RealClassic

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 ‘old’ British bike industry. The…

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 completely off the beaten track…

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 that it’s actually a 7…

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 drive needed a little house-cleaning…

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 a machine later in life…

Chapter Three of Jim Algar’s Dominator Diary, wherein the engine gets torn down, and the news is… not good. So let’s take the gearbox apart, shall we? With the engine and gearbox on the workbench at the end of Chapter 2, the next step was to tear the engine down to its component parts in preparation for sending the crankcase…