Real Classic - July 2019 - Preview

TRIUMPH TRIPLES  BSA B33  HARLEY-D KRTT!

Running, Riding & Rebuilding RealClassic Motorcycles

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WHAT LIES WITHIN

TRIUMPH TRIPLES  BSA B33  HARLEYD KRTT!

ISSUE 183  JULY 2019  £3.70

Running, Riding & Rebuilding RealClassic Motorcycles

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REALCLASSIC 183: PUBLISHED JULY 2019

40

RC REGULARS THE CONTENTS PAGE ...................................3

VAN VEEN OCR 1000.....................................6

It’s a bold venture indeed to take one seriously exotic road bike from the late 1970s and put it back into even limited production.

Alan Cathcart reports on the revived Van Veen OCR 1000…

NORTON COMMANDO .............................. 24

If you really want to go fast… take the advice of a privateer who built his own production racers for top-flight competition. Stuart Urquhart gleans some top tuning tips for Norton’s big twin HARLEY-DAVIDSON KR TT......................... 34

Harley’s sidevalve 750 was developed for an all-American post-war race series. How did one end up in New Zealand, and what strange circumstances have afflicted its earlier owners? Sleuth Stuart Francis investigates…

SUNBEAM S8 ............................................. 40

Sunbeam’s post-war twins were amazingly different to all other Brit twins. Frank Westworth has been amazed by them more than once. He’s still amazed…

BSA B33 ..................................................... 48

Leafy country lanes and a beefy British single: SCOT T SQUIR REL  BSA FLATT RACK ER ISSU E 182

JUNE

2019 

£3.70

Running ,

Riding &

there are few scenarios which can match this quintessentially classic experience, says Henry Gregson…

Running, Riding

EVENTS ...................................................... 74

Places to go, places to be, people to wave to and people to see…

READERS’FREE ADS .................................. 76

TT RACER ................................................... 66

What has happened? There’s a load of bikes in there this time. Some corkers, too.

Hmmm…

Last month Richard Jones revealed the early adventures of clubman rider Robin Jac Edwards, whose chance to ride a works racer vanished when war broke out. But Robin’s competition career was far from over…

OLLIE’S ODDJOBS...................................... 98

Ollie Hulme is never afraid to say what he thinks. Which is just as well, as we’ve asked him to expand a little…

BIG HEAD BULLETS.................................... 82

PUB TALK ................................................. 102

Before Enfield stopped building their 500 Bullet in Britain, the singles were fitted with the same big cylinder head as the firm’s competition bikes. Paul Henshaw has recently fettled a pair of these Redditchbuilt roadsters, and shares his hints, tips and buying advice…

Rebuild ing Rea lClassic

Spring is sprung, and PUB is out and about (when not working on her rebuild)…

TALES FROM THE SHED ........................... 108

Frank’s been fettling again. But… fettling with a slight difference. He’s also been riding, which is more fun. Mostly

Motorc ycles

It started with a strange sound, possibly the clutch. Before Nick Adams knew it he was deep into dismantling his Moto Guzzi V-twin’s gearbox, where each step forward was matched by taking two steps back…

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Get writing! You know you want to tell the entire RC world what you think about … well … everything

Half a century ago, the first BSA-Triumph triples went on sale in the UK. Fifty years later, the iconic British superbikes sell for serious money. So what’s a fair price to pay for a Trident, Hurricane or Rocket 3? Rowena Hoseason goes in search of a bargain threecylinder 750 – if such a thing actually exists!

HARLEYD KRTT! S  BSA B33  TRIUMPH TRIPLE

ISSUE 183  JULY

WE’VE GOT MAIL! ...................................... 16

BUYER’S EYE: BSA / TRIUMPH TRIPLES..... 54

MOTO GUZZI GEARBOX............................. 90

 ME GO

LA!



A Van Veen? A What? A Harley-D KR TT? You don’t see either of those every day of the week, or indeed in most other magazines. We have them both, as well as lots and lots and lots more…

You won’t find RealClassic on the shelves in UK newsagents – but you can save the cost and

hassle of mail-ordering each issue with a straightforward subscription. Here’s how!

