Moto-Immortality
Moto-immortality
AT LARGE
STANDING ON A STREET CORNER WITH a couple of longtime riders the other day, a funny thing happened. A Norton Commando burbled past us and nobody said anything about it. When I realized that we had all just ignored what was a very nicely restored motorcycle, I wondered aloud why. “Easy,” one guy said. “There’s a lot of them around. And, well, I mean, it’s just a Commando, right?”
Now, understand, these are middle-aged guys like me. To riders of our era, a Norton Commando was just another parallel Twin, its Isolastic engine mounting just a supposedly temporary Band-Aid foisted on us by a Norton-Villiers-Triumph management too poor or dumb to give us the liquid-cooled dohc Four we just knew they had on the drawing boards. Not that some of us hadn’t owned Commandos; I still have the Production Racer my teammate and I bought off Gus Kuhn’s Clapham showroom floor in 1972. But to us, it was just a racer—a tool—not a way of life or a philosophical statement. So when one of us sees a perfectly restored Commando, he’s looking with a fairly jaundiced eye.
Even so, the truth of what the guy said struck me. There are a lot of Commandos around now. Just as there are a whole lot of Triumphs and BSAs. People are obviously buying a lot of rundown Britbike junk and nursing it back to life.
This, it seems to me, is a fundamentally different phenomenon from the now decades-long pursuit of the purists to preserve, restore and perfect purebreds like the Norton Manx and Velocette KTT. Commandos, Bonnevilles and Rockets were Everyman’s bikes, mass-produced with as much loving attention as your average Morris Minor, and often by guys who cared as much about the quality of the finished product. (Editor Paul Dean, former BSA dealer and racer, makes clear the universal rule for making a BSA—any BSArun: First, you take it out of the crate. Then, you take it completely apart and put it back together the right way. Now you can tune it.)
My diehard, Britbike-loving friends disagree that the surge in restoring middle-class Twins from the Sixties and Seventies is different from what the guy with the Manx Nortons does; they say it’s the same nostalgia that powers the megabuck auctions of truly vintage and classic hardware. Maybe they have a point, in some cases. But I think the main reason lies elsewhere.
It lies, I think, in what’s happened to American general aviation during the last decade. In brief, what’s happened is that new-airplane sales have just stopped. In 1980, the manufacturers built and sold almost 17,000 new airplanes—a record. Seven years later, they managed to move barely a thousand. Aviation types have been going crazy trying to figure out why this once-vigorous industry collapsed, and right now the betting is on product liability—something haunting motorcycle makers, too.
But early on in the aviation deathwatch, some pundits began wondering if the real reason the sales plunged wasn’t the simplest of all: There finally were enough airplanes to go around. And since the new airplanes were essentially clones of the ones made last year (or, given the abysmal state of general aviation technology, two decades ago), people who needed or wanted an airplane bought used.
This is the key to the Commando/ Bonneville upsurge, I think. And it also helps explain some other weird quirks in the buying patterns we have in America, not only in bikes, but in cars, too. If you examine Britbike Twins not with nostalgia but with the calculating eye of a rider looking for a certain kind of bike, you’ll see in them a radically different ride from what’s available in the showrooms.
They’re simple enough for any dropout to fix (as long as he has patience and some good Whitworths), lightweight and flexible enough to fill any task. Best of all, they’re usually much cheaper than most of the stuff down at the new-bike shop. And the oncecritical spare-parts shortage has been eased, courtesy of “pattern” partsmakers in the unlikeliest of placeslike Taiwan.
In cars, we saw this with the Mustang convertible craze of a few years back, and now with the middle-class British sportscar boom. True, some of the people who powered the Ponycar blitz were after long-gone youth, but for others, it was simply a matter of price, availability, “difference” and that all-important ragtop. Six years ago, when I bought a Triumph TR4A, some parts (like the glovebox) were impossible to get at any price. But because I was part of a ground swell of guys who wanted a generic fun roadster and didn’t relish paying Mr. Porsche fifty grand for his, you now can get that glovebox for a pittance, and my roadster is no longer an uncommon sight.
Neither are those Bonnies. Nostalgic folks who think yesterday was better will sigh and reflect on The Glory That Was as today’s Triumph riders learn the eternal truths of owning one; but to me, this resurrection of Brit Twins is a good thing because it makes more different kinds of bikes available, period. A motorcycle in a junkyard is no good to anybody. But if we all go on getting jaded at the new-bike store and bringing these things—whether they be T120s or CB77s or YDS3s or R5Is—back to life, by the time today’s shiny new toys are old crocks, just think of the incredible selection that’ll be available to us.
One message, after all, of the airplane sales crash was that because planes are required to meet basic airworthiness criteria, their owners and operators have been forced to keep them in good fettle—and thus have made them essentially immortal. If we can make this happen for twowheelers, we’ll all have cause to echo the sentiments of a bumper sticker I saw the other day:
“So many bikes, so little time . . ..”
Steven L. Thompson
