Paul’s Dad on his Knucklehead
For me, it started when I was 12 years old in the 7th grade, and it started with British bikes. Triumphs, to be specific. Oh, I’d seen other motorcycles before that, and my good buddy Pauly’s father Walt had owned a Knucklehead after the war. But everything changed when the motorcycle bug bit, it bit hard, and it did so when I was 12 years old. I remember it like it happened last week.
I grew up in a town small enough that our junior high school and high school were all in the same building. It was 7th through 12th grade in that building, which meant that some of the Juniors and Seniors had cars, and one guy had a motorcycle. That one guy was Walt Skok, and the motorcycle was a ‘64 Triumph Tiger (in those days the Tiger was a 500cc single-carbed twin). It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, with big downswept chrome exhaust headers, a cool tank with a dynamite chrome rack, chrome wire wheels, and the most perfect look I had ever seen on anything. I spent every spare moment I had sneaking out into the parking lot to stare at the thing. Some things in the world are perfect, the precise blend of style and function that makes them extremely desirable (things like Weatherby rifles, 1911 handguns, C4 Corvettes, Nikon DSLRs, and 1960s Triumph motorcycles).
A ’64 Triumph Tiger, just like the one Walt Skok owned.
Back to the Triumph: One day Walt started it (I had been looking at it for a month before I ever heard it run), and the perfection was complete. In those days, a 500cc motorcycle was enormous. When Walt fired it up, it was unlike anything I had ever heard. It wasn’t lumpy and dumpy like a Harley, it wasn’t a whiny whinny like a Honda, and it wasn’t a tinny “wing-ding-ding-ding-ding” like a Suzuki or a Yamaha (they were all two-strokes back then). Nope, the Triumph was perfect. It was deep. It was visceral. It was tough. The front wheel and forks literally throbbed back and forth with each engine revolution. To my 12-year-old eyes and ears it was the absolute essence of a perfect machine. It looked and sounded like a machine with a heart and a soul. I knew that someday I would own a machine like this.
Fast forward a few years, and I was old enough own and ride my own Triumphs. I’ve had a bunch of mid-‘60s and ‘70s Triumphs…Bonnevilles, Tigers, and a Daytona (which was a 500cc twin-carbed twin back then). I was a young guy and those British motorcycles were (and here’s that word again) perfect. They were fast, they handled well, and they sounded wonderful. I had a candy-red-and-gold ’78 750 Bonneville (they always had the coolest colors) that would hit an indicated 109 mph on Loop 820 around Fort Worth, and I did that regularly on those hot and humid Texas nights. It was wonderful.
Fast forward another 50 years (and another 40 or 50 motorcycles for me). We saw the death of the British motorcycle empire, the rise and fall and rise of Harley-Davidson, this new thing called globalization, digital engine management systems, multi-cylinder ridiculously porky motorcycles, and, well, me writing a blog extolling the virtues of world exploration on 250cc Chinese singles.
So here we are, today.
Jerry, our service manager, owned this ultra-cool Norton Commando. Steve bought the bike and put it on display here in the CSC showroom. We’ve got a lot of cool bikes here, including vintage Mustangs, Harleys, Beemers, our CSC RX3s, RC3s, and TT250s, and more. But my eye kept returning to that Norton. I’d never ridden a Norton, but I’d heard the stories when I was younger.
Back in the day (and I’m jumping back to the ‘60s and ‘70s again), guys who wanted to be cool rode Triumphs. I know, because I was one of them. We knew about Nortons, but we didn’t see them very often. They had bigger engines and they were more expensive than Triumphs, and their handling was reported to be far superior to anything on two wheels. Harleys had bigger engines and cost more than Triumphs, too, but unlike Harleys, Nortons were faster than Triumphs (and Triumphs were plenty fast).
So, like I said, guys who wanted to be cool rode Triumphs. But guys who rode Triumphs really wanted to ride Nortons. Nortons were mythical bikes. Their handling and acceleration were legendary. In the ‘60s, the hardest accelerating bike on the planet was the Norton Scrambler (Norton stuffed a 750 into a 500 frame). I remember guys talking about those bikes in hushed tones. You spoke about reverential things softly back then.
And now, here we are in the present, with a 1973 Norton Commando sitting in our showroom (just a few feet away from where I write the blog). Steve’s Norton is magnificent. It’s original. It’s not been restored and it wears its patina proudly.
“Steve,” I said a few days ago, “you need to let me ride that Norton.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll have Gerry get it ready for you.”
