Killing the bike that killed mine

I suppose the question of which is the best touring bike depends on where you like to tour. If your idea of touring is rolling down an interestate, then a big, heavy machine is great. To my way of thinking, If that is the type of road to be travelled, I might as well be in a car and have full comfort. The advantages of a motorcycle, even a behemoth motorcycle are gone once you hop on that freeway. I do interstates for short periods if I must, but it is extremely boring riding so the tendency is to route plan away from them, generally easy to do and far more interesting riding/travelling.

Like a lot of motorcyclists, I look for roads that are as twisty as possible, then get to enjoy the handling of the bike and the advantages it has over a car or a behemoth touring motorcycle. Norton Commandos excel at this kind of touring. Goldwings dont, I pass them all the time as the owners struggle getting that tonnage thru the mountains. It looks like too much work to me. Kind of like driving a 40foot motorhome vs a sports car, both are motor vehicles and have a purpose, but if the object is fun driving the Motorhome falls short.

Glen

worntorn said:

I suppose the question of which is the best touring bike depends on where you like to tour.

Click to expand...

True.
I said something to that effect in an earlier post:

"Touring the Interstates of America is a bit different than riding around Europe. The Goldwing is the hands down Winner when it comes to 600-700 mile days crossing the USA."

What I meant by that was that there are long expanses of straight flat roads crossing this large country. The large bikes were designed for just that task.

I like the twisties as much as anyone, I live in the Colorado Rocky Mountains for that very reason.
But..... when I "tour" (my definition of touring means traveling a good distance).

From where I live,
If I want to get to the Pacific Ocean, I must cross the desert,
If I want to get to the Atlantic, I have to cross the great plains.
(both large flat areas)

I've crossed this country on both big and small bikes, I like the big bikes better!

It's good that manufacturers recognized the need for different bikes for different jobs and filled the needs of the customers.


I

It is this blanket statement that I don't agree with- " For a while I had a 1975 GL1000 (Goldwing). When parked side by side next to my 75 MK3 Interstate, It was pretty apparent which one was the better "touring" bike."

My definition of touring is the same as yours, "travelling a good distance"
For me the Commando is the easy choice. My wife and I routinely ride from Vancouver BC to Southern California, generally a 2500 - 3000 mile round trip. We go down the twisty 101 on these tours and I would not want to wrestle all that way there and back on a half ton machine. I used the Commando for this twice and it was a treat, comfortable too. We've done three of these trips on the Vincent, also a relatively light machine and remarkable comfortable for two people and luggage.

As I age I seem to be going the opposite way to the norm. I see a lot of people purchasing heavy Grandpa bikes even as their physical strength is waning. I'm going the other way, lighter and lighter weight, better handling and better power to weight ratio.
At the moment this is my favourite solo tourer- 350 pounds, 1360cc, terrific handling. There is always a way to get the necessary luggage on there somehow! Step off this thing after 600 miles thru the mountains and it's like you breezed down to the corner store,no aches or pains at all.





Glen

Good for you worntorn! cool bike, cooler that it actually gets ridden!


Last year my woman and I did a 4 month 19,000 mile ride around the USA on my Valk.
IMHO, two people pretty much living off of the back of a bike requires a bit more than my Norton can offer.

Windshield, Hard Lockable saddlebags, leg room, cruise control ---- heck yeah! give me all of that stuff!

IF I would have took the trip on the MK3, I know for sure that I would have went through:
4 rear tires,
2 front tires,
4 oil changes,
at least 1 set of brakes
I'm sure a sprockets and a chain
and the engine would be pretty tired now.

My Honda:
I put a new set of front brake pads on while camping in the Florida Keys,
a new front tire on while passing through Texas and an oil change at 12K.
That's all!

Water Cooled/ Shaft Driven motorcycles don't require the attention (maintenance)
that my older air cooled bikes do.
When I'm riding, I want to ride, not work on my bike.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

P.S. Hwy 101 is tame compared to some of the roads we ride on that "Hondapotamus"

There again Mark, you've slipped a new bike in alongside a 47 year old one to make an unfair comparison. New cars run longer between oil changes, are more reliable than old ones and so on. To go back to the original statement you would need to compare the same age Honda to the Norton, and the few Hondas I still see from that era, are looking more than a little sick.

