The Commando returns? really?

[GuzziMoto]

Personally I like the new / old Commando. I think the Kenny Dreer version was better, but this latest version seems all right.

Funny, there is a tie in with this thread; 

 Because I believe ever since the Kenny Dreer remake it has been a 270 degree crank to reduce vibration at the displacement and rpms they are running.

[Paradiso]

Norton is like a fish that has been caught, gaffed, hauled into the boat, bonked on the head, taken back to shore and then flops out of the ice bucket, slips off the jetty and manages to flap off before anyone can fillet it and do anything useful with it!
Every time some new grifter buys the name some shitty version of what was basically a 500cc platform with a non unit gearbox is trotted out with great fanfare claiming, like Hesketh, (remember them?) that it's going to be the revival of a 'Great British Name!'.
@#!#$# off with this noise! Norton is dead. It died, with the rest of the British motorcycle industry, at the beginning of the Second World War. Yes, Joe Craig continued to develop the pre war 'International' OHC motor in the race shop and it continued to be competitive, at least on the tighter circuits, as the Manx. But post war the models offered to the public were your quintessential 'Grey Porridge'. Horrid, slow, shitboxes like the 16H and later the twins in the form of the 'Atlas' and, (Smirk!) 'Dominator'. Models that were so vibratory, not to mention unreliable, that the Dominator was ruefully known as the 'Morecome Flagelator' due to its propensity for shaking loose fillings and shedding bits of itself like confetti as its owner wheezed from breakdown to breakdown! The 'Commando's' were even worse!
Yes, they were pretty, yes the name has a certain, (Thouroughly undeserved) reputation for??? Well? Something good? But they weren't. They were awful. Just like everything else made by the British motorcycle industry post-war.
How do I know this? Because I lived through the death thoes of the industry and it was pathetic to watch. The only thing more pathetic is seeing a seemingly inexhaustible queue of dolts with rose tinted specs queuing up fo be fleeced by whatever grifting spiv has bought the name off the last grifting spiv who is cackling into his bank account in some tax haven that doesn't have an extradition treaty to anywhere they can be taken to task.
FOR THE SAKE OF ALL THINGS DECENT! LET NORTON'S ZOMBIE CORPE REST!
Its a turd that keeps on giving!

While I accept the thrust of your argument, winning the 1992 Senior TT with the rotary was an achievement, and a worthy revival.

Sent from my SM-S901B using Tapatalk

[GuzziMoto]

5 minutes ago, Paradiso said:

While I accept the thrust of your argument, winning the 1992 Senior TT with the rotary was an achievement, and a worthy revival.

Sent from my SM-S901B using Tapatalk
 

Those Norton Rotary racers are some of the coolest racebikes ever made. The sound, the spectacle of them, is amazing. That is a more interesting Norton to me. The guy behind them made a few new versions, track only, a couple years ago as I recall.

[Tomchri]

2 hours ago, Paradiso said:

While I accept the thrust of your argument, winning the 1992 Senior TT with the rotary was an achievement, and a worthy revival.

Sent from my SM-S901B using Tapatalk
 

Had breakfast every morning with the John Player team that year, NICE.

Cheers Tom.

[Lucky Phil]

7 hours ago, Pressureangle said:

At least the Hesketh had sex appeal. I wanted one in the worst way, even stopping by the importer's house in California, or Colorado...Brian something maybe? 
*edit* Roger Slater. It wasn't easy to find his residence in 1979.
Probably best it didn't happen.

Without a doubt. I've seen and heard one run and ride in the flesh. Impressions? massively overweight, and chunky. Poorly engineered. They had perennial issues with oil leaks from the cam drive covers and an appalling gearbox shifting action that was never really addressed. I learned quickly in the mid 80's from being in Britain and hanging out with the industry people a lesson about the English speaking motorcycle press. They were so parochial in those days you could pretty much dismiss all their opinions on British made or British involved anything. So they pumped this thing up a lot but the reality was disappointing. Bit like those horrid Janus things made in the states now.

Phil

[pete roper]

I never rode a Hesketh but I do remember on the few occasions I saw one they looked like they needed a wading pool to park in to keep the oil anywhere near them. They were like a colander with a wheel at either end!

