RealClassic - January 2014

KAWASAKI 250 SG • BRIT SPARKS • HAPPY DAYS TRIUMPH!

ISSUE 117 • JANUARY 2014 £3.20

tribute twin

ONE WINTRY MATCHLESS G3CS

cracking on

TT SpECIAL

NORTON MOdEL 7

SAvEd TO RIdE AGAIN ROYAL ENfIELd 500 TWIN

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MATCHLESS G3CS

CraCking P On! Woolly jumpers, stout shoes, mist and the crackle of a big single. Frank Westworth has being playing again…

Photos by Rowena Hoseason, Chris Spaett, Frank Westworth

iles of crackling brown leaves, sparkling white-ridged roads, brilliant blue skies and birdsong, maybe a distant peal of church bells. Perfect wintry quiet, worthy of a Christmas card. Until some lunatic comes cackling and crackling down the lanes aboard a shining, bouncing old bike with an upswept and very joyous exhaust note.

The lunatic pulls into a clearing, circles in an ever-decreasing way, churning up the leaves, disturbing the dried mud beneath them, and finally pulls up by a beautiful view. The engine dies into silence, the birds resume singing and the lunatic gazes across brilliant bright winter England.

There are those – and there are many of them – who will maintain that more than one motorcycle is too many motorcycles.

They maintain that in the great rosy-tinted days of the remote past motorcycles were so perfected and so all-rounded that RealRiders needed only the one to satisfy all their needs.

It may be true. I have no idea. I am too thick to spot the truth in this. I have almost always enjoyed more than a single motorcycle at a time. The Norton (or the AJS, Brough Superior, Jawa or Shifty – choose your own favourite) for posing and polishing, and the MZ (or Honda, Laverda, Vincent or James – choose your own favourite) for all-weather everyday use. That sort of thing.

The arrival of autumn always finds me quite suddenly hankering for something light, simple, chuck-aboutable and tough for those awesome and rare bright days when the beckoning of the lanes is just irresistible.

The Shed contains more than one machine of this spec, luckily, thus avoiding potential walletary disaster. There’s a BSA A65, which does the job perfectly, and there’s a Triumph T25SS, which would do the job perfectly and with rather less weight … but which is buried somewhere at the back and has probably been eaten by mice. Why is neither of them an AMC single? A question best ignored, really.

The opportunity to satisfy my selfish urge to drop everything and go battering the lanes aboard someone else’s shiny-shiny greenlane machine is never resistible. And as the offering was indeed an AMC single, it would have been foolish to refuse. I’ll tell you what the bike is in just a moment, but before that I’d rather dwell on what it does!

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TRIBUTE TWIN

A replica is the sincerest form of flattery; discuss. Nolan Woodbury meets Robert Jones, a man whose mission built him a special replica … a very special replica!

Photos by Nolan Woodbury

M

irroring automotive application, trickle-down technology from racing motorcycles improves the breed. That was certainly the case for Vincent, for when mechanical failures using proprietary engines let down their Works effort, namesake Phillip and his lead engineer Phil Irving built their own. That design, the 500cc Meteor, was doubled to produce a 1000cc twin for the Series A Rapide. Introduced one year after the conclusion of WWII, the remade Series B (still carrying the Vincent-HRD moniker) served as a base to achieve some success at the IOM (the singles, primarily) and other high-speed competitions. Yet, despite these accomplishments The Vincent’s position as a storied institution comes not from just records, but from decades spent as a

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gold standard of road-going performance motorcycles.

A testament to its enduring nature, some thirty-plus years later Swiss racer / tuner / engineer Fritz Egli found it necessary to build a new chassis for what continued to be motorcycling’s best, most capable large displacement engine. Keeping that and dismissing the rest allowed Egli to earn and repeat as champion of the Swiss Hill Climb (in 1968, Fritz Peier in 1969) by binning the original cantilever design for his now famous twin-shock, tube backbone which is lighter, more compact and far more rigid.

That success inspired a street version, as Egli’s mission of playing chassis catch-up joined similar efforts to create a booming miniindustry of specialists in the 1970s. But while builders such as Rickman, Seeley and others are remembered best for frame kits that held

the new wave of Asian fours, Egli’s first and most profound fame was pushed into legend by the still glorious, all powerful Stevenage twin.

‘A UK bike magazine used to run a sepia sketch of an Egli on their autojumble page,’ says Robert Jones, happily doing business at sixty-nine in Salt Lake City Utah. ‘The image of that solo rider and his determined look stayed with me.’ Very clearly, these pages prove that Bob was successful in transforming his dream into reality, but I’m skipping many important details making that early conclusion. ‘That sketch swayed me towards the Egli and away from that long-desired Black Shadow,’ smiled

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1970 EGLI-VINCENT REPLICA

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JANUARY 2014 I 23

R 7 E L P E U D S O E M H T o e to g engin t n vy wa ho t a rev e. So s w lu fi am olk st f end to bed fr e surp e o M er t her d to th e’s on t t s a a e f a f ppene s? Her early y o t in t ha gine to an en b a wh mi en -fitted is, ridd s Dom , retro r chas n‌ d Frank n w no inato seasoseason a o Dom ena Hwena Ho o Rowos by R t Pho tworth Wes

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NORTON DOMINATOR

W

hen the Norton Dominator is mentioned, few people tend to give its first incarnation more than a passing nod, and some folk are outright sniffy about the pre-featherbed Model 7. Trials rider and photographer Don Morley reckoned that the plunger-framed Model 7 was most definitely ‘not a thoroughbred’, regardless of what Norton’s advertising claimed. Morley thought that ‘the roadholding and handling of these bikes, frankly, were anything but good, not least because they shared exactly the same

The original Model 7 engine incorporated three patents and produced around 29bhp. Our test bike has been fitted with a later, alloy-head 596cc motor, donated in the mists of time by a Dommi 99

The 99 engine would originally have breathed though a Monobloc, but this looks like the original 1-inch Type 76, which could explain some of the very sweet low-down running

running gear as the equally-poor-steering single cylinder job… this bike’s handling left a lot to be desired.’

Author Mick Woollett also gave the Model 7 short shrift in his huge marque history: ‘in reality it was no match for the already wellestablished Triumph Tiger 100. The Norton was overweight at 440lb – no less than 50lb heavier than the (sprung-hub) Triumph 500 twins! The Norton twin had a disappointing performance. It was fast but lacked the midrange torque that the other twins had and which was where the twins were supposed to score over the singles.’ When first announced in 1948, great things were expected of the Model

7 and perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that the Dominator couldn’t quite satisfy all that accumulated anticipation. Enthusiasts had been patiently waiting for something special from Norton which would trounce the Triumph twin. Bert Hopwood aimed to engineer out the Triumph’s inherent weaknesses and build a robust all-rounder, but as Cyril Ayton explained; ‘fans who had long foretold instant annihilation for Triumphs when the winner of 21 TTs got round to making a twin became a little subdued when Dominator road-test figures were released…’

Even RC regular Jim Reynolds, well known for his dedication to the marque, commented

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