Classic Bike Hub UK

In part I, Martin Gelder wrote off a BMW R60, then bought an R100S and rode round for a bit before writing that off as well. The story of Common Problems continues… Time passed. The crashed BMW languished under a green canvas cover in the front garden while a Mk1 Le Mans tried to take…

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Common fault No.37: Martin Gelder never throws anything away, ever. From the dusty shelves of obscurity comes this tale of a written off and rebuilt Boxer, and a list of funky foibles… BMW. Three letters that impress estate agents and middle-managers, but will have every shoulder-chipped 250 riding courier reciting a list of ‘common-faults’ that…

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A restoration project is a funny thing: it can offer immense personal satisfaction, and immense frustration and self-doubt, sometimes simultaneously. PaulG80 experienced all three while rebuilding Beatrice… This story begins in 1997 when I bought a ratty BMW boxer from a work chum. It was a R60/5 1973 model. I originally bought it as a…

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This high quality, limited edition book about the Ariel motorcycles of the late 1920s will only be available for a short while. Grab it while you can… The trouble with enthusiasm is that enthusiasm is infectious. Beware enthusiasts, lest you come away from sharing their world with a bad attack of sharing their enthusiasm. Sometimes…

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If you’re looking for a lightweight classic, you don’t have to be restricted to a two-stroke. Bill Wood has brought a little Italian back to life… While British lightweights of the 1960s tended to be utilitarian plodders (with an occasional sprinkling of excitement); their Italian counterparts were almost entirely the opposite. The Latin obsession with…

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Imagine a wormhole which sucked a 1930s classic bike forward to 2003 (and upgraded its electrics in the process). Steve The Toast investigates a tear in the fabric of time… Brushes come in many sizes, and you can use one of almost any size to tar many different things. Today was a day for having…

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Inspired by the world’s fastest Indian, Woodie explains that you don’t need a big bike to go fast. In fact, he knows of some really fast Bantams… In no way discrediting Burt Munro, the New Zealander of the world’s fastest Indian fame, I wonder now if the film industry will travel to that other Antipodean…

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Do you fancy something like a Brough Superior for the new millennium? Darren Vickers knows a man who’ll build you one, at a price, of course… A Banquer Superior? Surely he means a Brough Superior, I hear you ask. But no, the Banquer Superior is a brand new motorcycle with all the style and panache…

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If you like your British bikes to be a little bit different to the usual pushrod parallel twin, then John Walton’s 250 two-stroke might just turn your head… After a lapse of twenty-something years (wife, kids, mortgage, blah blah blah) I thought it was about time I came back to bikes. A quick trawl on…

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When is a Harley-Davidson not really a Harley-Davidson? When it’s an Armstrong, of course! The military motorcycle plot thickens on both sides of the Atlantic: Allan Johnson stirs the soup… There’s some rather interesting background history to the origins of the Armstrong MT500 and 350, which also explains how H-D got back into the military…

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