Even tho there have been many improvments over the years, you would be quite surprised at what these old bikes can do. A few years ago, a good friend rode his 47 rap from Vancouver to Tierra Del Fuego, 28,000 kms thru every imaginable kind of terrain, two up plus luggage and full camping gear. the following year they loaded up again to ride from Vancouver to the Arctic circle. No breakdowns except the dreaded Smiths Chronometric speedo!

We tour with these old bikes all over the world. if the Ocean gets in the way, put the bike on a plane and off you go.

Does that Vincent have a n Egli frame ?
I rode a CB750 when they were new, I was unimpressed. I remember weaving through about four of them in the rain with my 500cc Triumph during a ra ce at Calder raceway in about 1968. They didn't do anything until the guys fitted cb450 pistons and made them into 836cc. I also rode the Suzuki GT750 waterbottle, the steering scared me, but the CB750 was just heavy and bloody awful. I was surprised when I rode a Ducati 900 - it was stable enough for 1000 horses.

Yeah, I guess I did compare my Norton to my Valkyrie, (a totally unfair fight).
For that I apologize.

Touring on old bikes? of course "back in the day" people toured all over on parallel twins - that's all they had.
I did it too.

Somewhere around the Arizona New Mexico line:


I would show a side by side pic of my Norton next to My GL1000 but all I have are 35 mm. pics and don't have a scanner.
But......

Here is an old shot of my 78 GL1000 (basically the same as the 75):


with my woman posing on it back in the 80's:


I sold that bike with 166,000 miles on it. The only problem I ever had was wearing out the ignition switch.
The guy who bought it still has it and still rides it.


After that one, I got a 81 GL1100. The same bike that Emilio Scotto rode around the world - Twice!

Utah (I think)


White Sands, New Mexico



Sold that one with 206,000 miles on it. It was getting tired and I was ready to "upgrade"

Now today we tour like this:














Since this is a Norton board, I think I should stop posting pics of my "other brand" bikes, I don't want
to piss anyone off or start a flame war.
And..... this thread is supposed to be about the CB750, I guess I hijacked it and made it about touring
on a Goldwing.
For that I also apologize
!
Funny thing is........... out of all of the bikes that I have owned, the Norton is the only one I have kept!
That says a whole lot right there!

Acotrel, that Ducati impression, I have to agree, like riding a locomotive, on rails. I didn`t like the feeling of being railroaded, & so long in the W/B that you had to lean them way over or you`d never make the corner apex, so, coming from, & preferring short-er bikes, I wasn`t favourably impressed.
As for Honda 750/4s -they were floppy, you could look down the front fork at speed & see it flexing fore & aft instead of up & down.

Yeah CB750's are junk. Can't imagine how they sold so many?

Refrigerators sold quite well too , doesnt mean theyre a decent motorcycle . Just easy to live with , if youre not demanding . Or like Bling .

Crikey , it keeps poping up Everywhere . :shock: ( dont look behind )

Or - [nicest people] - if boring suits your motorcyling preference..

I didn't realize refrigerators was a particular brand or model. If so, then I guess that's a fair comparison.??? I wonder if people will be bummed out if their new Cdo doesn't leak oil? I guess ignorance is bliss.

Matt Spencer said:

Refrigerators sold quite well too , doesnt mean theyre a decent motorcycle . Just easy to live with , if youre not demanding . Or like Bling .

Click to expand...

For me,
a decent motorcycle = easy to live with.
It's kind of a prerequisite.

acotrel said:

Does that Vincent have a n Egli frame ?
I rode a CB750 when they were new, I was unimpressed. I remember weaving through about four of them in the rain with my 500cc Triumph during a ra ce at Calder raceway in about 1968. They didn't do anything until the guys fitted cb450 pistons and made them into 836cc. I also rode the Suzuki GT750 waterbottle, the steering scared me, but the CB750 was just heavy and bloody awful. I was surprised when I rode a Ducati 900 - it was stable enough for 1000 horses.

Click to expand...

I built the frame out of 308 SS. Part of it is patterened after Egli who really patterened from Vincent (oil filled top spine which the motor hangs from) The motor in the photo is the 38th twin built after WW2. I borrowed it from my touring Rapide for build purposes. It will go back in its original frame parts soon and the Stainless bike will get 1360cc Vincent engine all from new parts.

The swing arm is of my own design, a bit like a D Vincent except with progressive springing.

Modern 6 cylinder Hondas might run for many miles but so do old aircooled Brit bikes. My Rapide was originally delivered to the Isle of Malta in January 1947. It was crashed there in 1952 then shipped to Scotland where it received a new front end. It spent many years in Scotland then was sold to a Gentleman in the South of England. After a decade or so there it was sold by the Veralls company of the UK to a new owner in Australia.