WHO’S DONE WHAT REALCLASSIC is written by its readers and edited

by Rowena Hoseason and Frank Westworth of The Cosmic Bike Co Ltd in Cornwall. Chris Abrams of AT designs the editorial sections, while Mortons Media Group Ltd at Horncastle are in charge of trade advertising, subscriptions, back issues and all those groovy things Cover image: fab Norton photography from Stuart Urquhart We’re online at www.Real-Classic.co.uk TRADE ADVERTISERS for the magazine or website should call Helen Martin on 01507 529574, email hrmartin@mortons.co.uk EDITORIAL ENQUIRIES should be sent to Frank@ RealClassic.net or to PO Box 66, Bude EX23 9ZX. Please include an SAE if you want something returned or a personal reply SUBSCRIPTION INFO is on pg114. Call 01507 529529 to subscribe or renew or buy back issues SUBS QUERIES, late deliveries, or changes of address should be directed to 01507 529529, or email subscriptions@realclassic.net ALL MATERIAL in RealClassic is copyright its authors, so please contact us before reproducing anything. RealClassic is printed by William Gibbons & Sons of Wolverhampton. Our ISSN is 1742-2345.

THIS MONTH we’ve been reading PAST TENSE

by Lee Child (the current Jack Reacher thriller and every bit as good as its predecessors); BUILDING THE WORLD by Ken Macleod (superb first contact sci-fi); GET9 by Eden Sharp (features a female vigilante with serious IT skills); APPLESEED by John Clute (remarkable scifi adenture and a little challenging to read); CHANCE by Robert B Parker (more of FW’s Spenser obsession), and BLOOD IN THE SNOW by Franco Marks (really good Italian hoodunnitt).

MEANWHILE AT THE MOVIES we finished our X-MEN frenzy with DARK PHOENIX and came out mainly mystified by it; are still enchanted by the EXPANSE sci-fi TV-series; thought HOSTILES with Christian Bale was possibly the best western we’d seen this week, and thoroughly recommend CLASH for fans of, erm, Vietnamese martial arts movies…

FROM THE FRONT As you may already have noticed, we have something of a rare treat lurking within this issue. Rare? Well, yes. Bikes do not come much more of a rare sight on the roads than a Van Veen OCR 1000. In fact … I have never seen one on the road. This may be because I have lived a particularly sheltered life, surrounded by more mundane machinery, but it might just – only just – be a reflection of the tiny numbers which exist.

We almost have a trend, as I remarked to Alan Cathcart when we were chatting about the Van Veen. How long ago was it that we featured a Münch Mammoth? Another seriously rare classic. A little later I was chatting with another friend (no jokes please; it is perfectly possible to share arcane interests with several otherwise rational people) and he remarked that those two machines, the Van Veen and the Münch, must surely be the oddest of motorcycles.

Well, possibly so. I was able to ruin his day by revealing that way back in the latter 1970s I was privileged to take more than a single ride on another oddity – a Moto Shifty.

Never heard of them? No surprises there, although the Shifty was imported into the UK

by RC’s occasional contributor and longtime reader, Roger Slater. Bet you didn’t know that!

And what do these machines all have in common – apart from tiny sales, oddity and considerable rarity? They all use car engines.

The Münch is powered by an NSU engine, the Van Veen by an engine intended for a Citroën, while the noble Shifty used a Fiat powerplant.

And there have been several others, all the way back to the Brough Superior Straight Four, which was powered, in a sense, by the engine from an Austin Seven. If you know of earlier car engine powered motorcycles which littered the roads before the truly strange Brough, please let me know!

I also enjoyed a ride… actually that’s not true, I didn’t enjoy it at all. Whatever: the bike was a BFG Odyssée, which was also Citroën powered, by a flat twin engine of remarkably little performance. The deal in that case was that its owner offered me a ride. I stared at it,

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a little bewildered. And I was on the point of declining his generous offer, not least because there was a huge crowd of other riders there and I didn’t want to look more of a fool than usual by failing to cope with the terrifying BFG. Which does not stand for Big Friendly Giant, sadly. The same logic on a different day saw me turn down the opportunity to ride away on a Quasar, which as you already know was powered by a Reliant car engine.

However, back to the BFG. It was owned by a very kind chap who really wanted a ride on my Norton Commander, so I agreed to swap bikes so he could. He claimed to enjoy the experience, as did I, so it is possibly that neither of us was entirely honest.

