Introduction The Norton Commando is a vintage British motorcycle whose name would become so iconic it’s still a household name decades after the originals left production. Most people with even a passing interest in motorcycles will have heard of it. Given that the Norton Commando was created using a dated parallel twin engine and certainly…
Motorcycles were a market that was to be a natural opening for Japanese industry. Although the British, Americans, Italians, and Germans were making motorcycles that sold well they were steeped in traditional ideas of what a motorcycle should and should not be. The Japanese were not. Japan had worked on creating a motorcycle industry especially in the post war period.
Introduction to the Triumph TR6 – The Desert Sled The Triumph TR6 Trophy, otherwise known as the “Desert Sled” is perhaps best remembered as the bike Steve McQueen used in “The Great Escape” – albeit a TR6 that had been camouflaged to look a little more German. Over the course of its production, the iconic Triumph…
The Beginning The Japanese are an interesting people. When US Commodore Matthew Perry engaged in a bit of American “gunboat diplomacy” back in 1853 the Japanese were forced to emerge from their two hundred and fifty years of isolation from the world. In just fifty years they went from being a sixteenth century nation with…
The Japanese rise as a dominant force in the motorcycle industry during the seventies caught much of the established European motorcycle manufacturers off guard. The bikes from the Land of the Rising Sun had nice convenient electric starters and quickly earned themselves a reputation for dependability. The expression “boringly reliable” was quickly applied to anything made by Honda, because they were. A flat out ride on a Honda CB750cc was however anything but boring and the Kawasaki 900cc that followed it provided levels of excitement that beggared belief.
