Features

Moto Guzzi Le Mans Mk2 Hard to believe now perhaps, but Moto Guzzi was for a long time Italy’s numero uno manufacturer of motorcycles. Although the glory has faded over the last decade or two, business was booming in the second half of the Seventies. The 1975 launch of the Le Mans 850 was probably…

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Harley-Davidson Evolution engine The Harley-Davidson Evolution engine is entirely new only from its base gaskets up, though the crankcase does contain significant refinement. What are the changes and their purposes? First, an engine's operating temperature is the balance between the heat the engine generates and the ability of its cooling system to reject that heat.…

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Harley-Davidson FXDS It all started back in 1971. Harley had the big FLH Electra Glide and the little XL Sportster, but nothing in between. In a moment of inspiration, Willie G Davidson stripped the panniers off a 1200 Electra Glide and bolted a skinny Sportster front end to it, and invented a new range of…

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1980 Harley-Davidson Electra-Glide Classic Although Harley has flourished more recently, back in the Seventies the situation was far less rosy. Just as happened in Britain, once the Japanese started to make large capacity bikes, America’s only remaining large-scale manufacturer found it increasingly hard to compete. Not that they even tried, it could be said. Having…

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Suzuki RE5M Suzuki launched its radical rotary engined RE5 at the Tokyo Show in Autumn of 1973 and appeared to be leading the rotary revolution. The company obtained a rotary licence from NSU in 1970, and had set a team of engineers to work on a prototype that was initially named the RX-5, standing for…

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Yamaha’s RD400 – great performance and usability Someone once said: “when the green flag drops the boasting stops,” and this month we’re reviewing a machine that unarguably eradicates 99.99% of all known BS. In terms of mid-1970s middleweights Yamaha’s RD400 was, in the eyes of contemporary road testers, top dog in terms performance, handling, usability…

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BSA A7/A10 service notes (pdf) BSA's 500cc parallel twin, the A7, was introduced in September 1946, though the initial design was laid down before 1939. It was a bit of a 'committee' engine — the basic layout is attributed to Val Page, Edward Turner laid hands on it during his time at BSA during the…

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Honda CB250 – you meet the nicest people on a Honda, etc… By 1967 Honda’s, by now almost legendary, CB72 could trace its ancestry back a decade. Although a phenomenal machine, its profit margins are believed to have been low. Honda decided to produce a more conventional, and therefore cost effective, machine that was less…

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Honda CB900F If ever a bike has lived in the shadow of another it’s the Honda CB900F. When the CB900 was launched in 1979 the press, and public alike, had their attention firmly fixed on the headline grabbing six-cylinder CBX1000. 31 years later it’s still the CBX that is the bike most fans of big…

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Give your exhausts an overhaul… There are now no longer any hard and fast rules to decoking two-strokes and the changes in two-stroke oil technology since the 1970s means a one-size-fits-all approach is no longer viable. Before the advent of ester-based synthetic oils it was pretty much guaranteed that the time-honoured caustic soda de-coke method…

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