But, car engines? I’ve never understood the appeal to motorcycle builders. They’re all fairly ugly, usually heavy and have power characteristics suited to cars, as you might expect. So why bother? You tell me, because a clue I have not got…

Ride safely Frank Westworth Frank@realclassic.net

THE NEXT ISSUE

RC184WILL BE PUBLISHED ON AUGUST 5th, AND SHOULD REACH UK SUBSCRIBERS BY AUGUST 9th

VAN VEEN OCR 1000

R TORS RETURN? It’s a bold venture indeed to take one seriously exotic road bike from the late 1970s and put it back into even limited production. Alan Cathcart reports on the revived Van Veen OCR 1000…

Photos by Kyoichi Nakamura

A

round a quarter of a century ago rotary-engined motorcycles seemed set to be the next big thing. It certainly felt like it, after the Norton RC588 scored a Wankel-engined bike’s greatest victory by winning the 1992 Senior TT in the Isle of Man in the hands of the late Steve Hislop at a then record speed of 121.38mph, after a thrilling battle with future four-time World Superbike champion Carl Fogarty’s Yamaha. Coupled with the Duckhams Norton team’s domination of the 1994 British Superbike championship, with riders Ian Simpson and Phil Borley finishing 1-2 in the points table, Norton might have expected to benefit from this win with a spike in demand for its F1 Sport race replica streetbike. But the indebted British company was sliding towards insolvency, and production was soon to shut down of the last Wankel-engined motorcycle money could buy. Until now.

In 2019 it’s again possible to purchase a street-legal motorcycle powered by an engine of the kind invented by German engineer Felix Wankel, whose prototype design, featuring an eccentric rotor turning within a trochoidal chamber containing peripheral intake and exhaust ports, first saw the light of day in 1957, powering an NSU car. But not from today’s Norton, even though current owner Stuart Garner actually developed a prototype 700cc twin-rotor road racing engine ten years ago on taking the company over, before dropping it in favour of trying to meet demand for the air-cooled Commando 961 retro-twin that’s underpinned the company’s growth since then.

Instead, the rotary-engined motorcycle you can buy right now is built in the Netherlands by OCR Motors, whose owner Andries Wielinga is in doing so making the past live again. In the 1970s, Dutch two-wheeled tycoon Hendrik ‘Henk’Van Veen produced what was then by far the most high-performance as well as the most expensive series-production streetbike money could buy, powered by the same 100bhp twin-rotor engine equipping the NSU Ro80, the world’s first production rotary-engined car which entered production in 1967. The machine was the Van Veen OCR 1000, of which he sold 38 examples to the likes of US magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes and German Opel/Sachs heir-cum-professional playboy Gunther Sachs at a retail price equivalent to €40,000 today (twice the price back then of a BMW R100RS, or half the cost of a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow limousine!) before the company closed down in 1981. The OCR was in every way symptomatic of the age of excess – which makes Wielinga’s decision to build ten exact replicas of the late70s production Van Veen OCR Rotary retailing at €85,000 tax-free, either a very brave or a very

8 I JULY 2019

Rotary in motion. It plainly is the power of the future!

foolish decision, depending on which way you look at it.

Van Veen’s eponymous company imported Kreidler 50cc mopeds and minibikes to the Netherlands from Germany in such volume during the 60s and 70s – Dutch sales of Kreidlers passed the 100,000 mark in 1971 – that he was able to go Grand Prix racing in the 50cc ‘tiddler’ category with his own specially developed Van Veen Kreidlers. He was able to see his riders win four World championships, starting with Jan de Vries in 1971.

But, that very same year, Van Veen had gone from little to large in taking the first steps towards establishing his own series-production motorcycle brand. He did so by creating a 100bhp prototype road bike featuring a 1000cc Mazda Cosmo rotary engine shoehorned into a Moto Guzzi V7 frame, still with shaft final drive.

Although the result was significantly challenged aesthetically, its performance was so impressive

by the standards of the era – 100bhp was a lot back then, when the newly launched Kawasaki Z1 über-bike ‘only’ made 82bhp – Van Veen decided to put such a bike into production using the NSU engine manufactured by Comotor in Luxembourg.

To do this, he gave the job of designing it to one of his GP riders, 24-year old Jos Schurgers.

