Table of contents for #26 AUTUMN 2017 in Retrobike

23,000 kilometres over four months on a 1959 Velocette" I MET Stuart Hooper at Speed Week on Lake Gairdner last year, as he prepared The World’s Fastest Velocette for what would be a record-shattering 193mph run. That’s 310km/h in the new money, on a pushrod Pommy single! Stuart’s bike is every bit as inventive and personal as was Burt Munro’s World’s Fastest Indian, which inspired it. Burt was fond of saying that if you didn’t follow through on your dreams, you might as well be a vegetable. No chance of that happening with Stuart Hooper. A lifelong British bike nut, he has also sailed a yacht around Australia and had a long and successful career in motor racing as a driver and constructor before he switched to motorcycle land speed…

“ROLAND IS CLOSE TO THREE-TIMES WORLD 500 GP CHAMP KENNY ROBERTS, WHO OFFERED HIM THE KEYS TO HIS RACE WORKSHOP” ONE thing we’ve noticed at runs and shows lately is the growing number of air-cooled two-stroke customs, albeit from a low base. And why not? Two-stroke motorcycles are as retro as you can get, simple technology once common but now long abandoned, mostly because they don’t run as clean as four-strokes. Political correctness be damned, it’s about time they made a comeback! Roland Sands agrees. He is especially fond of two-strokes after a long road-racing career that culminated in winning the AMA national title on a TZ250 Yamaha almost 20 years ago. These days more famous as a custom bike builder — we’ve featured a bunch of his bikes in…

“MY WORK FOCUSES ON THE AESTHETICS, THE HARMONY OF CURVES AND ATTENTION TO DETAIL” TALK about take no prisoners! This insane custom from Ed Turner Motorcycles in France is as warlike and aggressive as they come. It was commissioned by Gregoire, a survivor of the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, during which 130 people were murdered. Engraved on the tank are verses from Book of Ezekiel in the Old Testament of The Bible which speak of a vengeful God unsheathing a mighty sword to take revenge on those who wrong Him. “Gregoire thought that he had been sitting on the starting line for too long and decided his dreams had to be achieved in his lifetime,” says Karl Renoult of Ed Turner Motorcycles, and this is the result. Greg…

AT the final GP of the year at Valencia, newly-crowned MotoGP prince Marc Márquez was slated to make a lap of honour aboard his Honda RC213V alongside former GP racer Sammy Miller on the sole surviving 500cc AJS Porcupine E90 on which Les Graham won the inaugural 500cc world championship in 1949. Alas it wasn’t to be, after some over-zealous party pooper spotted a few drops of oil from the primary chain oil-feed beneath the AJS. Panic stations! Can’t have some old vintage boneshaker leaking oil on the circuit! No point explaining this had only happened because officials had kept them so long in pit lane and that at any speed said oil would be flung off in particles so minute as to be not there. Sadly, a special moment…

“The 50cc Suzuki RP68 GP racer of 1968 had 16 gears” SOME of you may not know this, but back in motorcycling’s earliest days — more than a century ago — there were no gearboxes on motorcycles. None at all. To get going on a bike in those far-off times, you started it up on its centre-stand by pedalling like mad, popped it off its stand, either ran beside the bike for several paces, or just hopped on and kept pedalling as you rode off. Pioneering sure sounds like fun, provided you had a sound footing! Back then, the only people flying aeroplanes were the Wright brothers. Very few people had telephones, radio was just a weird new invention and most of the technology you use today hadn’t even been…

“I WANTED TO EXPLORE DIFFERENT OPTIONS, EVEN IF I WASN’T SURE HOW THE PUBLIC WOULD TAKE IT” I WANTED to build something ‘unrealistic’, something that looked like it came out of a comic book,” Wenley Andrews says of the Honda Fireblade he calls Angry Bird. “Most of my builds up until then were cafe style and I wanted to explore different options, even if I wasn’t sure how the public would take it.” Wenley had already made a name for himself in Sydney custom circles as a builder of cafe racers based on modern Triumph twins when his mind turned to completing a streetfighter project that had never really gotten off the ground nearly a decade ago. “The build began in 2008,” he says. “I was really into streetfighters, so…

“THEY STEPPED OUT OF THEIR COMFORT ZONES AND TOOK THEIR FUNDRAISING TO A WHOLE NEW PLACE, 18,380 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL” REGULAR readers will know all about the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride (DGR), a worldwide phenomenon that has taken the world by storm. Beginning as a concept idea in Perth, it has been taken to its unpredictable scale by the founder of the Sydney Cafe Racers, Mark Hawwa. In only just a few short and very hardworking years, Mark and his team turned this concept into becoming the world’s largest fundraising motorcycle event. It is held annually on the last Sunday of September, with funds being raised over the course of the year. This international charity event is aimed at those who own and ride classic and vintage-styled motorcycles, groom their…

WHEN Grant Jarrett had a hankering for a new bike 16 years ago, he was thinking cruiser but nothing caught his fancy. “I’m not into Harleys,” he says, “and then Triumph brought out the America. I bought one of the first batch of 70 the factory made in 2001.” He brought the bike home and rang his good friend Fernando Alvarez in Brisbane. “Start it up and let me listen to it,” said Fernando, who mistook it for the sound of a sewing machine. He could fix that, he said. “Give it to me for one winter.” Hop-up parts for Triumph’s new twin were all but non-existent, no problem for Fernando and his mate Joe Marshall who builds some of Australia’s quickest drag-bike engines. It took closer to a year…