It ran around Australia for years until I bought it in 2003 and had it shipped to me here in Vancouver BC, Canada. I' ve ridden it all over Canada and the Us plus shipped it to England for a flat out lap of the IOM circuit for the 2007 iom centenary. My wife and I then did 2500 miles touring England and Scotland afterward.

I took the bike apart to repaint things and temporarily borrow the engine for the Stainless bike build. Mechanically the Rapide needs nothing, tho the last major rebuild was done thirty years ago in OZ.
From all of the papers and correspondance I have that came with te bike, total distance covered to date is over 500,000 miles!

Glen

Note , HRD considered Vincents " no longer economic to produce ' shouldave held on a year , and Doubled their prices .

The Crux being ' hand assembled / fitted . Skilled workers cost money , you dont get a profesional job for tuppance.
This I think correlates to Norton issues . High tech automatic machinary was where the Japs got the reliability .
Volume ( quantity ) justifying the expense of tooling etc . And there dedicated uncompaining workers .

Where in England , if it was built on Monday , or Friday , or after lunch on wednesday , it wasnt necessarilly the full quid .

Compared to other decent bikes of its era, the Honda 4 is boring, then & now, too boring to consider owning..

Matt Spencer said:

Note , HRD considered Vincents " no longer economic to produce ' shouldave held on a year , and Doubled their prices .

The Crux being ' hand assembled / fitted . Skilled workers cost money , you dont get a profesional job for tuppance.
This I think correlates to Norton issues . High tech automatic machinary was where the Japs got the reliability .
Volume ( quantity ) justifying the expense of tooling etc . And there dedicated uncompaining workers .

Where in England , if it was built on Monday , or Friday , or after lunch on wednesday , it wasnt necessarilly the full quid .

Click to expand...

Good work ain't cheap, and cheap work ain't good. Sailor Jerry

@ Glen
Did you need an 'end use certificate' when your Vincent was exported from OZ to Vancouver - they are needed for most weapons.

The export was an experience I would not want to repeat. I had a very low quote for Ocean Shipping, just $500 so I went with that. By the time I paid some bandit another $500 to put the bike in a cast off new bike crate and bought $550 worth of shipping insurance, I could have air shipped it and had it here in a day or two, generally no crate needed and I wouldnt bother with insurance either for air.
Instead I waited about a month for the bandit to locate a free crate, then he dropped it at the shipping company warehouse with no paperwork.
I got a call (at midnight our time) from the shipping company to say that the packer had hiabed the crate off into the middle of their driveway against the wishes of the shipper. The shipper did not want the item without paperwork. The packer told them to f---- themselves and get out of the way, then proceeded to drop the crated bike right there.

The shipper told me that " as it stands we have a very expensive motorcycle sitting here with no ownership. If I ship it to you without paperwork it will never get there and you will lose all of your money" Im pretty sure he was right about that.
The packer then told me that the paperwork was attached to the crate. Another call to the shipper and I learned that the paperwork was indeed attached to the crate, but was left blank!

I called the packer for the millionth time and his response was " Im not f------ing filling that out mate, you cant make me do it"
Well eventually I did make him fill it out and the bike got shipped. It was supposed to take three weeks to get to Vancouver, instead it took about three months. For a month or so it was sidelined and lost somewhere on a dock in Malaysia.
My wife said, " you are not going to get a motorcycle, you are just going to get a box with a rusty pair of handlebars in it!"

Eventually it did arrive and it was perfect. I rolled it out of the crate, checked the oil and slurped some gas into it, gave it one kick and it fired up sat there with running with that offbeat Vincent idle that sounds like an old warplane. It has been a fabulous bike, given me zero trouble and taken us to many unusual places since.

Ok can't take it anymore. Another CB750 owner here. I love it, will never sell it. Dead reliable, good looking, and cool. I love most bikes, can't think of many that i cant say something good about. Say what you want about it, but they sold a hojillion CB's and they DID have a HUGE impact on a lot of bikes to come. Thats simply fact. I"m sure others have experienced this as well: buy a new brand bike, get on a forum and theres some variation of this thread around. Kinda funny after 4 or 5 times seeing the same things with just the brands switched around.

I built it from parts on the cheap when i was 23. Tuned it then and havent needed to touch it since. Same plugs, same valve adjustment, havent synced the carbs in years. Starts at half a crank. I love it.

1974 CB750