Features

Honda XL250 has been a huge success The numbers are astonishing. 1325 wins from 1560 starts. No single machine we know of comes close to the stats of this 1979 XL250. It belongs to Neil Tuxworth, the man who runs the HM Plant Honda Racing team, which used to be Castrol Honda and has a…

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Yamaha DT175MX Variously used for general fun, commuting or green laning, the DT175MX proved to be possibly the best of the genre. Most ended their days as winter hacks then morphed to field bikes before being literally being put out to pasture and allowed to rot. All of which makes Sheila Ambridge’s latish MX version…

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Kawasaki Z650 In 1968 Honda launched the CB750. Jaws dropped, particularly at BSA–Triumph HQ, because the recently released three-pot Trident and Rocket lll had just been comprehensively upstaged. Meanwhile, according to lore, Kawasaki's plans to put their own 750 four on the market are shelved while they set to work on a bigger engine. In…

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Douglas LB special Striking specials have long been a feature of the classic world and some of the really special ones are the examples that perhaps don’t look too special or non-standard at a glance, which is a category this Douglas twin falls into. In car parlance it’s a ‘street sleeper’ – ie something that…

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Triumph T160 Trident 20 Triumph T160 Trident, 1975 With the BSA-Triumph group’s fabulous racing success with its 750cc triples in the early Seventies, the Triumph Trident road bike should have been better developed than it was. Dick Mann’s Daytona 200 race win in 1971 on a BSA triple showed that when properly prepared the bike…

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Yamaha RD250 Yamaha launched its first 247cc two-stroke twin, the YD1, in 1957. Following a series of piston port YDS models, the RD250 (for ‘race developed’) was launched in December 1972. The Yamaha RD250A was the first production road bike to use reed valves to control the incoming charge, giving rise to the ‘torque induction’…

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Wheel building I have always farmed out wheel re-spoking to a specialist, and since discovering the talents of Paul Jackson (01422 378100) many years ago, have always been more than happy to keep turning up at his workshop, drop my hubs and rims in a pile on the floor (with a note of offsets, of…

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Desmodromics gave Ducati a lead… Valve bounce happens at high revs when the valve springs are unable to respond quickly enough to close the valve back on their seats. The desmodromic idea was to replace troublesome springs with a mechanical closing system much like that used to open them. Eliminate the springs and you eliminate…

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Honda CB750 frame and ancillaries come back from powder coaters The first job is clean up all the engine parts for some cosmetic refinishing… View the step-by-step instructions in the image gallery. Image captions Picture one: The most unpleasant part of any restoration is the hours of cleaning, scrubbing and degreasing to remove years of…

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Yamaha RD350B With light weight and decent torque allied to a race developed (hence RD) chassis the bike was pretty much an instant success. In the post learner/middleweight market the RD350 was every inch a street sleeper just waiting for a bike more than twice its capacity to pounce on and figuratively shred to pieces.…

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