Reviews

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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‘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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1950’s Britain was very different to today. So what was it like to run a classic bike then, a Triumph Thunderbird, when it was brand new? David Gambie remembers… On reading the first issue of the RealClassic magazine, I was particularly taken with the article on the Thunderbird as it brought back many happy memories.…

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A true enthusiast’s book, this one; packed with technical information and racing recollections. Dave Minton discovers how the competition Triumph Daytona 500s performed so well in the late 1960s… Journalists do not usually make the best authors, not where make or model histories are concerned. For these you need the sort of rivet-counting fanatics that…

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