Jos had finished third in the 1971 50cc World Championship on a Van Veen Kreidler, before repeating the placing in the 1973 125cc World series on his self-built Bridgestone twin, an amalgam of parts from the Japanese firm’s 175cc Dual Twin roadbike and the Van Veen Kreidler singles. Schurgers managed to achieve all this in between creating the rotary-engined Van Veen OCR 1000 (standing for Oil-Cooled Rotors) with the help of British designer Simon Saunders – better known today as the proprietor of the Ariel Car Company, which today also manufactures its own highly

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VAN VEEN OCR 1000

The same engine in its original form, as fitted to Citroën cars. It’s not easy to recognise this, but it is indeed the eng gine used in the OCR 1000

innovative motorcycle design, the Hondapowered Ariel Ace V4.

The result duly made its debut at the Cologne Show in October 1974, where its show-stopping impact was such that some leading executives of BMW Motorrad were reportedly fired by the company’s Executive Board, on the ground that they ought not to have allowed the German manufacturer to be totally overshadowed in its crucially important home market show! The OCR also succeeded in sidelining the equally new 999cc flat-four Honda Gold Wing by its sheer presence, thanks to Schurgers’ ground-breaking styling that was later widely copied by other manufacturers – and its cost. At a time that the world was shakily recovering from the 1973 oil embargo crisis, when the quadrupling of petrol prices had put an end to decades of cheap fuel, the idea of launching such an expensive, excessive and above all thirsty motorcycle (high fuel consumption and dirty emissions have traditionally been the Achilles heel of Wankel engines) seemed decidedly risky.

But Henk Van Veen pursued his dream, establishing a factory to manufacture the OCR 1000 in his key potential market for such a bike, West Germany. This was located at Duderstadt, just two kilometres from the DDR’s barbed-wire Iron Curtain frontier, and in 1976 a select few journalists visited it to ride the pre-production version of the bike. This had a remarkable specification for its time, with 100.4bhp delivered at 6500rpm by the twin-rotor engine.

This measured 996cc in terms of the swept volume of the trochoidal rotor chambers, amounting to the equivalent of 1693cc under the FIM’s 1:1.7 equivalency formula. Sourced from Comotor, this was essentially a jointventure project between rotary pioneers NSU and traditional avant-garde thinkers Citroën, who installed it in their Birotor GS model – but an agreement was made to also supply the engine in batches of 50 to Van Veen.

Installed in the OCR 1000, the super-flexible twin-rotor engine delivered 60bhp at just 3000rpm, and in spite of a 292kg dry weight,

The engine sits across the frame in the conventional way, then the drive is taken to the gearbox and shifted through 90 degrees to power the drive shaft

performance was impressive, with a 0-100kph acceleration in just 3.6s, and a top speed of 224kph. The 0-200kph time was 16sec – impressive for the day, and pretty good even now for a sports tourer, which is what the OCR 1000 essentially was, especially when fitted with the optional very protective fairing designed by Schurgers. However, complaints from outside testers about poor throttle response, a flawed gearchange, and ineffective brakes – a critical factor on such a fast, heavy bike with minimal engine braking – saw Van Veen forced to delay production while these issues were addressed.

But addressed they were, and one year later in 1977 production of the Van Veen OCR 1000 got under way – although the Dutch entrepreneur’s target of producing 2000 bikes annually always seemed hopelessly optimistic, even without the problems of engine supply which would shortly hit the project. After just a handful of bikes had been constructed and delivered to eager, wellheeled customers, using the first batch of 50 motors supplied from Luxembourg, production

One remarkable powerplant. It’s a car engine by design, and has a decent wet sump as a result

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JULY 2019 I 9

The prototype Van Veen used its engine in-lline, as the makers intended, but was a little challenged in the handsomeness stakes. The frame appears to be from a Moto Guzzi, while the engine is probably a Mazda

One seriously hefty frame houses an equally hefty engine

Undercover… The oil pump p is at the frontt, the drive to the generator in the middle, and the oil filter lives behind them both

10 I JULY 2019

of the engine stopped, and Comotor folded o sshortly after.

