Classic Bike Hub UK

Shed not your tears for the Norton rotary project: there’s no fat ladies singing just yet. Norton Motors has re-surfaced, and they’ve a very special F1 Sport for sale… So less than a year ago we got all snuffly and sad about the closure and sale of Norton Rotary Engineering, the last outpost of the…

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Back in 1984, aged 22, Goat Maison set out on a Great Adventure aboard a Norton Dominator. In the first chapter he discovered the M25, then the English Channel, and then Greece… Finding a campsite became an important task each day as the sun was fading and one day, for some reason, I found myself…

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Got an old British bike? Check. Read ‘Jupiter’s Travels’? Check. Must be time for an extraordinary adventure, then. Goat Maison’s Dominator took him halfway around the world… What’s a Norton Dominator 77? They hardly ever mention them in the classic press. Try asking somebody and they’ll probably tell you that you’ve got it wrong and…

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Chapter 4. Wherein a letter arrives, a crankcase departs, a gearbox re-build goes awry… demonstrating why Jim Algar doesn’t rebuild classic Nortons for a living… To begin, this is actually Chapter 4, Version 2.0. Version 1.0 was almost complete and sitting safely on my computer’s hard drive when I decided (foolish man!) that said hard…

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John Blades always dreamed of owning a Norton Featherbed twin. And now he does: the last of the Dominator line… Many of my generation will have lusted after the bike of their dreams since teenage years when for one reason or another it was out of reach. When presented with the opportunity to own such…

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Chapter Three of Jim Algar’s Dominator Diary, wherein the engine gets torn down, and the news is… not good. So let’s take the gearbox apart, shall we? With the engine and gearbox on the workbench at the end of Chapter 2, the next step was to tear the engine down to its component parts in…

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Chapter Two of Jim Algar’s Dominator Diary, wherein the classic Norton twin gets naked (small children to leave the room, please), and the cylinder head gets the better of him. Twice… At the end of Chapter One, Black Bart was about to tie Polly Pristine to the railroad tracks…oh, sorry, wrong story. At the end…

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Remember Howard’s Big 4 which was undergoing a mechanical overhaul? We can now show you the photos of it. And David Yeats explains how the Big 4 got its name, and reveals his own collection of Norton singles… We left Howard’s Norton single with a leaking fuel tap, a non-existent regulator, a deceased drive chain…

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Riding a race-replica: Steve Jenkins lets rip on a 1970s JPS Norton – an unusual oldster which gets ridden all year round In 1979 a JPS Norton loitered at a bike show in Walsall. Mick Woolley was wandering around the show with £1800 burning a hole in his pocket. Mick was on his way to…

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Little girls beware; Barry Granger’s Norton Commando is out to get you… Apart from the front brake, Barry Granger has very little to complain about when he thinks about his 1974 Norton Commando Interstate. Bought in 1982 for around £700, Barry sees his Commando as; ‘the last of the hairy-chested bikes. Large, heavy and grunty…

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