Tabla de contenidos para Issue 3 - 2019 en Cycle World

It was quite a first editorial meeting in May of 1999, a room full of highly experienced Cycle World staff, and wondering what job I would end up with on my first issue. I had visions of a Honda RC-45 or Yamaha YZF-R7 test. Strangely, my debut riding assignment turned out to be the 1999 Royal Enfield Bullet 500 (“Bullet Slow,” September, 1999). It was an interesting introduction to Royal Enfield. I’d had vague awareness of these British relics manufactured somewhere on the vast Indian subcontinent, and had only a little experience with actual vintage British bikes. The Bullet 500 of that time vibrated so much it made me itchy, was a highly inconsistent starter, and quite slow once it lit. It was also terribly charming and fun to ride.…

Stainless-steel alloys are today found on motorcycles mainly in the form of exhaust valves and exhaust systems. So well-adapted to their purpose have these alloys become that there is no longer even a memory of the exhaust-valve problems that plagued early motoring. Records of racing at England’s great Brooklands Speedway show exhaust-valve failures as third-most-frequent behind drive-belt and spark-plug trouble. The chauffeurs of moneyed early motorists attended mandatory service schools, learning to regrind valve seatings every six weeks to restore the seal steadily destroyed by intense heat and corrosion. Early engines were given exhaust valves riveted together from a castiron head—they make stoves out of iron, right?—and a carbon-steel stem. Seeking some better solution, engineering pioneer Frederick Lanchester devised a single-valve system, functioning alternately as intake and exhaust, as a…

Although it’s hard to tell by looking at them, those black rubber hoops that your motorcycle rolls on have evolved dramatically in the past decade. And they have to: Faster bikes with more power, complex rider aids and ever-improving suspension and brakes enable riders to go farther with greater comfort and performance than ever before. Tires are expected not only to keep up with all this but to enable the overall progression of motorcycle performance. They are as key to the overall systems as can be because—preferably—those contact patches are the only place your motorcycle touches the road. The best tires today offer near-peak levels of grip, hot or cold, wet or dry. So while tires aren’t as glamorous as the spec sheet of a Ducati Panigale V4, they are…

For approximately the past decade, Editor Mark Hoyer has been telling me, “We’ve got to get you to the Quail.” His tone of voice always reminds me of one of those worldly college guys telling his naive and innocent freshman roommate, “We’ve just gotta get you out to a bar!” It’s a mixture of sympathetic concern and genuine mission. And that metaphor is not entirely strained, because a ride up the Coast Highway from the CW office to the Monterey Peninsula is nothing if not intoxicating. Once you escape rush hour in Los Angeles, the seacoast, vineyards, and sprawling hills have an almost Tolkien-quality grandeur and scale—especially if you take the right roads. And there are many right roads to choose from. I’ve made the trip many times in my…

“News of Rob”—it was always that, like pings from a satellite gone out of our orbit, sending snaps from other planets. The first news of Robin Tuluie reached our San Francisco café racer club—the Roadholders—in 1986, before we’d actually met him: some German kid with a Norton Commando, studying physics at the University of California, Berkeley, keeping secret his weekend vintage racing on his daily rider so Dad wouldn’t cut off his allowance. We were sufficiently amused to dub him Rob the Roadholder, because of the Norton. I had a 1965 Atlas, other members had ’62 Atlases, and one had an 850 Commando in stylish white John Player bodywork. The club was proud of our egghead racer, even when he didn’t win, and sometimes crashed. He soon graduated, movedto the…

Major elements of the motorcycle—chassis, engine, fork, wheels and tires—have become steadily lighter. This is not from substitution of expensive exotic materials such as titanium and carbon fiber, but because improved manufacturing technologies now let us use less of the usual materials—steel, aluminum, and some magnesium. Production motorcycles have gone through cycles of weight gain, then simplification and weight loss. From time to time I have felt discouraged by so many tubby motorcycles. I know from the experience of racing that lighter machines maneuver more quickly and accelerate and stop faster than heavier ones. They are easier on tires and brakes. That’s why, when Honda gave up its complex oval piston NR500 32-valve four-stroke GP racer, and turned to two-strokes in 1982, they built small, light and handy—not big, power-laden,…

Unlike steam or electric powerplants, piston internal combustion engines cannot produce torque from zero rpm. That means they must first be started, and only then gradually connected—“clutched”—to the load. Although 98 percent of new U.S. autos have automatic transmissions, for motorcycles the ratio is the other way around: most bikes retain foot gearchange and a clutch operated by the left handlebar lever. Modern motorcycle engines are of unit construction: powerplant, clutch, and gearbox are in one unit, with crankshaft and clutch geared together. It wasn’t always so—British motorcycle engines and gearboxes were long separate, joined by bolting to engine plates. The clutch (mounted on the gearbox) was driven by a primary chain from a sprocket on the engine’s crankshaft. A chaincase enclosed and protected the chain. In a typical motorcycle…