[gstallons]

15 hours ago, Lucky Phil said:

True but they don't bang on about how home grown they are. There's not a lot in a Ducati that's made outside Italy come to think of it. 

Phil

That is because he has air time and has to say somethin' . Lok at H-D , their forks are/were made by Showa , or whoever is the low bidder is now .

[gstallons]

You have never been in a love/hate relationship until you have owned a British motorcycle .

[pete roper]

When I was a youngster I couldn't afford a car and the only motorbikes I could afford were old pieces of Pommy dross because by the mid nineteen seventies everybody with half a brain in the UK realised they were utter shite and they were therefore almost valueless. Sure we used to talk about 'Jap Crap' but that was because like all young men we were stupid automata whose every waking thought was driven by our penises. It didn't stop anyone who could afford it buying a Japanese bike though because they were just superior in just about every way!
 

OK, so they didn't handle as well but that was simply because the crappy British junk didn't produce enough power to tug the skin off a rice pudding! Never mind over tax its frame! They all had shite brakes and the first thing you did with any Japanese motorbike was put new tyres on it! Back then all Japanese bikes had Bridgestones as OE and Bridgestone seemed to have developed a compound that has no grip but the wear properties of granite! Riding on them was like riding on something carved out of a Cairngorm, only slippery!

My first real motorbike was a BSA A10 with a huge Watsonia sidecar on it. There was an anomaly in the road rules that meant you could ride a bike of any capacity if it had a chair attached. I had been forbidden by my parents to get a motorbike so it had to live at a mates place and I lived in perpetual fear that I'd be seen by my father who was a GP when he was out on his rounds, (These were the days when doctors still made home visits to people who weren't actually dying!). It also was the reason I got into mechanics as I certainly couldn't afford to have anyone else work on it so I had to teach myself how to maintain it, badly, but I never managed to do anything that actually killed me!

Over the next few years I went through a load of other old shite. In fact anything that came my way that would actually propel itself down the road, no matter how wonkily, with me on board. I even had an Ariel 'Bleeder' at one point a bike that combined a startling amount of threadbare ugliness with a two stroke motor of profound lack of both performance and reliability! Utterly loathsome. I even at one point picked up a Ducati 350 MkIII valve spring model at one point. The only Ducati I ever owned it was unspeakably horrid as well. I somehow managed to scavenge a Desmo head for it from some weasly little spiv in Huntingdon, rebored it, ran it in super carefully and the first time I gave it 'The Berries' down the Sawston bypass it blew the crank out of the bottom of the cases. The only salvageable part of the whole motor was the bloody Desmo head! I sold it, and the cycleparts, back to the spiv who smirked and gave me less than I'd given him for the head. Bastard. Anyway, that gave me a lifetimes loathing for Ducatis that remains with me to this day!

I returned to riding shitty Pommy bikes but by the early eighties I'd learnt enough to be dangerous and my last foray was with my little Triumph T500. It rolled off the production line the same year I did but over the, in hindsight, few years I had it I hotted it up to way over Daytona spec and it was, for what it was, a bit of a weapon. It would give GPz 550's a run in the traffic light GP but, because the little head was still doing the thinking, all the effort went into making it GO and none into making it STOP so it still had the single leading show front brake that wouldn't lock the front wheel even in the wet! It was a f*cking death trap! I have no idea how I survived it!

Along the way I had one of my favourite bikes of all time. A Jawa 350 with a Velorex chair. What a wonderful thing that was! And a revelation! Unlike the Triumph which would gleefully 'Nom-Nom-Nom' a timing side main bush every 5-6,000 miles the Gentle Jawa was stone axe reliable, had brakes that worked and would carry me, the girlfriend and a mate and all our camping gear down to Devon for the weekend AND get us back to London afterwards.

Soon after I met Jude in '83 and wooed her by taking her to Paris in the spring on the Triumph, (Which for once didn't break down!) I decided enough was enough. Doing complete engine rebuilds every 5-6,000 miles had whiskers on it so I looked around for something else that wasn't a total nail. A few weeks later an ad popped up for a Moto Guzzi V50-II. A brand I knew nothing about but a bit of research said it was a pushrod twin so I knew it would be simple and it had, 'Gasp!' Shaft drive! It was also very cheap. I found out why when I when to look at it. The then owner was even more youthful and obviously feckless than me! He'd rattle canned the whole bike black! Everything! Forks, brake rotors, tyres, the lot! What a knob! But it was cheap so I took it away, scraped the paint off it and proceeded to thrash it mercilessly for a year or two and it never went wrong! I sold it when I went to Oz with Jude in '83 and when we returned at the end of 84 I used a small inheritance I'd been left by an aunt I ended up buying an SP 1000 that I owned for twenty years and took with me when I emigrated to Oz in '88.