There had been technical problems with the rotor tip seals – a recurring problem on early rotary engines, even for Mazda, which eventually resolved the issue. Also the now Peugeoto owned Citroën had ceased production of the poorly-received Birotor after making just 847 eexamples, while NSU was now part of the VW eempire, and in 1977 they made the last of the 337,204 examples of the Ro80 to be built. Van V Veen staggered on with production, with the fi final original OCR 1000 of the 38 built completed in 1981, before everything ground to a halt, and t factory closed. the But now, 38 years later, this Van Veen ultrabike is back in production, thanks partly to Dutch rotary-engine enthusiast Ger Van Rootselaar, w who purchased the entire stock of unassembled parts from Van Veen when the Duderstadt ffactory shut. From these, he assembled Van V Veen OCR 1000 no.39 for himself, but had no

intention of doing anything more until he met up with Andries Wielinga, based in the nearby north Holland town of Wommels, and a restorer of classic Citroën cars – including of course the very rare GS Birotor.

‘I’ve rebuilt two of these so far, and their technology was very interesting,’ says Andries.

‘I ride bikes on the road, so when Ger Van Rootselaar decided he wanted to sell his Van Veen OCR parts because they were just sitting there gathering dust, he had two people who wanted to buy them, one German and one English. But he realised that if he sold them that would be the end of him ever making any new bikes himself – so he came to see me, and we agreed that I’d buy the parts from him, and he’d build the engines for me.

‘That was in 2009, and that’s how it all started. Since then we’ve digitalised the original drawings and built up a complete parts stock to build ten motorcycles, using in most cases the original suppliers. I’m making the exact same

Putting it all together

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JULY 2019 I 11

As you may have observed already, this is not entirely a slim machine. And the view from above is only a little intimidating

bike from thirty years ago, with all the original parts just as Van Veen made them back then.

Dirk here came into the project to help me, and we tracked down every small parts supplier, even down to the ones making silly things like the special kind of tie wraps for the cables – it took two months of searching, but we got them specially made!

‘We wanted to make a completely authentic original bike, and even if some of them took half a year to track down, we managed to find all the parts to do so, except for the tubular steel frame, which is made by Nico Bakker to exactly the same design as the original, and of course the tyres, which are Michelin Macadam. Otherwise, this bike is history on wheels – but brand new!’

I suppose from that point of view the born-again Van Veen OCR 1000 isn’t so much a replica as the resumption of production almost four decades down the line, with mostly original period parts acquired as part of the factory clearout, even down to the Ronal cast aluminium wheels made by a MercedesBenz/BMW car supplier, which were strictly futuristic at a time when everything else in the marketplace had wire wheels. Also avant-garde back then were the modern-sized 42mm Van

12 I JULY 2019

Veen telescopic forks with Koni internals, the twin Koni nitrogen gas shocks with three-way preload adjustment, and the trio of 280mm Brembo cast-iron discs with two-piston Brembo calipers, which apparently cured the braking problems experienced with the stainless steel discs originally fitted. It may seem strange now, but all this stuff was leading edge back in the late 70s, and partially justified the bike’s very steep price tag.

Fast forward 40 years, and it seems Andries Wielinga is trying to trump that, but with a timewarp motorcycle that’s only available in just one colour, the original admittedly very classylooking black-and-green livery. The colour green was a Van Veen trademark, and his 50cc GP racers featured it too, only combined with patriotic Dutch orange. Delivery time is three months from the customer placing an order, and the price includes a two-year unlimited mileage warranty – the same as Van Veen offered back then. Just ten bikes will be built – seven of which have already found customers – reflecting the number of engines held in stock.

The Comotor twin-rotor motor fitted to the bike, with wet sump lubrication for the oil-cooled rotors (OCR, remember!) and a water-cooled

engine casing – hence the large radiator – is built up by Ger Van Rootselaar with uprated rotor tip seals, reflecting Mazda’s successful resolution of this single most contentious rotary engine issue. The four-speed gearbox with gear primary, shaft final drive and a dry twin-plate diaphragm clutch with hydraulic operation, was developed and manufactured for Van Veen by Porsche, in keeping with the calibre, and the price tag, of the motorcycle.

The chance to spend an afternoon riding this back-to-the-future bike revealed an enticing blend of old and new, that in some ways was nevertheless rather frustrating. I’ve ridden lots of rotaries down the years, mostly Nortons, and while the engine’s visual appearance often turns off traditionally-minded bikers, I must admit to being seduced by the Wankel engine’s smooth running, compact build (even in the case of the OCR, which on the basis of the FIM’s 1.7:1 equivalency formula is equivalent to a 1700cc twin) and broad, rideable spread of power.