“I WAS VERY HAPPY WITH HOW IT RODE; THE SUSPENSION AND BRAKES ARE FANTASTIC” TOWARDS the end of my BMW K100RS build (The Hornet, Retrobike #24), my cousin Lukas gave me a Kawasaki GPz750. It was stock as a rock but hadn’t run for eight years; he did try to get it going a few years ago but only succeeded in setting it on fire. So my first task was to get the engine running and the rest of it roadworthy for Victorian club rego. It had a sump full of fuel, the carburettors leaked like sieves and it had no horn, indicators or brake lights. After a partial rewire, carby kit, new coil and plugs, I eventually got it running and registered with the Classic and Custom Japanese Motorcycle…

“Racing is dangerous, but it can be far safer than it is at the moment” RACING, what a wonderful thing to do. Racing motorcycles is even better, perhaps one of the best sports and pleasures for a rider to do in his or her lifetime. It’s one of those pure sports where it’s just you and your machine and how you go is dependent on your ability, strength, fitness and will to succeed. This is what makes motorcycle racing so much fun and so addictive. Racing a motorcycle — whether it be a 50cc mini-bike or a 1000cc superbike — takes skill, not just natural skill but learned skills that have been taught to a rider by a mentor or in a class environment. Experience is something that we develop…

WHEN I was a kid in England, still trying to work out how to not fall off my moped, a guy in our village bought a new 750cc Triumph T140. My mates and I were drawn like moths to a flame. In a time of CBX1000s and Z1300s, it looked retro even then and, unbeknown to any of us, was about to go down in history as one of the last-ever Meriden-built Bonnevilles. The OHV T140 was derived from the 650cc T120 which had been around in one form or another since 1959. And now the T120 nameplate has returned on another Bonneville twin, this time a liquid-cooled SOHC 1200, up from the previous air-cooled model’s 865cc, and with a 270-degree crank instead of the traditional two-up 360-degree shaft. Yet…

“200MPH IS NOT THAT FAR AWAY BUT THE MOUNTAIN IS GETTING VERY STEEP” ONE of the many great things about land speed racing is the sound. There are no decibel limits nor audio barriers as riders and drivers stay hard on the gas seemingly forever, then stay on it some more. Long after they’ve disappeared into the haze and just as the noise starts to fade, the exhaust echoes off the far mountain range and you get to hear it in stereo. And still they stay on it! Most of the cars run booming V8s but they’ve been outnumbered by bikes for a while now, a direct legacy of The World’s Fastest Indian. The quickest local riders go as fast as 230mph on late-model four-cylinder Jappas, but it’s the big…

“MANY CUSTOMS LOOK THEY ROLLED OFF THE SAME CAFE RACER PRODUCTION LINE. THERE HAD TO BE MORE TO IT THAN THAT” TOM Konecny and Pablo Steigleder are a pair of 20-something university students who, while pursuing their studies, have turned a custom bike-building hobby into a flourishing business, Diamond Atelier, in just a few short years. As good German boys, their main focus is on Berlin-built BMWs, in particular airhead twins. No two are alike but none as aggressive as this, their fourth build and the first based on an eight-valve R nineT, which they call DA#4. The custom bike scene in Munich in 2013 was happening but the bikes had a sameness about them, Tom says. “With most custom parts being bought from catalogues and not hand-built, the majority…

“NO-ONE REALLY CARES WHO WINS OR LOSES. WE ONLY DEMAND THAT NO-ONE DIES” ONE of the many things we like about Deus Ex Machina is the names they give their workshops. In Sydney, it’s the House of Simple Pleasures. Bali has the Temple of Enthusiasm and Los Angeles the Emporium of Postmodern Activities. In Milan, it’s the Portal of Possibilities and it was there in mid-2015 that the seeds of the world’s most improbable custom bike weekend were sown. Gary Inman, founder of Sideburn magazine, was in town to help with the judging of the Deus Bike Build-Off. Gary’s other claim to fame is establishing Dirt Quake in the UK, the fifth running of which we covered last issue. The concept of giving road riders a taste of a real…

“I didn’t need some plum saying tyre plugs were illegal and dangerous” A FEW years ago I ran a motorcycle rescue and transport company based in NSW and it occurred to me that you lot are an eclectic bunch. I hauled everything from a 1915 Rover — yes, you read that right — to slammed Harleys worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, fixed many roadside catastrophes and rescued plenty of bikes that had bounced off the tarmac. So there I was, called out on a sunny Sunday morning to an anxious Ducati 999 owner with a rear puncture. No worries, easy fix. It was at the Road Warriors cafe on the Old Pacific Highway at Mount White, so I was already looking forwards to grabbing some breakfast afterwards. And then…

A NICE thing happened to me after finishing Seddo’s Norton. Old mate Pete asked me to help out at his motorcycle workshop on a casual basis. Now who would knock back the offer of moving from their home garage to a fully-equipped workshop? Not me! A few weeks have passed and I have settled in well. Old Mate Motorcycles caters for all makes and models. In just a short time we have worked on an 85cc Moto Guzzi Cardellino (c1958), a Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail, a 1988 Suzuki RGV250, Seddo’s 750 Commando, my Honda CB750 and a Honda VFR800. I have been hopping around the workshop like a kid in a lolly shop. And I do mean hopping, progressing from a leg in a cast and on crutches to now using…