Tabla de contenidos para Issue 2 - 2019 en Cycle World

I’ve always contended that if a motorcycle hasn’t run for at least 25 years, how do you know it’s any good? And then I realized because I was waiting so long to buy, I was often paying too much. The idea is to buy when a bike is just “used,” not yet “collectible.” Of course, popular collectible bikes march forward through time with their able collectors. In 15 years of the Cycle World Rolling Concours—you only get a prize if you make our ride—the trend away from the British bikes of the ’50s and ’60s to much newer Japanese bikes has been plain to see. All those impressionable kids of the ’80s and ’90s whose tender, receptive motorcycle minds were imprinted by these, ahem, “rad” motorcycles want to recapture the…

Iron is an element, and steel is an alloy of iron with a very small amount of carbon. In practical terms, cast-iron came to mean a combination of iron with so much carbon that most of it is present as inclusions of free, flaky graphite. An early—and enduring—use of cast iron was as the five arching beams with two hinged elements each that support the 100-foot Iron Bridge in England, built in the late 18th century. Each beam was cast in an open sand mold, and there were 368 tons of iron in the bridge. Yet cast iron had important limits under high stress. Years of study and experiment were needed to make cast iron cannon the equal of brass. The inclusions of graphite in iron weakened it, and certain…

Purity and honesty are what make flat-track motorcycles so appealing. They are beautiful, but not decorative. Purpose drives design, and to strive for perfection in this, only the necessary parts remain. Flat-track bikes are also just damned American. So it is no surprise that 1) Indian built a street tracker as its first standard-style performance motorcycle and 2) did everything it could to maintain an exceptionally strong link to the company’s dominant flat-track race bike, the FTR750. There has been a sense of anticipation around an Indian street tracker since the 750 debuted—these shimmering notions stoked by the FTR1200 Custom we put on our cover last year. There is sometimes an uneasy tension between the “custom” concept bike and the street product that follows, simply because legal, regulatory, and practical…

Mark Blackwell doesn’t want to talk about the past. The honors stretch back some 40 years and his trophy case is filled to the brim, but his primary focus these days is on the future. Namely, the future of motorcycling. Blackwell was a leading rider and an early star in the first days of U.S. motocross during the late 1960s and early 1970s, starting on Husqvarnas. One of the first American champions, he raced on the Grand Prix circuit in Europe and won the 1971 American 500cc Motocross title. By 1975, he’d begun to transition to the business side of the industry, transforming Suzuki’s struggling motocross racing operation into one of the most formidable teams of the early 1980s. Blackwell then jumped to Husqvarna and returned its U.S. moto division…

What does it say about us that as much as we strive to live in civilization, we increasingly buy motorcycles built to escape it? Well, everybody loves a vacation, right? Up to now, there have been lots of ADV bikes built that are pretty good on vacation. We’d argue that KTM, though much later to the adventure-bike game than its biggest German rival, has done the best job of giving its bikes a harder edge. In fact, KTM has always leaned on its Dakar Rally success to help connect the dots between race wins and its Adventure motorcycles. It sells the dream of shredding sand-swept deserts at breakneck speeds, even if you’re just using your bike to explore local dirt roads. Back in the days of the 950 and 990…

Things were certainly different in Japan back in 1988. The country’s economy was shooting skyward much like the rev limits of these 250cc sportbikes. Motorcycles were still the primary form of personal transportation for the majority of the population. With the “golden era” of Grand Prix motorcycle racing in full swing, roadracing was soon reaching its zenith of popularity in Japan. The Japanese Grand Prix and Suzuka 8 Hours races drew massive crowds, and the MFJ All-Japan domestic racing series was bursting at the seams with entries. Racing’s popularity meant that sportbikes were dominating motorcycles sales in Japan during that time, but the cost and difficulty of obtaining a license and registering a bike of more than 400cc meant that small-displacement bikes were the overwhelming choice of Japanese riders. The…

I bought a terrible rigid-framed BSA D1 Bantam for $140 in 1959. Insuring and registering anything as offensive to good order as a motorcycle in those days required that I enter the “assigned risk pool.” I took the subway there and I stood in one of the several lines. The window closed as I reached it, so I moved to another line. Eventually I had the essentials—plate and registration. The great day came—to ride from my strange new life to my old familiar one, 200 miles up through New Hampshire and Vermont, crossing Lake Champlain at Crown Point and then into the Adirondack Park. My little engine fussed along. In hilly Vermont, top gear (third) was inevitably too tall and second too low, so at first I oscillated. Then I…

It is a visceral pleasure to examine a piston from a modern high-performance motorcycle engine such as Ducati’s V4 R. This is because it is the flow of stress that defines shape, just as the smooth flow of air gives grace to an engine’s intake ports. Once the task of cylinder-filling is fully optimized, the key to more engine power is ever-higher rpm. From the earliest days of motoring, the need to abruptly accelerate and decelerate pistons as they alternately pump air and produce power has placed the greatest stress where the piston attaches to the connecting rod: around its wrist-pin bosses. Cracks form and propagate in highly stressed metal in a process called fatigue failure. No real metal can be made 100-percent free of internal defects, and the presence…

Four billion years ago, a Ural sidecar rig rolled out of the primordial soup and set to lurching about the world, seeking adventure and bears and vodka and whatever the hell else Russian hacks survive upon. Or maybe it was 5 billion years. No one knows. Urals are so old and have been so fundamentally unchanged for so long, all anyone can remember is that they were first manufactured in Russia, in the Ural Mountains, when our solar system was in diapers. And now, at last, there is change, in the form of an electric Ural. Sort of. The bike we tested is a factory prototype, a proof-of-concept designed to gauge public interest. Like all modern Urals, it contains a prehistoric leading-link fork; unlike any other Ural, it also holds…