Thumb the starter button to fire up the OCR (the starter motor comes from a Johnson outboard engine, since Van Veen was also the Dutch distributor for those), and the twin-rotor engine bursts immediately into life via the twin-

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VAN VEEN OCR 1000

A bike of this mass demands decent brakes and running gear to control it. The brakes are by Brembo and are a little underwhelming, while Van Veen produced their own beefy forks and wheels. Brand identity is everything

choke Solex carb’s automatic cold start setting, before settling to a fast-sounding but totally vibration-free 1300rpm idle, accompanied by the trademark offbeat rotary burble that’s halfway between a two-stroke’s high-pitched crack and a four-stroke’s deeper rumble – call it a three-stroke!

Having only ever ridden a 588cc twin-rotor Norton Rotary streetbike, I was unprepared for the depths of performance delivered by the Van Veen’s engine with almost twice the capacity and practically double the rate of acceleration, in spite of its heavy weight. Notch bottom gear on the street-pattern left foot shifter, and

you can feel the OCR pull smoothly away from literally off idle, with impressive wide open acceleration from 2000rpm upwards without any risk of lifting the front wheel, thanks to the long 1550mm wheelbase and also the fact the heavy motor (because of the cast iron rotors) is carried way low in the bike.

The Comotor engine motors hard and fast with a totally seamless power delivery toward the 6500rpm redline – and beyond! There’s no built-in revlimiter on the Bosch/Hardig CDI, and perhaps there should be, because several times I realised with a start that I’d been seduced by the smooth-running engine to send the ta tacho needle beyond the 7000rpm mark, s seemingly without the build of power fa falling off even though it’s supposed to

peak out at 6500rpm, with 100.4bhp on tap there, matched to 99.82lbft of torque at just 3500rpm.

Which means that this thoroughly modern engine is a delight to use, with waves of grunt just waiting for you each time you change gear, to propel the revs back towards the red zone again. With the 100mph mark showing on the speedo at just 4200rpm, and 60mph smooth running at just 2500rpm, both in top gear, the rotary motor has serious reserves of performance which it’s fun to exploit – but without the slightest undue vibration at any time. Thanks to that fabulous motor, this is a very untiring bike to ride hard, in spite of its heavy weight and large capacity. The gearchange is OK by shaftie standards, though

‘So the engine’s a twin out of a Citroën? Sort-of a Deux Chevaux Espresso, then?’

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JULY 2019 I 13

there’s a clunk when changing from first to second through neutral, which is however easy to find at rest. And the hydraulic-operated diaphragm clutch is quite easy and precise to use, if not quite as light-action as I’d expected.

The OCR’s riding stance is very 70s, upright but pretty comfortable until you get much over 85mph, when you start to struggle to hold on.

The location of the right footrest is annoying, though – the clutch housing protrudes into your ankle bone, which means you can’t reach the rear brake pedal properly, and also can’t park your toes on the footrest. And without much engine braking to speak of on the twin-rotor motor, you do have to use both front and rear brakes very hard to stop. Really, the brakes fitted to the OCR aren’t up to arresting the significant performance of such a fast, heavy bike. You have to squeeze like mad on the non-adjustable front brake lever, and somehow find a way of stamping hard on the rear brake pedal to get it to do so – eventually.

It’s the usual triumph of expectation over delivery in braking terms that you get from a Superbike of the Seventies when viewed in the context of the 20-teens, and this reincarnation of such a bike also disappoints in terms of suspension compliance. Konis were the hot tip in the twin-shock era, but while the Bakker frame steers as well as Nico’s creations always do, in spite of that long wheelbase and the rangy 29-degree fork rake, the rear suspension feels way over-sprung, probably in order to counter all that torque and the substantial weight transfer under hard acceleration of such a heavy bike.

The relatively primitive 42mm Van Veen period forks with Koni internals and zero

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Brembo hydraulics for both brake and clutch… and a fuel gauge. Rotaries are notorious drinkers

damping adjustment feel very stiff and not very compliant. They don’t like bumps a whole lot, though the hefty weight of the bike as a whole helps settle any chatter before it gets out of hand. But you can’t really feel what the front Michelin tyre is doing, and this is pretty important with a €85,000 package you need to bring home in one piece, especially with the skinny 18-inch tyres and all that weight.

