1 hour ago, Justgrazing said:

Is this top bike part of the same project .? It has what looks like a more sloped forward engine and the general lines look cleaner almost like it's a different model again .. Good looking bike what ever it is .. 

 

 

From what I gather, the white one is Edward Turner's original prototype, while the green ones are the later developed prototypes, and much better looking in my opinion.  The sleek tank line and general appearance would make it an ideal bike for modern Triumph to replicate to get into the smaller market. 

 

One of the 5 surviving ones is in Australia, and its owner praises it highly compared to the CB350s of the time.

https://www.oldbikemag.com.au/triumphs-last-gasp-abandoned-bandit/

 

A scrambler prototype, the Bandit SS, was also built.  Update the brakes and tyres (and no doubt the electronics) and I could easily see myself puttering about the farm on it.

1 hour ago, Damrongsak said:

German Triumph (TWN)  http://www.autogallery.org.ru/mtriumph.htm  

Possibly a Triumph Boss circa 1954.  https://cybermotorcycle.com/euro/brands/triumph-twn.htm 

Triumph - TWN Motorcycles  Manufactured in Germany 1903-1957

Triumph TWN History

A native of Germany, Siegfried Bettmann founded the Triumph factory in Coventry in 1886 where he built bicycles. A decade later he built another Triumph factory in his home town of Nurnberg. The English factory built its first motorcycles in 1902 with the German plant following in 1903.

 

Cool .. 

Tularis 800 reverse cyl 2 stroke twin .. 

800cc snowmobile engine ( Sachs ? ) .. no performance figures but quite likely to be bonkers .. not to mention fuel consumption .. neat undershock arrangement .. 

 

54 minutes ago, Justgrazing said:

Tularis 800 reverse cyl 2 stroke twin .. 

800cc snowmobile engine ( Sachs ? ) .. no performance figures but quite likely to be bonkers .. not to mention fuel consumption .. neat undershock arrangement ..

Insane. And radical thinking on the design.  I love the creativity.

 

Honda's early 80's MVX 250 V3 from a time when they were experimenting with the goppy enclosed front disc idea and the even goppier Comstar wheels that they beloved at the time .. the engine I believe formed the basis of the later NSR400 .. a bike with quite possibly the worst fuel consumption of a 2 stroke ever .. I'd like to see a MVX with proper wheels and brakes and some of the bodywork off .. 

 

MVX 250/3 with proper brakes and wheels .. a bit more like it that ..

Honda VF500 .. typical 80's Honda .. well built but anonymous .. jewel of an engine but you had to wring it to do anything .. 

So here's one that someone has chucked a lot of away to cool out a bit .. 

 

 

8 hours ago, Justgrazing said:

MVX 250/3 with proper brakes and wheels .. a bit more like it that ..

Honda VF500 .. typical 80's Honda .. well built but anonymous .. jewel of an engine but you had to wring it to do anything .. 

{snipped}

I don't remember a VF500.

I had a Honda 500/4, (UK M-reg) bought second-hand in the late seventies.

A 1967 Greeves Silverstone, with and without fairing.  Produced for the 250cc road racing class from 1963 - 1967, it had some success at the Isle of Man throughout these years, but it, and other British singles, were soon to be killed off by the Japanese.

 

Imagine lapping the Isle of Man at 90mph with that front brake...

 

A carb worth sticking on the mantlepiece:

2 hours ago, bluesofa said:

I don't remember a VF500.

I had a Honda 500/4, (UK M-reg) bought second-hand in the late seventies.

Blimey Mr Sofa .. bit of a dark horse you be with that .. similar to this one ? 

 

1 hour ago, Justgrazing said:

Blimey Mr Sofa .. bit of a dark horse you be with that .. similar to this one ? 

 

Yeah, that's one. The guy I bought it from had fitted clip-on handlebars. First thing I did was to change them for the standard ones.

I lived in Leicester and went on a BT training course at Bletchley Park. I took a work mate on the back with me. I remember we did 115mph two-up down the M1. Oh, the days before speed cameras!

 

1 hour ago, Justgrazing said:

Blimey Mr Sofa .. bit of a dark horse you be with that .. similar to this one ? 

 

 

I had a '73 750/4 back in the early eighties looked just like that but in orange. Great bike, I traded a quarter pound of weed for it. I think it had over 120K miles on it and was still running strong when I lost it. 

37 minutes ago, bluesofa said:

Yeah, that's one. The guy I bought it from had fitted clip-on handlebars. First thing I did was to change them for the standard ones.

I lived in Leicester and went on a BT training course at Bletchley Park. I took a work mate on the back with me. I remember we did 115mph two-up down the M1. Oh, the days before speed cameras!

 

T'was kid brother to the CB750 was the 500 .. my sister's early boyfriend had one when I was an annoying little 13 .. he'd come round to see her with me wanting to know answers to questions out of my book of bikes naive to the fact that he had something else on his mind .. my parents forbid her from ever going as a passenger on it as they thought bikes were deathtraps .. 

