Features

Dave Manning looks back to the very first days when ‘Honda’ became a familiar word, and the enthusiasm with which the weekly motorcycle press welcomed Japan’s engineering excellence. When Soichiro Honda claimed, in 1954, that the Honda Motor Company was “bigger than Japan”, many thought his words to be an idle boast that was simply…

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Gold-plated Daimlers – but belt-driven lathes still tried to produce precision motorcycle engine parts Former Umberslade employee John Cart adds to the revelations already published by OBM about this former BSA Group research facility as he tells what life was like there and remembers the best three years of his life Over the past few…

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During a visit to Carrot Cycles of Lincoln, Dave Manning is amazed by the sheer range of motorcycle components the team is able to produce, replicate or improve for the classic or vintage enthusiast. If you’re a regular show attendee, you might remember seeing the Carrot Cycles stand at places like the Stafford Show, complete…

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Bernie Freeman looks back fondly at the 250cc side-valve single that was the first love of his motorcycling life. I knew I wanted a motorbike from the age of 13, when I saw one ‘tonning it’ along London’s North Circular Road, so as soon as I started work as a trainee fitter/welder I started saving.…

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Colyn Thomas fondly remembers the comings and goings around an old Cornish garage beside the A38 where he and his motorcycling friends met up in the mid-1950s. Remember the Good Old Days, with rickety old motorcycles and sidecars crammed with kids, shopping, the dog and the wife’s handbag, and the wife perched behind the rider,…

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Keith Carter from Wiltshire recalls his own experiences of rainy days and broken-down motorcycles. With a nod to Martin Hamer’s tale of his wet and windy Scottish adventure (OBM March, see also page 49 this issue) my take on touring Scotland was somewhat different, leading up to the cop-out decisions I took after several wet-weather…

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Dave Manning tells the story of the Triumph legend, forged on the Bonneville Salt Flats, that became a byword for mile-gobbling performance after production began in September 1958. Sixty years ago the Triumph Bonneville, a motorcycle that would become an icon of its time, first came off the production line in September 1958. The inspired…

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Dave Manning gets the chance to sample Royal Enfield’s long-awaited Himalayan adventure bike around the decidedly non-mountainous territory of Louth, Lincolnshire. Given that the Royal Enfield factories in Chennai – all three of them – have been churning out a rather limited range of machinery for so long, when it was announced that a new…

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Mick Payne looks back over 60 years of the Federation of Sidecar Clubs, and sadly records the recent passing of his friend and long-time member, Ray Doran. I’d just started at infant school (as it was then known), my sister had recently been born and we lived in a two-up, two-down terraced house with an…

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Steve Cooper unravels the complex history of Kawasaki’s trail bike models When it comes to trail bikes, Kawasaki never figured largely in the UK until the likes of the KDX and KMX 125/200s of the late 1980s and early 90s arrived. Sure, we’d had the KL250 in the late 1970s, but it was never Kawasaki’s…

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