I can’t help thinking that Andries Wiesinga has missed an opportunity here. Nowadays, a bike like this with such a fabulous highperformance engine deserves much better suspension and brakes to allow you to exploit that

performance in safety, and he should fit modern Öhlins forks and Brembo radial brakes to the OCR 1000 to let his customers do so – especially at that price! Instead, you must exploit the thoroughly modern performance of that crown jewel of an engine via period chassis hardware that’s not up to scratch, and that’s a pity.

Reproducing the bike in original guise is one thing, but to include all the period drawbacks when they’re easily resolvable is a mistake. My test confirmed that the OCR was way ahead of its time in terms of concept and performance, but the old-school brakes and suspension stop you enjoying the fruits of that.

Maybe Andries Wielinga will listen, and get the message…

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JULY 2019 I 15

RC readers write, rant and rattle on...

Summat to say? Send your comments, hints, tips, tales of woe and derring-don’t to: RCHQ@RealClassic.net

DANGER UXB

When we were young – apprenticeship age – transport work and for pleasure at weekends was essential. All my buddies seemed to be on two wheels. My introduction to two wheelers started in 1968 when I was old enough to get a licence and pass my test. I took the RAC/ACU training course on a local airfield, which was very comprehensive, even riding across a seesaw. After several days of training I was followed by an observer for an extended run of about 10 miles. This was all done on a Bantam 125 with three gears.

But when it came to buy a two wheeler, my parents decided a motorcycle was too dangerous and said it should be a scooter. So a Lambretta GT200 was bought for the princely sum of £130, with the help of the bank of dad (I can’t remember if I paid him back!) This was the ‘high powered’ version of the Lambretta with a cable-operated front disc brake, all of 11bhp and about 70mph top speed… if the Veglia speedo needle could be believed.

Apparently they are now sought after and fetch upwards of £10,000 – I can’t really understand why, as they were a bit fragile.

The scooter was used for commuting, weekends away, holidays and having really good fun. Protective clothing consisted of stout work shoes, jeans and a blue RAF greatcoat from the Army and Navy Stores (it was a little warm in summer). Working in the front garden, I fitted a very unsuitable 30mm Amal carb along with an Ancillotti expansion chamber silencer which sounded great. It annoyed the neighbours and probably didn’t do much for the performance. Mum said she could hear me coming from a mile away.

My friends rode scooters and motorbikes of all sorts, small to large British twins, Greeves, Franny-Barnetts, Triumph, AJS, and I remember someone having a Norton Navigator 350 which at the time looked very flash in its blue and white livery when compared to the more sober colours of the other bikes. There was no animosity between the scooterists and motorcyclists in our group, we just loved the freedom the bikes gave us.

16 I JULY 2019

During our many riding weekends, half a dozen of us visited most of the resorts on the north-east coast, including Cayton Bay. We rode down almost to the beach and spent the afternoon playing about in the sand… where we found a metal canister.

The lettering on it said ‘Mine Mk2’. So we carefully placed it in an adjacent concrete bunker; a couple of us took up station about 50 yards away to warn people away while others went to call the coastguard.

Initially the shop (with the nearest phone) and coastguard staff did not believe us. They

thought we were joking but eventually, after some persuasion, they came. Sure enough it really was a mine and they cleared the beach instantly and called the bomb disposal squad.

We continued our weekend’s fun. My next problem was a broken throttle cable which needed a temporary fix by the side of the road. Eventually we reached home near to midnight. We got slightly lost on the way as we were all following the leader – whose lights were the usual 6V Italian flywheel mag efforts. A glow worm would’ve produced more light. In fact I dropped the bike on a corner after hitting some mud. My passenger was definitely not impressed.

The next day we read in the paper a report about how the coastguard had discovered some scooter / motorcycle riding yobs on the beach, playing football with a land mine.

Apparently these youths were chastised and the mine was destroyed in a controlled explosion in a bunker. There were no comments regarding our protection of the other beach-goers or that we reported the mine in the first place. Apparently the truth was not newsworthy, so the local rag made up a more interesting story involving reckless mods and motorcyclists. My opinion of these newspapers, already low, took a definite dive after this. The bias against two-wheelers in the 1960s at times in the local press was quite

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