News

This freshly restored 350cc JAP-engined Coventry-Eagle has returned to the road for the first time in more than half a century. If you hear somebody talking about a Coventry-Eagle, it’s a fair bet you’ll immediately think of either the firm’s Villiers-engined lightweights with pressed steel frames, or the rare and prestigious V-twin Flying Eight. But Coventry-Eagle was…

Continue reading »

This oil-in-frame 650cc T120 Bonneville emerged from the confusion of the Meriden blockade. Today it pulls like a train – but is a bit of a mystery… When I visited Moto Corsa, Italian bike specialists supreme, there was a cuckoo in the nest – an oil-in-frame Triumph T120 Bonneville, a 650 twin. Spiffed up for…

Continue reading »

The BSA C11 was a solid, workmanlike motorcycle, possessing many of the attributes of its bigger brethren, presented in a pint-sized package. Mike Tottey’s first bike was a BSA C11 rather like the one he’s just restored, but this is no tale of an epic mission to recreate a long-lost first love. “No,” he admits,…

Continue reading »

A big, overweight, wobbly sidecar tug, right? Well, no, that’s not what the late Matchless Model X is at all. When the Matchless Model X was significantly redesigned for the 1937 season, it gained a new name too – the Sports Tourist. Despite the fact that by the fashion of the day, a side-valve V-twin…

Continue reading »

Lovely period photograph, from June 1933, of motorcyclists and their machines lined on the Portway, Bristol. ‘… the fine concrete road and promenade running beside the river Avon in the deep Avon Gorge at Clifton, a suburb of Bristol.’ The Motor Cycle reported; “It would have been a more attractive venue, from a scenic point…

Continue reading »