Classic Bike Hub UK

‘Complete 1957 Thunderbird but in pieces’ read the advert. Roy Stockham wouldn’t usually reply to adverts that don’t give a price but the phone number indicated that the bike was only 20 miles away… A call revealed that the ex-sidecar machine was indeed complete. The seller had bought it some eight years before, had started…

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Four-pot Japanese classics are over-complicated, tricky to maintain and expensive to run, right? Not quite. Steve Bergman has clocked up over 120,000 miles on the cut-rate Katana and reckons it has real classic cred… The Suzuki GS650 Katana has been in the ‘cheap transport’ league for a while, but now — following the fashion of…

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How do you turn a bland UJM into a genuine Japanese classic? You add style, of course. Rowena Hoseason has a thing about pop-up headlights… An interesting phenomenon was observed at the recent Japanese Classic Motorcycle Show at Donington: there was an extremely clean Suzuki 1100 Katana offered for sale at sensible money. It wasn’t…

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Over in Brazil, Chico Rasia has been making progress with his 1980’s Honda twin. Just a few things to fix… oh, and then a few more… Part II left off with a stalled bike getting pushed back into the garage. Actually, it would stall everytime I’d let it idle, and was running roughly – seemed…

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Chico Rasia has finally found his chosen classic: an early Eighties CB400. Now all he has to do is to get it to stop. And start. Which to worry about first?… This is the second installment on a series of articles about the Honda CB400 twin – it must only mean one thing: I’ve bought…

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Your definition of a ‘classic bike’ may well depend on where you live. Chico Rasia, from Curitiba in Brazil, dreams of a 1980’s Honda twin… So, I’ve decided it must be a Honda CB400. 1983 or earlier. With a Japanese engine. Wait a moment. Haven’t I skipped something here – something like ‘How come this…

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He bought it, he broke it (OK; maybe it was broke already…) and now he’s nearly fixed it. Steve The Toaster finally gets his Sunbeam going again. Was it easy? Was it ‘eck as like… One of the major pitfalls of disassembling engines is they refuse to self-reassemble. A nightmare, ’tis true. Also, the cheapest…

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Steve The Toaster strips his P&J and finds that the inevitable has indeed come to pass… not only that, there is, indeed, no such thing as a quick fix. Next stop? The bank balance void… There are many dangerous words in the English Language when it comes to buying secondhand motorcycles; one of the very…

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After falling in love with the dream of a Beam, Steve The Toast finally bought an S8. The reality turned out to be just a little… leaky! Madness is said to run in families. It is thought to be genetic, but many other things can also bring it on; diets lacking in certain vitamins, over…

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You probably have an all-time favourite classic bike. Sunbeam Peter (the name is a bit of a giveaway about the model of motorcycle!) explains how his dream bike became a real bike… ‘Kevin’s found you a Sunbeam,’ the good lady said as she waggled the telephone handset at me, ‘but do you really need another…

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