Commandospecialties Weblog

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http://commandospecialties.wordpress.com

They’re just some guys with a passion for old motorcycles (and new ones to be fair) specifically Nortons but any European marque will be considered. Here’s a few pics from their new location, walls need some pictures etc but the hard work is done!!!

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The Sunday Movie

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Norton Commando Fastback

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Via : Bike Exif





Australian vintage guitar specialist Neil Rote has an enviable stable of motorcycles. We featured his lovely BMW R100/7 nearly a year ago, so it’s now time to show the Norton Commando Fastback. The Commando was the swansong of the British parallel twins, but by all accounts it was a good motorcycle: it won Motorcycle News magazine’s ‘Machine of the Year’ trophy five years in a row, from 1968 to 1972. The Commando was known for its ‘Isolastic’ frame, the successor to the featherbed frame and an attempt to quell the inherent vibration problems of big parallel twins. Neil’s Commando is a 750cc model from 1970, boasting 58bhp and a relatively light weight of just 190kg (420 lbs)—so performance will be brisk. This particular motorcycle has also been fitted with upgrades from the legendary Norton tuner Paul Dunstall, including a ‘GT’ fairing, front fender, velocity tubes and exhaust... Read more



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David Edwards’ P11

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Via : The Bike Exif

What’s former editor David Edwards been up to since leaving Cycle World magazine last year? He tells us he’s been putting his free time and severance pay to good use, “Buying cool old mo’cycles!” One of them is this custom 1967 Norton P11 special, a machine designed as a desert racer. The P11 concept started life as a prototype reportedly built by Californian Norton distributor Bob Blair, who installed an Atlas 750cc twin in the lightweight frame of a Matchless G85 CS.


The history of Edwards’ bike tallies with this: “It was purchased new by a Northern California roadrace/flat-track tuner, who rode the wheels off the thing,” he says. A long-term rebuild started in the ’70s then carried over into the ’80s: “This guy massaged just about every component of the bike. Grafted onto the stock P11 cases are the barrels, primary cover and timing chest from a Commando, and it breathes through big ol’ pumper Dell’Ortos.” The forks are Ceriani, wearing early Kosman rotors and Japanese calipers, and Edwards reckons the seat is from a Yamaha DT1.


The oil tank looks like a Harley XR750 item. “Apparently the tuner lavished an immense amount of time on this project, but sadly he never got to ride it again before his untimely death,” says Edwards. “When I bought the bike at auction, there were no fluids aboard and the insides of the mufflers were soot-free. Currently it’s being recommissioned so it’ll make noise once more—and I’m guessing lots of it!” Despite being over 40 years old, a stock ’67 P11 (or ‘Ranger’ in 1968) is no slouch: around 50hp propels just 170kg, and Edwards’ bike has an even better power-to-weight ratio. Who needs a Triumph Scrambler when you’ve got one of these? Besides collecting oddball bikes, by the way, Edwards is also consulting for the Motoring Department of the Bonhams auction house in the USA.









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The Sunday Movie

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A video from my friend Kenny Cummings from www.nycnorton.com


'68 Seeley Norton Commando at AMA Vintage Grand National Championships, Mid Ohio, July 26, 2009. I was gridded in the last row of the second wave and had a group of 350 GP bikes in front of me. In front of them was a group of Middleweight Superbikes that went off in a first wave. I was able to get a great start and made my way past all bikes from the 2nd wave by Turn One. I then set out to chase down the Superbikes from the first wave. I managed to pass all bikes and not only led my class but got the overall win as well. Unfortunately I forgot to turn on my camera until about the 3rd or 4th lap, so I missed all the action in the beginning, but you can see me catch the last Superbike at about 6:00. My camera worked well, but I still have to figure out how to get better sound and less wind noise.




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Brand New 1975 Nortons

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by Paul Crowe - "The Kneeslider"

We all know what a barn find usually looks like, some rusty hulk stuck in the back corner of some out building comes to light, the original pieces intact but usually in very poor condition. This "barn find" is a bit different. The owner of Motoshop Podevyn in Aalst, Belgium passed away and the contents of the shop are going up for auction. It turns out it's quite a collection, among the discoveries are 11 1975 Nortons, brand new, unassembled, still in their original crates, that's about as original and unmolested as you can get.


