Reviews

Easy to work on, good handling, but infested with an electrical gremlin. Is Mark White really talking about a Kawasaki Zed One? What’s one of the commonly-held attributes which unites classic bike owners, no matter what sort of classic they ride? It has to be pride of ownership, and Mark White of Wiltshire is certainly…

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Velocette LE: He rode for 20 years in the fast lane, and then PaulG80 discovered an entirely different world with Matilda the Matchless… After 18 months of being off the road while rebuilding my BMW (which is an entirely different and very long boring story), I was getting an extremely itchy throttle hand. My Dad…

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More Morini Meanderings from Martin Gelder; this time it’s rearsets, clip-ons and inevitable Italian illectrics – and a philosophical question for Real Classic bike owners… A couple of months back I thought it would be easy to sit here and churn out a few thousand words every month on the trials and tribulations of owning…

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An unusual 500cc Grand Prix racer goes under the hammer this autumn. But there’s more to the Munch marque than this single machine… If the name of Friedl Munch seems familiar to you, then you may well know of his most famous creation – the Munch Mammoth monsterbike. There were several versions of this car-engined…

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Roy Workman gets a bit nippy and meets any number of Norman cycles, and the Norman Cycle Club, and a windmill… My interest in Norman motorcycles was rekindled when an article in the MZ club magazine mentioned a Norman Club. On enquiring about it I found out that the club started up in 2001, 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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Some times we’re asked if we ever review anything we don’t actually like. Well, Dave Blendell really didn’t like this book… Despite my total antipathy towards Mr Boorman I picked up a copy of his ‘Race to Dakar’ book in a local charity shop. Although I was a lot less than impressed with his televisual…

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In the search for a ‘modern classic’, there’s one marque which inspires roughly equal amounts of devotion and detestation. Jim Peace didn’t think too much of Harleys. And then he bought one… It was a complete impulse buy. I’d called in at my favourite local dealer, looking for something to replace my Honda GL1000, when…

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So the caff-race Bonnie has a strange riding position, dodgy stoppers and is more than a little lethargic? BikerBabe reckons you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers… If you’re of a certain generation, then the word Thruxton probably conjures up images of speed, adrenaline, excitement and of course, racing. Back in the late…

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When the need arises for a modern-but-traditional motorcycle, Mike Powell didn’t quite know which one to choose. So he let his Better Half do all the deciding for him… I was quite happy on the 550/4 Honda, mint it was, almost a classic, dead comfy, electric start, but judged gutless by the local bike experts.…

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