After going Italian I never looked back. Those Pommy bikes of the post war years had only one redeeming feature. They taught you how to wield a spanner! Why? Because you had to. The odds of you getting anywhere without being stranded or run over when you sputtered to a halt in the pouring rain, at the bottom of a hill, in the dark were very high. But unless you were riding on a day that didn't end in a Y that was what was going to happen. Dear god they were awful! Many people forget that and view the past as halcyon days to be viewed through rose tinted specs but the reality was much harsher.

The only 'Good' thing about the 'Good Old Days' is that they are gone and anyone who says otherwise needs a 'slap up the head'!

Bugger Norton! I fart wetly and lavishly at them, with pinpoint accuracy!

 

 

[Pressureangle]

My first 'big bike' was a '72 non-combat commando. I bought it Christmas 1981, for $350. After getting it running (I don't say tuned, because I was still completely ignorant) first thing I did was learn how to burn out in a circle like in Mad Max. Then, February 27, I and an equally stupid but better equipped friend left Detroit for Daytona. We rode about 30 miles, stopped at his parents' place, where I discovered only 2 of the 6 cradle studs holding the driveline in the frame remained. Fortunately, the marine hardware had exactly what was needed, in stainless steel so expensive it cost near what I paid for the bike. Then it rained from Toledo to Macon, Georgia. Took us 3 days to get there, but the bike ran flawlessly the entire time- discounting discovering that the reserve tube was missing from the petcock on I-75 in the bottom of Cincinnati, forcing a half mile push uphill to the previous exit. My 'snowmobile' suit turned out not to be waterproof, and the blue die stuck to me and I was a Smurf for a week. I remember blasting into Chattanooga sliding both ends in the rain at about 70mph, giving no shits about my safety; a hospital would be warm and dry and I was willing to make that trade. This trip was ten years dead before I could tell the story and laugh. So we make it past Atlanta, the temperature went up to about 55* and the rain stopped. My friend was on a '75 BMW R75/5 which had the precise same gearing as the Norton; the harmony next to each other was beautiful, and finally the trip was fun. On the Macon bypass, at 1 in the morning, at 55mph, I heard and felt a bang and my left leg was hit by something, then very hot and wet. I thought the timing chain had broken and cut my leg; when the State Trooper stopped with his flashlight, he found a hole in the cases big enough to stick the head in. That's when I discovered that Norton used aluminum conrods... I took my license plate, packed what I could in my buddy's panniers, left the key in it and left it against the guardrail never to be seen again. 

The trip home from Daytona was worse, but that's another story. 

Then there's that '70 Fastback in buckets on my garage shelf, waiting to redeem the Norton name.

[gstallons]

All of the British bikes of the 60s-70s were beautiful in a showroom & a curse once they hit air and you got them in your name . Think Gremlins with a super duper dose of DMT .  

[Bill Hagan]

 

OTOH, while some bashed poor Mr. Dobbs, I just saw this on y/t while looking for a (short) vid on R&R'ing fluids on my V85..

 

 

Must go; this awaits ...

 

 

... along with "Her Grace's" task list up here at the house.  

Bill

[audiomick]

Ok, so he noticed the qualities of the bike, and gave it a good report. Mostly.

The bashing continues: he says at the start that he never was interested in adventure bikes, but for the test he miracuolasly has a retro enduro helmet to wear.

Further: as in the last video, brand new spiffy clothing appropriate to the bike in question, and meticulously aged boots. And he is constanly striking poses.

I'm pleased that he liked the bike, but I still reckon he is a bit of a twat.

 

And Monica is a shit camera operator.

[docc]

5 minutes ago, audiomick said:

 I still reckon he is a bit of a twat.

And Monica is a shit camera operator.

Perhaps they should swap positions.

I remember doing that with girls (in the distant past) and it worked out swimmingly . . .

[audiomick]

Docc, you're a very naughty boy.