Along with the Nortons, there's a Matchless still in the crate, too, plus lots of other bikes and parts. As the fellow got a bit older, you might think he would have gradually wanted to sell these off or at least make sure they went to owners of his choice, but whatever the case, these are going to be an interesting purchase for the future owners who can assemble them and put those first miles on them, something I would encourage them to do. Interesting.

Here are the other 10 Nortons, still in their original, unopened packing crates.

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The CP Project One

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via : the Southsiders

For a couple years we have wanted to design a bike. It all started when we came back from the Legend of Motorcycles in June 2008, where we met a good part of the best motorcycle builders and enthusiasts.
As english motorcycles fans, we decided to use a featherbed frame and a triumph 750 engine. Of course with a beginning like this, our only direction was to build a Triton. But we didn’t want to make the thousandth caferacer or the thousandth triton. We wanted to make something more personal, a bike that matched better with our backgrounds and interests. That’s why we decided to do our best to forget all the british standards for these kinds of bikes and follow our own road.



When we started designing, we quickly discovered what the final bike should be; a mix of Batman’s motorcycle with a T.rex fastback and a general feeling of Catwoman’s curves.In other words, a blend of all that we love from the Comics culture.




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Off road Norton

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images copyright Frank Sider

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DC-4

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The Douglas DC-4 is a four-engined propeller-driven airliner developed by the Douglas Aircraft Company. It served during World War II, in the Berlin Airlift and into the 1960s in a military role. From 1945, many civil airlines operated it worldwide.
The designation DC-4 was first used by Douglas Aircraft Company when developing a large, four-engined type to complement its very successful DC-3, already in widespread operation. It was intended to fulfil United Airlines' requirement for a long-range passenger airliner. Retrospectively this aircraft became known as the DC-4E (E for experimental).



It emerged as a 42-passenger airliner with a fuselage of unusually wide cross-section for its day and a triple fin tail unit, similar to that later used by Lockheed on its Constellation. The triple fin and double deck were abandoned on subsequent models, and the more common single fin was utilised.
The DC-4E first flew on 7 June 1938, piloted by Benny Howard and was used by United Air Lines for test flights. The type proved to be ahead of its time: it was complicated to maintain and uneconomical to operate. The sponsoring airlines, Eastern and United, decided to ask instead for a smaller and simpler derivative, but before the definitive DC-4 could enter service the outbreak of the Second World War meant production was channeled to the United States Army Air Forces and the type was given the military designation C-54 Skymaster. Additional versions used by the US Navy were designated R5D. The first aircraft, a C-54, flew from Clover Field in Santa Monica, California on February 14, 1942.



The DC-4 had a notable innovation in that its tricycle landing gear allowed it to incorporate a fuselage of constant cross-section for most of its length. This lent itself to easy stretching into the later DC-6 and DC-7. A total of 1,163 C-54/R5Ds were built for the United States military services between 1942 and January 1946.
C54E-DC VH-PAF, Archerfield, 2007.Douglas continued to develop the type during the war in preparation for a return to airline services when peace returned. However, the type's sales prospects were hit by the offloading of 500 wartime C-54s and R5Ds onto the civil market. DC-4s were a favorite of charter airlines such as Great Lakes Airlines, North American Airlines, Universal Airlines, Transocean Airlines, etc. In the 1950s, Transocean Airlines (Oakland, California) was the largest operator of the C-54/DC-4.



Douglas produced 79 new-build DC-4s between January 1946 and cessation of production on 9 August 1947. Pressurization was available as an option, but all civilian DC-4s (and C-54s) were built unpressurized. Purchasers of the new build aircraft included National Airlines, Northwest Airlines and Western Airlines in the USA and KLM Royal Dutch Air Lines, Scandinavian Airlines System, Sabena Belgian World Airlines and South African Airways in overseas markets.

Associated Motorcycle : Norton





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SR-71 Blackbird Vs Norton Commando

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The Lockheed SR-71 is an advanced, long-range, Mach 3 strategic reconnaissance aircraft developed from the Lockheed A-12 and YF-12A aircraft by the Lockheed Skunk Works as a Black project. The SR-71 was unofficially named the Blackbird, and called the Habu by its crews, referring to an Okinawan species of pit viper.