Wow, I thought. I’m going to catch a ride on a Norton. I felt like the little dog who chased and finally caught the bus. Like that little dog, I had now had a mouthful of bus. What do you do when that happens?
I sat on the Norton that afternoon. It felt big. The pegs were set far to the rear and my hips hurt immediately from the bike’s racing ergos (and maybe a little from the femur and spine fractures I suffered in a motorcycle accident a few years ago). I don’t bend as easily as I used to. Maybe my mouth wrote a check my body wouldn’t be able to cash. But I was committed. The Norton went back to Gerry in the Service Department so he could get it ready for me to ride. There could be no backing out now.
So today was the day. I was nervous, I was excited, and I was a little giddy. All I’ve ridden for the last 7 or 8 years have been 150cc Mustangs and the 250cc Zongs. Lightweight bikes. Singles. Under 25 horsepower. Electric starters and all the amenities. Modern stuff. I rode my TT250 in on the 210 freeway this morning, the weather was perfect, and I realized on the way in how much I love riding the TT. While I was riding the TT, I thought about riding the 850 Norton. It dawned on me that I had not even heard it run yet. I realized I really like electric starters. Even though my TT250 has a kick starter, I hadn’t kick started a bike in probably 35 years. The Norton is an 850, and it’s kick start only. Hmmm.
When I arrived at the plant, Steve pushed the Norton outside for me. We both tried to figure out where the ignition key went and we solved that problem (it’s on the left side of the bike). We tried to guess at the ignition key’s run spot (it has four or five positions). We picked the second one and I tried kicking the engine. It’s a complicated affair. You have to fold the right footpeg in, and when you kick the starter, you have to try to not hit the gear shift lever on the right side of the bike. We kicked it a couple of times. Hmmm again. Lots of compression. Then Steve had to run back into the plant to take a phone call. I tried kick starting the Norton a couple of times again without even a cough from the engine.
I played with the key and clicked it over one more notch. Another kick, and the mighty 850 fired right up. It settled into an easy idle. Ah, success. It was wonderful. It sounded just like Walt Skok’s Triumph. I was in the 7th grade again. I looked around to see if Steve had seen me start it, but no one was there. It was just me and the Norton. Okay, I thought, I’ll just ride around in the parking lot to get the feel of the clutch, the throttle, and the brakes.
Whoa! I thought as I let the clutch out gingerly. This puppy has power! The Norton was turning over at an easy idle and it felt incredibly powerful as I eased the clutch out. I tried the rear brake and there was….nothing. Oh, yeah, the rear brake is on the other side. I tried the front brake, and it was strong. Norton had already gone to disk brakes by 1973, and the disk on Steve’s Commando was just as good as a modern bike’s brakes are today.
I rode the Norton into the shop so Gerry could fill the fuel tank for me. The Norton has a sidestand and a centerstand, but you can’t get to either one while you are on the bike. You have to hold the bike up, dismount on the left, and then put it on the centerstand. The side stand was under there somewhere, but I didn’t want to mess around trying to catch it with my boot. It was plenty scary just getting off the Norton and holding it upright. It was more than a little scary, actually. I’m riding my boss’s vintage bike here, it’s bigger than anything I’ve been on in years, and I don’t want to drop it.
Gerry gave me “the talk” about kick starting the Norton. “I don’t like to do it while I’m on the bike,” he said. “If it kicks back, it will drive your knee right into the handlebars and that hurts. I always do it standing on the right side of the bike.” Hmmmm. As if I wasn’t nervous enough already.
I tried the kickstarter two or three times (with everybody in the service area watching me) and I couldn’t start the thing, even though I had started it outside (when no one was around to witness my success). Gerry kicked the Norton once for me (after my repeated feeble attempts) and it started immediately. Okay. I get it. You have to show it who’s boss.
I strapped my camera case to the Norton’s back seat (or pillion, as they say in Wolverhampton), and then I had a hard time getting back on the bike. I couldn’t swing my leg over the camera bag. Yeah, I was nervous. And everybody in the shop was still watching me.
With the Norton twerking to its British twin tango, I managed to turn it around and get out onto Route 66. A quick U-turn (all the while concentrating intensely on “shift on the right, brake on the left”) and I rode through the mean streets of north Azusa toward the San Gabriels. In just a few minutes, I was on Highway 39, about to experience riding Nirvana.
