Old Bike Mart
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Pete’s Prattle
We never appreciate how good something is until we lose it – perhaps that’s why there’s such a big interest in old motorbikes – so the recent reports of disagreements within that great organisation, The Vintage Motor Cycle Club, have left me feeling rather sad, especially in the light of the untimely passing of Ken…
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Royal Enfield springs a breath of fresh mountain air
With a brand new LS 410 engine, a rugged duplex split cradle frame designed and developed by Harris Performance and a strong monoshock rear suspension, Royal Enfield’s Himalayan balances aspiration with access, and is a serious contender in the adventure riding stakes. Bringing together 60 years of Himalayan riding experiences, Royal Enfield’s first-ever adventure motorcycle sends…
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The life and times of ‘Torrens’
Although the memories of Arthur Bourne, the legendary ‘Torrens’ of The Motor Cycle fame from 1928 until 1951, were written more than 40 years ago, only now have they finally been published – but it’s certainly been worth the wait, writes Pete Kelly. The one and only thing that Arthur Bourne and I had in…
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Buzz bombs Italiano!
Pete Kelly looks back at some of the pint-sized Italian ‘cafe racers’ of the early 1960s With howling multi-cylinder machines and screaming two-strokes in a variety the world had never seen before, the mid-to-late 1950s and the whole of the 1960s will always be remembered as a golden age of motorcycle road racing. This was…
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Granite City welcome for Niall and Taylor Mackenzie
More than 150 motorcycle enthusiasts gathered at the Beach Ballroom in Aberdeen on the last Tuesday in November, for the second in a series of yearly events aimed at bringing motorcycling legends to the north-east of Scotland, writes Gorgeous Biker Chick. Organiser Andy Freeman fell into arranging the events by accident. “I got to know…
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Norton 350T trials restoration completed
Stuart Dixon, who last year sent us a picture of his 350T Norton asking for information, has followed it up by showing the machine fully restored. His father came across the bike in Northern Ireland in 2015, and at first wasn’t sure if its specification was correct, but after some research on the web and…
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White Helmets celebrating 90 years of Royal Signals motorcycle displays
The Royal Corps of Signals’ White Helmets motorcycle display team, now based at Blandford, Dorset, can trace its origins back to 1927, when the first public displays of joint precision horsemanship and motorcycle riding were given by instructors and students from the Signal Training Centre in Yorkshire. In this 90th anniversary year of 2017, the…
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Spectacular Greeves line-up at Telford Classic Dirt Bike Show
A special display of Greeves scramblers – one for each year of the firm’s existence – is being planned for the Telford Classic Dirt Bike Show, sponsored by Hagon Shocks, at the Telford International Centre over the weekend of February 18/19. In a world first, no fewer than 21 scramblers, from the first production run…
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Book Review: A truly Matchless apprenticeship
Pete Kelly reviews Bill Cakebread’s newly-reprinted and wonderfully-evocative story of life in London during and just after the war, and his apprenticeship and early working life at AMC’s long-vanished Plumstead Road factory. Every now and then, of the many motorcycling books that arrive at Old Bike Mart for review, a diamond-plated gem comes along; one…
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What Des Heckle’s rolling chassis did next
It was interesting to read the article in August’s OBM regarding Des Heckle’s Yamaha sprinter and the reference to Des selling his rolling chassis “to someone who wanted to use it as a basis for a drag race bike”. Well I was that person, and remember one evening after work driving up from Buckinghamshire to…
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