Sommaire pour Issue 45 de Retrobike

WHAT COULD be more Retro than a Royal Enfield Classic? Produced with very few changes from the 1950s, they are the epitome of classic style: one air-cooled cylinder in a steel chassis with only the basics — wire wheels, conventional forks, fuel tank, seat and a pair of shocks. Well, that was until now. We’ve got a new one, full of whiz-bangery and cutting-edge style … not. Hell, lots of people will confuse the new 2022 model with the old one. They look pretty similar. They go pretty similar. But in bringing the bike not just into the 2020s, Royal Enfield has made it more civilised and kept it legal … progress, they call it, but it least it doesn’t look like a modern bike. The latest Royal Enfield hitting…

LOOK BEYOND the sticker-bombed tank and you’ll find Guy Abrahamsson’s Yamaha XV1000 to be a precise piece of equipment, applying the skills he’s learnt as a jeweller with new skills learnt along the way during this seven-month build, working in his garden shed before and after work each day. “I WANTED TO SEE IF I COULD BUILD SOMETHING IN MY LITTLE GARDEN SHED.” “I wanted to see if I could build something in my little garden shed.” XV Yamahas have been popular with builders in recent years, because they are often inexpensive, having not become the classic collectable they probably deserve to be. “I knew roughly what others had done with this model but I had my own idea which I thought I’d try and put together, and seeing as…

IS THIS really a Sportster? How could it be … liquid cooling, four-valve heads, even bloody Euro5 compliance. “... THE EARLY MACHINES SPAWNED THE RACING XR750 ...” The Harley-Davidson Sportster, born in 1957 and grudgingly updated as laws and consumer tastes changed, has never seen such a huge update. Until now all Sportsters were air-cooled 45-degree V-twins, and most models had a silhouette that could be confused for that original 1957 model, if only you squinted hard enough (and removed the back seat, and had one with laced rims, and ignored the disc brakes …). But not anymore. HOW DID WE GET HERE? In the mid-1950s Harley-Davidson was hurting. Lighter, quicker, better handling machines were being imported into the USA in huge numbers and Harley’s big twins were being seen…

TOO HEAVY, too loud, too expensive and too much: these were the things which killed the Neander 1400 turbo diesel long before it had the chance to test itself on showrooms. Despite the fact it never went onto the market, this performance cruiser is a fascinating look at the way things might have been. The diesel engine has become a mainstay of marine, locomotive, urban transport, road haulage and stationary use — indeed, any application where its inherent benefits of 30 per cent lower fuel consumption, cleaner emissions and longer life, as compared to an equivalent petrol engine, can suffi ciently offset its disadvantages of increased noise, extra vibration, higher manufacturing costs, and especially greater weight and bulk. And they can even run on non-fossil fuels, potentially making them even…

COVID-19 sadly killed off Indian’s plans for the 2020 centenary of its iconic Scout model’s birth to be celebrated with a series of global parties, with the result that it passed almost unnoticed. Still, the ongoing showroom success of what is the Minnesota firm’s bestselling current model since making its born-again debut in 2015 with its liquid-cooled 1133cc 60º V-twin eight-valve engine, thus hastening the demise of Harley’s air-cooled OHV Sportster, will have helped make up for that as far as the marque’s current owner Polaris is concerned. A conservative but astutely managed Midwestern company, Polaris’ management today could hardly be more different than the bunch of spivs who ended up running the Indian Motocycle (sic) Company into the ground during the Teens and Twenties of the last century. For…

BRENDAN JAMES has a plan — he wants to offer the world an Australian motorcycle. To get there, he bought up some of the machinery used to build Holden cars after the factory closed, put together a team and here’s their first effort — a retro styled single known as the TwoStroke. “When I was young, growing up in regional Australia, people were proud to say they owned an Australian-made car. And why not? Australia produced some of the most desirable sedans in the world at the time, and possessed truly world class engineers. While the Australian auto industry has since closed, both Australia and our New Zealand brothers and sisters continue to produce world-class engineers and machinery. Look in any of the large automotive and racing companies in the…

“… BOTH CARBURETTORS ARE BETWEEN THE BARRELS.” WITH LOTS of parts in the boxes in his shed, a history of building interesting motorcycles and retirement time on his hands, Sedge Deste has built another amazing machine. This time it’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s Monster, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, some parts used the way you’d expect, other times not. “Everything needed restoring,” Sedge told me when I visited to shoot the machine. “It was in rough condition, which is why so much of it was here, waiting for a project.” The most recent Deste machine featured in Retrobike was a Suzuki T500 two-stroke twin, something radically different to this bike, but the man likes his large capacity V-twins as well as his two-strokes. So…

THEY SAY you gotta be in it to win it and that’s exactly how one of Peter Howes’ immaculate and pristine Honda RC30s came into his hands. Often raced by Australian racing legend, Malcolm “Wally” Campbell and his son Scott, Peter actually won the bike in a raffl e. “I bought a raffle ticket for $20 — number 45! — in about 1991 or 92 and won Ed Miller’s race bike,” Peter explains. “Steve Tozer raced the bike as well, so it was a well-set-up machine. It has a Paul Hallam-built motor with modified heads and the porting and cam timing has been changed. It’s brilliant out of the box.” Back in the day both Miller and Tozer were handy racers. Tozer is a legend in Victorian racing. He was…

ALTHOUGH he makes his living being a craftsman plumber, Seb, the man behind Seb Kustom Motorcycle in Western France might just end up a full-time custom bike builder, for this very special KZ650SR isn’t his first rodeo. Currently he has a Honda 600 Shadow he’s turning into a Bobber, a Suzuki GSX-R1100 being transformed into a “Dragster/Racer” and a Honda Hornet 600 which will be a rat-styled cafe racer. “… THIS MIX OF STYLES HAS PAID OFF, IT ATTRACTS A LOT OF ATTENTION DURING EVENTS …” For this build, Seb started with a 1980 KZ650SR, a factory custom … one of those oddball machines from the late 1970s where manufacturers would take their naked machine and ‘customise’ it with a king/queen seat, a fat rear tyre and buckhorn handlebars, then…