Wow, this is sweet, I thought as I climbed into the San Gabriels. I had no idea what gear I was in, but gear selection didn’t seem to make any difference. The Norton had power and torque that just wouldn’t stop. Go faster, more throttle, shifting optional. It didn’t matter what gear I was in (which was good, because all I knew was that I was somewhere north of 1st). I looked at the tach. It had a 7000-rpm redline and I was bouncing around somewhere in the 2500 neighborhood. And when I say bouncing around, I mean it literally. The tach needle oscillated ±800 rpm at anything below 3000 rpm (it settled down above 3000 rpm, a region I would visit only once on today’s ride). The low speed torque was incredible. I realized I didn’t even know how many gears the bike had, so I pulled over and clicked through all of them just to get a count (the number is four).
The Norton was amazing in every regard. The sound was soothing and symphonic. It’s what God intended motorcycles to sound like. Highway 39 is gloriously twisty and the big Norton (which suddenly didn’t feel so big) ate it up. The Norton never felt cumbersome or heavy (it’s only about 20 lbs heavier than an RX3). It was extremely powerful. I was carving through the corners moderately aggressively at very tiny throttle openings. Just a little touch of my right hand and it felt like I was a cannon-launched projectile. (Full disclosure: I’ve never been launched from a cannon, but I’m pretty sure what I experienced today is what it would feel like.) Everything about the Norton felt (and here’s that word again) perfect.
I was having so much fun that I missed the spot where I normally stop to take our CSC glamour shots. There’s a particular place on Highway 39 where I can position a bike and get some curves in the photo (and it looks great in our ads), but I sailed right past it. I was enjoying the ride. But when I realized I missed the spot where I wanted to stop for photos, it made me think about my camera and I reached behind me to make sure it was still on the seat behind me.
My camera wasn’t there! Oh, no, I thought, I lost my camera, and God only knows where it might have fallen off. I looked around behind me, and the camera was hanging off the left side of the bike, captured in the bungee net. Wow, I dodged a bullet there. I pulled off and then I realized: I don’t want to kill the engine because then I’ll have to start it, and if I can’t, I’m going to feel mighty stupid calling Gerry to come rescue me. Okay, off to the side of the road, find a flat spot, keep the engine running, put all my weight on my bad left leg, swing my right leg over the seat, hold the Norton upright, get the bike on the centerstand, unhook the bungee net, sling the camera case over my shoulder, get back on the bike, and all the while, keep the engine running. Actually, it wasn’t that bad, though. And I was having a lot of fun.
I arrived at the East Fork bridge sooner than I thought I would (time does indeed fly when you’re riding an 850 Norton Commando). I made the right turn. I would have done the complete Glendora Ridge Road loop we normally do, but the CalTrans sign told me that Glendora Ridge Road was closed. I looked for a spot to stop and grab a few photos of this magnificent beast. That’s when I noticed that the left footpeg rubber had fallen off the bike. It’s the rubber piece that fits over the foot peg. Oh, no, I thought once again. I didn’t want to lose pieces of Steve’s bike, although I knew from my earlier days no ride on any British vertical twin would be complete without something falling off the bike. I made a U-turn and rode back and forth several times along a half-mile stretch where I thought I lost the rubber, but I couldn’t find it. When I pulled off to turn around yet again, I stalled the bike.
Hmmm. No doubt about it now. I’m going to have to start the Norton on my own.
We (me and my good buddy Norton, that is) had picked a good spot to stop. I dismounted using the procedure described earlier, I pulled the black beauty onto its centerstand, and I grabbed several photos. I could tell they were going to be good. Sometimes you just know when you’re behind the camera that things are going well. And on the plus side of the ledger, all of the U-turns I had just made (along with the magnificent canyon carving on Highway 39) had built up my confidence enormously. The Norton was going to start for me because I wanted it to.
And you know what? That’s exactly what happened. One kick and all was well with the world. I felt like Marlon Brando, Steve Mc Queen, and Peter Fonda, all rolled up into one 66-year-old teenager. Yep, at that moment I was a 7th-grade kid staring at Walt Skok’s Triumph. Yeah, I’m bad. A Norton will do that to you. I just stared at the bike as it idled. It was a living, breathing, snorting, shaking, powerful thing. Seeing it alive like that was perfect. I suddenly remembered my Nikon camera had video. Check this out…
So there you have it. We get classic bikes in on trade here at CSC, and we’re going to be seeking out more of them. And when I can do what I did today again, well, you know…
TT250 Enduro
RX4 450cc Adventure
SG250 San Gabriel Cafe Racer