Which didn't go down well when I went on to own dozens of them ..

and nearly meet my maker on one , one morning .. 

The 500 in good original nick are now worth £8/9k with absolute showroom examples fetching £10k ..

3 minutes ago, Justgrazing said:

T'was kid brother to the CB750 was the 500 .. my sister's early boyfriend had one when I was an annoying little 13 .. he'd come round to see her with me wanting to know answers to questions out of my book of bikes naive to the fact that he had something else on his mind .. my parents forbid her from ever going as a passenger on it as they thought bikes were deathtraps .. 

Which didn't go down well when I went on to own dozens of them ..

and nearly meet my maker on one , one morning .. 

The 500 in good original nick are worth £8/9k with absolute showroom examples fetching £10k ..

 

I think they had a 350, 400, 500 & 750, but I'm not sure. They all looked surprisingly similar.

 

 

1 minute ago, Yellowtail said:

 

I think they had a 350, 400, 500 & 750, but I'm not sure.

They did that .. The 350/4 was a rare bike in G B being sold for only 2 or 3 yrs before being superceded by the 400/4 .. both of them were hard work up against the 350/400 2 strokes of the day from the rest of Japan having to be revved to oblivion to keep up .. 

 

 

53 minutes ago, Justgrazing said:

T'was kid brother to the CB750 was the 500 .. my sister's early boyfriend had one when I was an annoying little 13 .. he'd come round to see her with me wanting to know answers to questions out of my book of bikes naive to the fact that he had something else on his mind .. my parents forbid her from ever going as a passenger on it as they thought bikes were deathtraps .. 

Which didn't go down well when I went on to own dozens of them ..

and nearly meet my maker on one , one morning .. 

The 500 in good original nick are now worth £8/9k with absolute showroom examples fetching £10k ..

I came off the 500/4 just after I'd fitted the standard handlebars and was testing it out. It was a Sunday evening and I went around a slow bend too fast and clipped the side of a parked Ford Cortina.

As I was sailing through the air, the first thing that went through my mind even before I hit the road was that I'd just lost a bet with a workmate as to who would have a sick day off first.

Then it hit me - the road surface. Cost me thirteen stitches in my left leg.

I found out later the Cortina was an insurance write-off. My 500/4 had minor damage.

 

 

2 hours ago, Justgrazing said:

They did that .. The 350/4 was a rare bike in G B being sold for only 2 or 3 yrs before being superceded by the 400/4 .. both of them were hard work up against the 350/400 2 strokes of the day from the rest of Japan having to be revved to oblivion to keep up .. 

 

 

 

I think (at least in the US) there was a year or two that the paint and tank on the 350 looked almost identical to my 750, I seem to remember doing a double take when I saw it.

 

I think they only built them a few years for the US as well. I also think the had a 400 "sport" model with that was around for quite a while.

 

 

Kawasaki's KR500 square 4 G P bike campaigned between 1980 and '82 .. sported the highly unusual sheet aluminium monocoque frame with fuel tank part of the structure rather than trad' tubing to create a stiffer frame with reduced frontal area and less weight .. at least that's the theory but in practice it didn't really pay off as perform well in the track it did not .. 

Another small Italian manufacturer had tried a very similar monocoque frame a few years earlier but never went past prototype testing so accusations of plagiarism by Kawasaki were muttered in the paddock when this bike appeared .. 

Anyone want to take a pitch at who that manufacturer was .. 

 

Honda's late 70's NR500 .. built to seize the World Title from the 2 strokers it turned out to be quite good at breaking down .. and catching fire much to big H's embarrassment .. god knows how many patents Honda filed covering the design of its engine and despite being on paper a technological masterpiece it never bettered 13th on the track .. if it actually finished a race .. after 3 seasons H gave it up as a bad job and joined the 2 stroke brigade with the NSR's ..

This was also another bike that experimented with a monocoque aluminium frame on the early versions but access to some parts of the engine were impossible so it reverted to a more conventional tubing arrangement and the name N R cruelly morphed into Never Ready ..

Stripped of the fairing .. 

one actually running .. 

 

Older Yamaha SR250 ("Exciter")  transformed into a scrambler.  Claimed weight is 75 kg now as opposed to 130kg stock - hard to believe.  https://www.bikeexif.com/yamaha-exciter-sr250-scrambler

 

Nice, whatever it is:

 

Harley's RR500 from when they had a bit of a mid 70's identity crisis an' went all 2 stroke .. derived it's roots from Aermacchi's 350 2 stroke twin that was overbored to 385cc and entered in to the 500 class at the end of '73 season .. and gave the M V's a chasing which prompted Aermacchi's partner H D to sanction the RR500 .. still a 2 stroke twin but with twin carbs per a cyl which made it a real pig to ride at low engine speed .. also featured the odd-job counter rotating front disc rotors to try and counter the gyroscope effect hence the twin calipers .. debuted in 1975 against the all conquering Yam and new kid Suzuki running in a couple of G P's and National Championships but H D realised it wasn't gonna cut it and it was dropped with them concentrating on the 250/350 class ..

