Real Classic March 2022

Life is – still – full of surprises. Some great, some good, and some less so. Here’s one now. You may be aware that this magazine has its own Facebook group – a special private group open only to subscribers, this being mostly a subscription magazine. It’s an interesting and entertaining group too, with frequent contributions from familiar faces from the magazine. Rowena, RC regular Ian and I do the admin, which is hardly onerous, although we can have our moments of controversy! Not too often, happily, and the whole thing is pretty much as we intended it to be; an informal opportunity for a bunch of like-minded souls to chat, share bike stuff and generally have a relaxing time. There’s also a very good assistance theme to a lot of the…

Oh my, a T150! In my slightly unusual motorcycle world, the sight of a Trident awaiting the placement of my posterior upon its padded bottom perch is always a welcome sight. More than that, the sound of a Trident idling on three cylinders is even more welcome, if a little less common. Why the welcome vibes? Because I always enjoy riding Tridents, particularly Tridents belonging to someone else. My experience of actually living with the UK’s best effort at a 1970s superbike has been – shall we say – patchy. But if their idiosyncrasies are someone else’s problem, than hooray and off we go. And of course this is an unusual Trident. Not that they aren’t all unusual, almost by definition, but this one is a 1972 T150V with a drum…

Summat to say? Send your comments, hints, tips, tales of woe and derring-don’t to: RCHQ@RealClassic.net STAND & DELIVER! RC regulars have already discovered that fitting the spring to the centrestand of a classic British bike is not always the most enjoyable part of ownership. In my case, the discovery came with refitting a new(ish) spring to the stand of a 1947 B31 (one year older than me!). First, try attaching the spring to the frame then stretching it to the lug on the stand. No, that won’t work. Next, try attaching the spring to the stand and stretch it to the frame. No, that doesn’t work either. Received advice is to remove the stand again, attach the spring to both the stand and the frame, then manipulate the stand back into place and…

I took delivery of a Honda CX500 in April 1980, the first new bike I had owned then (and I have only owned two!). I could just about afford it, with some redundancy money and the sale of my BSA Thunderbolt. Before then I’d always owned British bikes, BSA in particular. I wish I hadn’t sold the Thunderbolt. She was a beauty: a 1970 model with lots of chrome and a great front brake. At the time most of my biking mates rode Japanese bikes and had a tendency to skit at British bikes: ‘They leak oil and are always breaking down.’ My Thunderbolt did neither. As I recall it was always my tools which I carried to fix their bikes: they didn’t need tools because their bikes never broke…

War’s good for business, sad to say, provided your factory doesn’t get bombed, and your workforce isn’t conscripted to go and fight on the front line. So building motorcycles for your nation’s Armed Forces has always been a prized endeavour for any manufacturer, especially in peacetime, albeit often achieved against the stiffest of competition from rival firms in terms of price, delivery times and overall performance in the all-important comparative tests with rival products. Leaving aside the obvious benefits in terms of prestige and brand recognition, it’s prized because once you’ve won the contract to supply the bikes in question, you then have a substantial ongoing order which can form the crux of your business, and underpin it for years to come. Well, provided you quoted a really profitable price,…

➤ WE WANT MORE STORIES about real life classic bikes. We like profiles of a single model or a comparison of two machines. Most magazine features are between 1000 and 2500 words. If your story is much longer then it’s probably not for us. Shorter stories appear in the letters section. ➤ TO SEE WHAT WE MEAN look at the Dunstall Commando or Honda CX articles in this issue. ➤ DON’T WORRY about your writing, grammar or punctuation; we’ll make sure that your article reads the right way. Just concentrate on telling a good story and we’ll do the rest. ➤ INCLUDE AS MUCH INFO as possible. Tell the RC readers exactly what model your classic bike is, when it was built and its history since then. What condition was it in you…