Features

Laverda Jota (pdf) When the fastest of modern sports bikes are capable of nudging 200mph flat out – with brave testers equally capable of pushing them to their limits – it might sound absurd to recall that it wasn’t so long ago that 140mph was a speed beyond the wildest dreams of road riders. But…

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BSA A50/A65 overhaul service notes (pdf) Introduced in 1961 for the 1962 season, the A50 and A65 unit twins, with their egg-shaped engines of 500 and 650cc were called, unkindly by some, Unit Destruction! But this was almost always the way when anything new came onto the market, especially so in this case when they…

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BSA A10 and A65 fork overhaul pdf The BSA front forks were basically robust, reliable and obviously helped with the good handling characteristics that most lit SAs possessed. From experience gained in owning several different models personally and later with working on many in the line of our work at Bri-Tie, the A, B, and…

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Honda CB 750 For years motorcyclists in the UK have been told that such-and-such a machine would be too expensive to produce, or too difficult. The old arguments that usually begin with "Who wants a high-revving multi, when the good old single will last for twice as long?" no longer hold water. It is almost…

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Yamaha 350 YR5 I must confess that when we picked up the YR5 Yamaha, we weren't quite sure how it would behave. Because of Yamaha's racing development, there was a tendency to expect a really pokey performance machine; and the YR5 frame is a direct descendant of the works racer, so we were anticipating road­holding…

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Kawasaki 350 How do you judge a machine? By the way it goes or how it looks, or what? No matter what it is you're looking for, at some stage you will have to compare it with other similar bikes. In the case of the new Kawa­saki S2 the only comparison which immediately springs to…

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Benelli 750 Think of six cylinders and you think Honda CBX – but Benelli got there first with its 750. Later came the 900 version but Neil Murray reckons the first was the real classic. I love the motorcycle engineering of the Seventies. The sheer diversity of engineering in that decade was incredible. Designers churned…

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BMW R65 I still quite haven’t figured out either why BMW built the R45/65 series, nor why they failed to develop it further. For my money, the design showed so much promise: smaller, neater, sweeter than the other aircooled boxers (airheads, they call ‘em now, to differentiate them from the current ‘oilheads’), but that promise…

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Honda CB750F This is nobody’s favourite Honda CB750. You only have to look at the prices of good clean F1s. At the same time, there’s quite a strong core of interest for F2s, and these are definitely worth a look. Right now, they’re cheap, but they have a historical significance in that they were the…

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Yamaha RD200 Before the 250cc learner ban, there were all sorts of bikes of around the 175-200cc mark and they were startlingly popular because they only gave a little away to their bigger brothers and were much cheaper to insure. Yamaha’s RD was probably the one with the longest pedigree. It started life as the…

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