Reviews

Where BSAs Dare! by Norman Vanhouse Back in 1952, three workaday BSA A7s beat the world to win gold medals in the ISDT and secure the Maudes Trophy. This new book tells the inside story, written by one of the competitors… This is a real gem of a book, centred around the BSA factory’s ambitious…

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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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by Des Molloy Two travellers take a Panther 120 and a Norton Model 19 on a 10,000 mile trek along the old silk road. Did we find the book more enjoyable than the DVD?… The preamble suggests that The Last Hurrah is an epic tale of an heroic adventure, undertaken by two chaps of a…

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There wasn’t meant to be a part two, but there’s a new problem for Bros-Rider’s diminutive Honda Vee-twin. Or Vee-single, it seems… Well… I wasn’t expecting to have a part 2 to tell, but unfortunately I have. As I said before, I thought I’d Fixed It; I think I probably have Fixed It. What I…

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We left Shaun Gibbons with his A10 stripped-down, and awaiting a complete engine rebuild at the hands of a kindly Geordie named Mike. Enter the engineer… Christmas had been and gone, and my wait for engine parts and services was nearly over. Newman Cams said ‘come and get it’, so I did. Next on the…

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After months of work, Philip Rashleigh’s scrambler-special is coming home and it just needs an MoT and registration to hit the road… Quite a few people have contacted Roy, who’s been building the engine for me, since they’ve read these articles [Potential advertisers please note! RM] and they want him to build a bike similar…

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Kel Boyce tells us what happened once he’d completed his rebuild, and how he learned to live with an ‘oilfield’… Now the old British motorcycle industry was inherently charitable. It kindly provided us with oily old engines that kept our waterproofs waterproof, rattles and whirrs to keep us awake and a multitude of parts that…

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We’ve just ridden a much-modded Duke Darmah for the magazine, but back in 1978 Dave Minton rode one of the very first of the breed to leave the factory. And he thought it was really rather good… If you accept that riding in freak rainstorms can provide enough information with which to formulate an opinion,…

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The lean-burn Electra X Enfield isn’t everyone’s cuppa tea, so how about heading back to basics with the Spartan Pre-65 trials bike? Or if you prefer to travel on tarmac, maybe the full-dress touring Sixty-5 would suit you, sir? For classic bike fans, the Spartan Bullet was just about the most exciting bike on display…

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Last episode, Michael Eustace explained how he found his Greeves and got involved in Pre-65 off-road racing. After one race he had a fair bit of work to do over winter… After my first race I then went on to complete another three scrambles by the end of last year’s scrambles season. One at the…

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