 

 

Talk of monocoque frames reminded me of this piece of motorcycle history.  The Britten V1000 is famous in the motorcycle world, but John Britten also designed and built other bikes prior to this, most notably the "aero" models.  First, he, and his engineering partner Mike Brosman, built the Aero d-Zero in 1985, powered by a Ducati 900 motor.  Two were made, one for John and one for Mike.

 

 

John then fully built a smaller version in 1987, the Aero d-One, powered by a methanol fuelled 999cc engine from Denco Engineering.  This bike featured a monocoque chassis constructed using carbon fibre, kevlar cloth and high density closed cell foam.  The entire frame weighed just 12kg.

 

In full race mode:

 

Unclothed:

 

And, by unscrewing just 6 bolts, totally stripped down:

 

Both the d-Zero and d-One won their respective races at local speed trials, but, unlike their big brother the V1000, don't appear to have been raced outside of NZ.  

 

John died of cancer at the age of 45 in 1995.  His factory continued making the limited run of 10 V1000 bikes he had promised to build and then shut down.  You can only wonder what might have been...

 

5 hours ago, ballpoint said:

John died of cancer at the age of 45 in 1995.  His factory continued making the limited run of 10 V1000 bikes he had promised to build and then shut down.  You can only wonder what might have been...

Had that " everything is possible " attitude coupled with a gift for all things engineering that made him a once in a generation genius .. 

Still highly revered in N Z which says a lot about his achievements ..

The V1000's are becoming as valuable as works of art now and as and when and if one becomes available fetch huge amounts of money .. 

20 hours ago, ballpoint said:

Talk of monocoque frames

Morbidelli's V4 350 stroker from late 70's with monocoque all'y frame .. note the similarity between it and the KR Kawasaki that appeared a few years later .. The 'Delli never raced in anger and the team reverted back to the smaller classes where they had more success .. 

Bottom shot is Giancarlo Morbidelli founder of the motorcycle side of the business and later curator of the Morbidelli motorcycle Museum housing some of Italy's famous racing motorcycles who passed away earlier this year aged 83 .. 

 

6 minutes ago, Justgrazing said:

Morbidelli's V4 350 stroker from late 70's with monocoque all'y frame .. note the similarity between it and the KR Kawasaki that appeared a few years later .. The 'Delli never raced in anger and the team reverted back to the smaller classes where they had more success .. 

Bottom shot is Giancarlo Morbidelli founder of the motorcycle side of the business and later curator of the Morbidelli motorcycle Museum housing some of Italy's famous racing motorcycles who passed away earlier this year aged 83 .. 

 

How is that a bottom shot? I bet he's got his trousers on.

5 minutes ago, bluesofa said:

How is that a bottom shot? I bet he's got his trousers on.

Hahahaha trust you to smutify that .. hahaha ..

allow me to rephrase .. 

The third photo is of etc .. 

Another monocoque, the Spanish built Ossa 250cc Grand Prix bike.  With a two stroke, rotary valve 250cc engine, it only developed 30hp, but it still came third in the 1969 250cc world championship, despite being up against the might of the Japanese.  This was mainly due to its magnesium monocoque chassis, meaning the bike weighed 20kg less than the Japanese competition, and was overall far more agile.  It won three grands prix in 1969, against the previously unbeatable Yamaha TD2s, and led the championship going into the final race, where it crashed.  It was again leading the championship going into the Isle of Man TT in 1970, but again crashed, killing the factory rider, and Ossa totally withdrew from road racing because of it.  

 

The mighty Yamaha TD2, from 1969 - 1970,  A 250cc two stroke parallel twin:

 

And again, with no fairing:

1 hour ago, Justgrazing said:

Hahahaha trust you to smutify that .. hahaha ..

allow me to rephrase .. 

The third photo is of etc .. 

Well, you're the one who started all this talk of mono-cocks.  What next?  Back to Wankel rotary engines?

7 minutes ago, ballpoint said:

Another monocoque, the Spanish built Ossa 250cc Grand Prix bike.  With a two stroke, rotary valve 250cc engine, it only developed 30hp, but it still came third in the 1969 250cc world championship, despite being up against the might of the Japanese.  This was mainly due to its magnesium monocoque chassis, meaning the bike weighed 20kg less than the Japanese competition, and was overall far more agile.  It won three grands prix in 1969, against the previously unbeatable Yamaha TD2s, and led the championship going into the final race, where it crashed.  It was again leading the championship going into the Isle of Man TT in 1970, but again crashed, killing the factory rider, and Ossa totally withdrew from road racing because of it.  

 

 

Great example of form following function....

Rotary engined bikes are rare. Suzuki , Kawasaki and Yamaha are well known , but there was another. No , its not Honda. Take another guess.