Classic Bike Hub UK

If at first you don’t succeed (and indeed your Bantam conks out before it even leaves Europe), try, try, try again. And then write a book about the experience… When it comes to adventuring – and I don’t just mean motorcycle adventuring – there is an unspoken compact between the few-who-do, and the many. The…

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After a series of high powered modern bikes, Noggy 88 is inspired to return to the Brit Iron of his youth. This in turn provokes another purchase – he explains all, in this tale of two twins… Some of you may remember a time some four or five decades ago, others may not, so for…

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Chapter 5. Wherein two steps forward are followed by a giant step backwards, and Jim Algar gives a nod to Archimedes and the inclined plane… The Dommi has been a bit lonely in the garage, and it’s been a while since I’ve had time to do any work on it. Other things have required my…

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After travelling through the world’s troublespots two decades ago, Goat Maison finally made it to Pakistan aboard his pre-featherbed twin. But the going had been tough… Weeks of travel through the desert had taken their toll. The jarring of the corrugations of the ‘road’ had caused the oil in the forks to disappear (I don’t…

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Twenty years ago, Goat Maison set off on his 1958 600cc twin to ride halfway around the world. In the previous episode, we’d left him in Iran… After an unpleasant encounter with a big crowd in Qom, I headed out of town and then stopped for a coke. There were some young soldiers there (who…

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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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