Clarence "Kelly" Johnson was responsible for many of the design's innovative concepts. A defensive feature of the aircraft was its high speed and operating altitude, whereby, if a surface-to-air missile launch were detected, standard evasive action was simply to accelerate. The SR-71 line was in service from 1964 to 1998, with 12of the 32 aircraft being destroyed in accidents, though none were lost to enemy action.



The Norton Commando was the last twin piston-engined motorcycle produced by the Norton Motorcycle company. Their last production bikes used a twin-rotor Wankel engine.
During the ten years it was in production it was popular all over the world. In the United Kingdom it won the MCN "Machine of the Year" competition for five successive years from 1968-1972.



Some regard it as the British Motorcycle Industry's swansong, selling well from its introduction in 1967 through the end of the British bike industry as a commercial concern in the mid 1970s.


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Norton Prepares for Bonneville Land Speed Record

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Via : asphaltandrubber.com

In contrast to Confederate Motorcycles’s forth year on the Bonneville Salt Flats, Norton Racing is also present at Bub Week with their rotary-powered NRV588, trying their luck for the first time out on the salt. With no FIM sanctioned class to race in, Norton isn’t going for a land speed record per se, but instead hopes that their efforts this year will provide the adequate momentum to have a sanctioned LSR class for rotary motorcycles in 2010.



With four days thus far on the salt flats, Norton has found that there is a step learning curve when it comes to reaching maximum velocity. While the NRV588 is every racer’s dream bike for tackling your local road course, its purpose-built design does not necessarily translate into an ideal LSR breaker. For instance, the NRV588’s almost anemic weight makes it harder for the bike to hook-up the rear-tire when at full speed, possibly spinning up the rear while at 150+ mph.



Learning the course and strategies behind racing on the salt flats is also key. Experiencing a slight snafu on the first run, Norton saw only 103 mph because of confusion on where the timed portion of the course ended. Sorting it out on the second pass, Norton put down an average speed of 158 mph over the timed-mile (161.31 over the time kilometer) yesterday, and showed the capability of 170mph, no problem.




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Working in the garage

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Today Saturday its time to take care of my bike ...







Now it works ...

Spitfire & Norton : 2 British legends

By Come Chantrel


Copyright by : clavework graphycs

My father went through flight training in the RAF during the late 1940s and ended up in the cockpit of the Spitfire MK XIV. Back in those days, fighter aircrafts really meant something. A few years before the same airplane had defeated Hitler in the skies of England. The Spit was a legend and the MK XIV was its sharpest version.

Meanwhile all my dad kept talking about was not the fun he had flying the Spitfire but the fun he had riding his Triumph and Norton motorcycles on the British Roads. As an aviation buff who’s never owned a bike, that makes little sense to me although I understand the comparison.





By the time I was born, the only thing that was left from his time in the RAF, was one of his log book. The picture is not him but it could have been as he flew the same airplane and wore the same outfit. I dreamed of wearing his long lost Irving jacket and his flight boots when I was a kid. I remember that he used to call his flight uniform, a "battle dress" in typical British pilot form and that his description of flying the "Spit" included variable pitch propeller, stick and rudder synchronization and trimming the controls, all concepts that I had a lot of troubles both to understand and to include when I played with my model airplanes...




The Rolls Royce Merlin engine of the previous version was replaced by a Griffon engine. Although the Griffon engined Spitfires were never produced in the large numbers of the Merlin engined variants they were an important part of the Spitfire family and, in their later versions, kept the Spifire at the forefront of piston-engined fighter development.



The first one of these was flown by Jeffrey Quill on 20 January 1943: Changes to the aircraft were restricted to those essential to enable it to accept the new engine...I found that it had a spectacular performance doing 445 mph at 25,000 ft, with a sea-level rate of climb of over 5,000 ft per minute. I remember being greatly delighted with it; it seemed to me that from this relatively simple conversion, carried out with a minimum of fuss and bother, had come up with something quite outstanding...
It was truly an impressive machine, being able to climb almost vertically - it gave many Luftwaffe pilots the shock of their lives when, having thought they had bounced you from a superior height, they were astonished to find the Mk XIV climbing up to tackle them head-on, throttle wide open!

