specials. John Bolster used two of them chained together in Bloody Mary and went on to use no less than four of them in the ultimate Bolster hillclimber. However, the resulting 4-litre eight cylinder monster proved too difficult to start. Without electric starters, bumping it was the only way to do it and if one engine didn't catch it just right, the shocks to the chain transmission system would snap the links easily. As for the frame...

At the Calstock Bike Show it was so wet underfoot even the pedestrians were aqua-planing. Never mind the bikes doing it - if you proceeded at anything above walking pace and braked injudiciously then you lost all steering and down you went in a great plume of water. And it proved incredibly difficult for the girls and boys of Calstock to stop aqua-planing once they'd got a taste for it. Was this show one of the summer's best kept secrets? Pete Low - he of Ginetta G21S and Armstrong MT500 fame already on this blog - told me about this show last year and now that he's moved up to Essex he was determined to come back for this year's event. Last year he got roped in to do the judging. He knew the organiser Malcolm Wright through the Armstrong Rider's forum and positively raved about what a good event this was. As I hadn't seen him since he'd moved up country and decided to go along and see for myself. Calstock is on the River Tamar just below Gunnislake. ...