I can attest to the fact that being in the motorcycle industry in the late 1960's was interesting and occasionally exciting. I spent most of 1967 and half of 1968 at N-V, initially on the Commando project, then on the AJS Stormer. Getting paid to ride the Commando all over England for 40 or more hours a week was a blast, particularly after we got the early bugs worked out.
The biggest downside was the incompetence and short-sightedness of upper management. Our CEO was a fine, upstanding gentleman who had no knowledge of or experience with motorcycles. I don't think he was an engineer as he had a Ph.D in combustion chemistry and had been at Rolls-Royce in their turbine engine development group. His immediate subordinates were the ones who had run the company close to extinction. He did hire some new blood in the design side of the company, who had started to turn things around.
Another problem was the lack of hard data about the vehicles. Everything revolved around rider opinion. I was hired to get a test instrumentation system organised so things could actually be measured, but the funding disappeared into the idiotic PR exercise that got us the "green blob" badges. I'd interviewed with Boeing just before I went to N-V and I got a job offer about 15 months later. Visa processing and getting ready to ship our stuff to the US took about 5 months, by which time N-V was in its death throes.
An interesting aside on the worn-out tooling was a story about the move of Norton from Birmingham to London. A majority of the older craftsmen declined the move and retired. The production drilling machine which drilled the holes in the crank-cases was relocated and the London folks were having a lot of trouble with inaccuracies. They talked to the man who ran the machine before the move and he asked "Did the take my bit of wood?" It turned out that the bearings in the machine were so worn that he used to push the spinle over as it drilled down, so that the set-up was always at one side of the wear. The vast majority of the machinery was of 1930's vintage and in poor shape after wartime production pressures.
I remember a comment by the CEO when asked about Japanese competitors. he said "They only make little bikes and scooters, not big ones like ours." About 6 months later, Honda came out with their 4-cylinder 750(?) with electric start, fully enclosed drive chain and all the other goodies. The death knell was very loud.