Steve Dunn THE Artist

Steve Dunn was born in the late 1950s and grew up in the bustling University City of Cambridge. He was a pupil at Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, commonly known then as 'The County'. His favourite subject then was art and in his final year he won the school art prize for his work.

"Manx Norton"

The Manx Norton was one of the most successful racing motorcycles of the late forties, fifties and early sixties. An icon of British bike design.

1962 Norton Manx 500

Courtesy of the AMA's motorcycle hall of fame Museum

These days, four-stroke motocross machines are phasing out two-strokes, which have dominated the sport since the 1960s.



But there was a time, long ago, when two-strokes did the same to four-strokes. And the last of the old guard they replaced were thumpers like this one.



Back in the early '60s, off-road bikes didn't get much more exclusive than this hand-built Manx Norton 500cc off-roader, powered by a road-racing engine. The odd combination was the brainchild of British racer Les Archer, framebuilder Ron Hankins and engine tuner Ray Petty.



The collaboration had already proven successful, with Archer using a Hankins-built Norton to win the 1956 European Motocross Championship, which became the World Motocross Championship a year later. But by 1962, Archer was ready to experiment with something new.



Instead of the tried-and-true long-stroke Norton engine he had used for years, Archer bolted a more-powerful double-overhead-cam, short-stroke road-racing engine, prepared by Petty, into Hankins' custom frame.Despite its road-racing origins, the bike made tractable power, says current owner Fred Mork. Plus, it was a screamer.

"During that time, there was probably nothing that made more power than that bike," Mork says. "But it was built at the very end of a golden era, when CZ, Greeves and Husqvarna were about to take over."



And take over they did. By the second half of the '60s, even exotic four-strokes like this one, with its aluminum tank and titanium axles, couldn't compete with the explosive power of lighter two-stroke bikes.
Instead, the four-strokes were sidelined—and butchered. When Mork bought this bike, many parts had been replaced, and the beautiful aluminum tank had been painted red, which made for a challenging restoration job.

"It probably had a couple of pounds of Bondo on it—and I mean literally a couple of pounds," Mork says.

Kelly Shane's Norton

By Kelly Shane


Ever since I discovered British motorcycles while in college, I’ve always had a hankering for a big twin. But not just any twin would do. I knew that I wouldn’t be happy on anything common like a Triumph or BSA. No, I needed a… (cue drum roll here)… Norton. In the fall of 2004, I finally gave in and started gathering all the necessary bits. John McCoy provided a new Cheney/Matchless frame, which by coincidence just happened to be hanging on the wall in my shop. I rooted thru my shop and attic and found a pair of CZ hubs, some Ceriani forks, an A-10 primary case, a Norton Atlas clutch, and a bucket full of parts from several Norton and Matchless trannys. A 750 engine was donated from a rather bent Commando. By early December, I had stripped the engine, made the engine and tranny plates, laced Excell rims to the CZ hubs, and had pretty much stacked all the loose bits into a pile which looked remarkably like a motorcycle. Of course, the engine didn’t contain a single moving part, the tranny case was empty, and there wasn’t a bolt with a nut anywhere close to it, but sitting on a milk crate in the middle of the shop floor, it sure looked like a motorcycle.


Every spare moment for the rest of December and all of January was spent rebuilding the engine, fitting the engine in the frame, assembling the tranny (several times before it finally had 4 gears and 1 neutral), making up exhaust pipes, taking the engine out of the frame, fitting up the air-cleaner and single 34mm Mikuni, building a head-steady, putting the engine back into the frame, lining up chains, sending the crank to Ed Crowell for rebalancing, boring the cylinders and fitting Combat pistons, slipping in a new cam, putting the engine back in the frame, welding footpeg mounts to the cases, taking the engine out of the frame, etc…...

A box of steel bits was sent out for nickel plating, the pipes were sent to for ceramic coating, and the tank was painted. Finally, on the Wednesday afternoon before the Nat’l in Arizona, the engine was installed in the frame for the last time and on Thursday, UPS delivered the ARD ignition. The various compartments were filled with oil- none of which ran out onto the ground in alarming quantities- and after a couple of preliminary stabs to the kick-starter (I wasn’t exactly sure about the timing, not to mention a hard-earned respect for unfamiliar kick-starters), a healthy kick prodded it into life. Damn this thing is loud- cool!


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