Greetings from a retired educator and Norton Commando owner since 1975.
It is amazing how many people do not know the history of internal combustion engines.
This site is ostensibly about what is right with the Norton Commando and other great bikes but too many posts glorify the massive, top-heavy, ill-handling, killer bikes of today.
Back in ’75 when I bought my ’74 model Commando it was the best all-around motorcycle available. The compact pushrod hemi was mounted low which made handling great and the Isolastic filters removed virtually all vibration at speed. It was a wonderful design that did everything well and was very affordable to purchase and operate.
At that time the Japanese multinational corporations were also working very hard to rewrite history. One subsidized magazine article after another praised Honda for inventing the Overhead camshaft engine in 1969!? It did not matter to them that MV Agusta had an OHC four road bike back in ’66 or that Moto Guzzi had produced a DOHC V-8 in the fifties.
Despite the propaganda to the contrary the genesis of OHC goes back much farther than that. It goes back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century. Buick was producing a car with OHV engine in 1904 but the earlier Marr Runabout of 1903 was OHC. These engines were not as modern as the Honda but the Peugeot engine of 1913 was. The Peugeot was a DOHC engine with 4 valves per cylinder and had hemispherical combustion chambers. It is the French fellows that made the Peugeot that deserve credit for the invention and not some Japanese company more than a half century later.
Young people deserve to know the truth.
It is amazing how many people do not know the history of internal combustion engines.
This site is ostensibly about what is right with the Norton Commando and other great bikes but too many posts glorify the massive, top-heavy, ill-handling, killer bikes of today.
Back in ’75 when I bought my ’74 model Commando it was the best all-around motorcycle available. The compact pushrod hemi was mounted low which made handling great and the Isolastic filters removed virtually all vibration at speed. It was a wonderful design that did everything well and was very affordable to purchase and operate.
At that time the Japanese multinational corporations were also working very hard to rewrite history. One subsidized magazine article after another praised Honda for inventing the Overhead camshaft engine in 1969!? It did not matter to them that MV Agusta had an OHC four road bike back in ’66 or that Moto Guzzi had produced a DOHC V-8 in the fifties.
Despite the propaganda to the contrary the genesis of OHC goes back much farther than that. It goes back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century. Buick was producing a car with OHV engine in 1904 but the earlier Marr Runabout of 1903 was OHC. These engines were not as modern as the Honda but the Peugeot engine of 1913 was. The Peugeot was a DOHC engine with 4 valves per cylinder and had hemispherical combustion chambers. It is the French fellows that made the Peugeot that deserve credit for the invention and not some Japanese company more than a half century later.
Young people deserve to know the truth.