I'm sorry, but if I saw this bike I might kick it over.

A Cafed W650 would have been neat-to-see but a FAKE Norton!?

Sad, just sad.

Vince

Has all the right ingredients to be the Norton that Nortons would have made -
twin cylinders, and bevel drive to the camgear. (cross between a dommie and a manx).

You often see them called triumphs, and thats without any fake badges....

Supposed to be very nice bikes, without being too flash in the suspension.
Physically not real big though, so large riders not accomodated.

now if he can get it on the " cafe racer" series - then it will be a "real cafe "

N-V did try to do a dohc 750, but what a maintenance nightmare it would have been. To save money (OF COURSE!!), they decided to run the cams by chain, off the existing cam drive. The chain ran up the forward existing push-rod tube, across the head through a couple of idler sprockets to get enough wrap of chain round the sprockets on the camshafts, then back down the aft pushrod tube. There were also a couple of idler pulleys inside the timing case. That chain was over 3-feet long! I don't think the ohc layout did much for the power output.

I remember doing some dyno work with it just about the time I left, but don't remember any details.

yikes, that truly is horrible (though a well built W650/W800 badged as such or unbadged would be great to look at)....according to the youtube page that tosser even removed the kickstarter, one of the best features of the "donor" and one that made it more Norton like. Wonder if he ever takes it to the Ace Cafe and what the reaction would be....if so hopefully that will end up on youtube also

I saw a guy on a stripped down Yamahw all sprayed flat black & looking dumb rat bike like & he had the nerve to put Norton tank badges and side cover stickers on it! I try to live & let live but I have to addmit I didn't try to be quiet when I said to my friend that I thought it was insulting to see junk masked as a Norton. To be honest, if the guy had just made the bike nice and put Yamaha tags on it then it would have been ok.

I don't get. Why call it something that it is not.
Rather well done cafe but why not just leave it as a Kawasaki.
Some people are just freak'n strange

Where is it though ?

In J*p*n, there is a big retro thing, at one stage you could source whole kits of bits to make Manx and G50 looking things out of lesser bikes, shall we say. Looked like a field of TT bikes at the stoplight. Not that I've been there, could all be magazine fiction.....

The O.H.C. thing , you could almost get triple eccentrics in that thing , like a Bently , and have pushrod driven o.h.c. , . Would leave the airflow adequate at least .

Dave:

I wasn't aware that N-V had actually produced a finished bike with the DOHC engine. I thought only one engine existed and had been scrapped. Where is tha bike in the photos? Looks kike maybe the British Motorcycle Museum? Gotta go there if we ever make it back to Blighty again!

frankdamp wrote:Dave:

I wasn't aware that N-V had actually produced a finished bike with the DOHC engine. I thought only one engine existed and had been scrapped. Where is tha bike in the photos? Looks kike maybe the British Motorcycle Museum? Gotta go there if we ever make it back to Blighty again!

That is the 800cc Matchless P10 project - no actual Norton content ?
(Why isn't it painted as a Matchless ?)

The frame that went with that project is supposed to have eventually become the Commando frame ?

As far as I know the last "factory-built" machine registered and badged as a Matchless was actually a street-legal AJS Stormer with the "360" (actually a 345 cc) Villiers Starmaker engine. We built four bikes for the 1968 International Six-Days Trial which were ridden by members of the Royal Air Force Auto Club. Three of them were 250cc AJS versions and the fourth was the Matchless.

They were nearly identical to the factory M-X bikes with just the addition of a DC generator coil on the flywheel stator to power a rudimentary light system and a spark arrester added to the tail pipe.

It was my impression that the DOHC project was started after the Commando was released in the 1967 Ealr's Court show and was a modification of the '68 model year Commando 750cc motor. Of course, by that time, relationships between the Engineering and Development group in Wolverhampton and the manufacturing folks in Plumstead were not very cordial, so we may not have got the real story.

The Norton history books say that that 800c dohc was started as a replacement for the Atlas, for the new machine. But when testing proved non-satisfactory, they used a tilted forward Atlas engine instead. No dates thrown about, without trawling back through the history books.
Wasn't Charles Udall connected with it - ex Velocette ?

There was also that unit-construction engine, a 650 was it ?
That was a Norton ?
Cheers.