Norton Manx and 88 twins at Daytona.....

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Rohan said:
I didn't say it had a slimline frame, I said it has a slimline style rear subframe - have a look. READ MY WORDS !.
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No, but I said it had a slimline frame, which it does in it's entirety.

Rohan said:
Where are you getting those engine specs and variances from ?
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I have one of the three 62' Daytona racers sitting in my garage along with some original dyno sheets for it and spares/parts from the other two bikes. I was friends with the previous owner who was an employee of the Norton Experimental Department in England, and after Bracebridge street closed, Berliner's in the USA, among other duties he was head of Berliner's racing efforts in the 60's.
 
beng said:
Indian Sales Co. was not THE Norton importer for Norton for most of the 1950's, they were just one of several that dealers in the USA could get their bikes and parts from including McGill in Canada.

Indian Sales company was formed in 1949 and ran on until 1962 as a separate venture from the American Indian Company. I have a 59' Norton that the factory records show was imported directly by Hap Jones in California.
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The Indian Sales Corp was not a 'separate venture', the english Brockhouse Co had wrestled control of Indians' Sales organisation away from Indian Motorcycles, through some legal and financial wrangling. Indian then were in dire straits, with very limited manufacturing, which made it possible presumeably.

This saw a whole slew of english made bikes being sold through Indian Dealers in the USA - they had to have something to sell ? - bikes like little CZs, and AJS, Matchless, Norton, Vincent and possibly Velocettes ? By the mid 1950s, Royal Enfields rebadged as Indians appeared. And late in the 1950s, Matchless bikes with Indian model names, but not rebadged were the product line.

When did Berliner come into the picture, there would have been no official Norton distributer after the mid 1950s ?

P.S. The Indian Sales Corp was behind Dick Klamfoth etc racing Nortons at Daytona for at least part of the early 1950s. The reason Klamfoth was racing a BSA in 1954 is given somewhere as that Indian Sales Corp had discontinued support after 1952.
 
beng said:
No, but I said it had a slimline frame, which it does in it's entirety.
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Just which bike(s) are we talking about here ?

beng said:
I have one of the three 62' Daytona racers sitting in my garage along with some original dyno sheets for it and spares/parts from the other two bikes. I was friends with the previous owner who was an employee of the Norton Experimental Department in England, and after Bracebridge street closed, Berliner's in the USA, among other duties he was head of Berliner's racing efforts in the 60's.
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Is this the late Heinze Kegler ? Why not mention his name ?
The 1962 Nortons at Daytona were beaten by a Triumph ?
Its difficult to even find a mention of where the Nortons came in the race ?
Did they have full fairings ? Were fairings permitted ?
 
beng said:
Rohan said:
I didn't say it had a slimline frame, I said it has a slimline style rear subframe - have a look. READ MY WORDS !.
Click to expand...

I have one of the three 62' Daytona racers sitting in my garage along with some original dyno sheets for it and spares/parts from the other two bikes. I was friends with the previous owner who was an employee of the Norton Experimental Department in England, and after Bracebridge street closed, Berliner's in the USA, among other duties he was head of Berliner's racing efforts in the 60's.
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If you have these details, can you either post this online or send me a copy, please I am most interested on the 500 Domiraces.
 
Rohan said:
beng said:
Dick Mann won the 1963 AMA championship using a Matchless G50 OHC racer.......
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Isn't this because AMC built a batch of G50CSR 'road' bikes, to get the type homologated to be eligible to race. Otherwise, the out-of-the-catalog G50 was no-wheres-ville.
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Well pointed out, but he did not win the 1963 Daytona 200, which was won by Ralph White on a H Davidson see all results ;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daytona_200

The manufacture of 200 bikes rule which someone else pointed out was also applied to keep the Norton Manxs out, which by the 1960s were only being made below triple figures.
If Matchless made 200 G50s then they may have been allowed, as were the watercooled Yamaha TZ350 racers in 1970s which won the 1972 Daytona.
 
Bernhard said:
Well pointed out, but he did not win the 1963 Daytona 200
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Did someone say that he did?

Bernhard said:
The manufacture of 200 bikes rule which someone else pointed out was also applied to keep the Norton Manxs out, which by the 1960s were only being made below triple figures.
If Matchless made 200 G50s then they may have been allowed, as were the watercooled Yamaha TZ350 racers in 1970s which won the 1972 Daytona.
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The AMA rules changed all the time, so you really can not quote them from one year and apply them to others.

At the time the G50 and Manx were banned, all a manufacturer needed was 25 bikes to qualify, but they had to have lights and an electric generating system, which the Manx did not.

Racers had to run plunger-framed Manx Nortons through 1952 because the featherbed was not used on a production bike then. So in 1953 and later the frame was approved and it appeared at Daytona that year with the Daytona 88 bikes. I do not know when the "lighting and generator" rule came out, but the DOHC and short-stroke Manx never had those, and by the mid-fifties the featherbed SOHC International was very limited production, down on power and expensive compared to the USA Goldstars and probably was never sold in the USA in any quantity.

The 1962 Norton Daytona 88 bikes had to use the slimline frame because that is what the roadsters had, the Isle of Man Domiracer would not have been allowed with it's special engine parts and frame.

Matchless brought over 26 of the G50 street bikes in roadster frames with lights, plus extra road-racing frames and other parts for approval by the AMA, but because they won, and because Triumph, BSA and Harley each sold ten times the motorcycles as Matchless and Norton both, and probably had ten times the money and people in the USA, Norton and Matchless would always be at a disadvantage when it came to politics. So Matchless and Norton, both with little money to develop and produce high-performance street bikes in quantity, were at a big disadvantage compared to everyone else.

By 1964, when most of the bullshit was sorted out or thrown away, Honda was pumping out OHC bikes in the tens of thousands, and it was more or less legal to race the G50, they were being eclipsed by more modern 2-strokes and multi-cylinder bikes, so the politics had done it's job.

In the later 1960's Harley, BSA and Triumph tried to protect themselves in racing by upping the number of bikes needed to qualify as production to 200, but the Japanese factories were making thousands of bikes on one day and they had tons of money, so it was easy for them to pump out racing bikes to bury the American and European marques.

The AMA still ended up banning multis and two-strokes from some dirt-track racing classes in the mid 1970's after KR started running a TZ700 there, siting safety and other reasons..politics!

Read this: http://www.superbikeplanet.com/2002-Apr ... _story.htm
 
beng said:
The AMA rules changed all the time, so you really can not quote them from one year and apply them to others.
At the time the G50 and Manx were banned, all a manufacturer needed was 25 bikes to qualify, but they had to have lights and an electric generating system, which the Manx did not.
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Funny you should mention that.
The 'escape clause' that permitted the late 1940s manx to run at Daytona has come to light.
For 1948 that little sentence below the Norton logo "The Models 30M and 40M are also available fully equipped for road use". This sentence doesn't seem to appear on all versions of Nortons catalogs and brochures, so maybe this was a special printing for USA consumption. ?
To get race bike eligible for Daytona.
Whether any of these were dohc versions of manx is an interesting question though.
The 1949 Daytona manxes appear not to have been.

Norton Manx and 88 twins at Daytona.....
 
So, the 1962 Nortons that appeared at Daytona were slimline frames.
Production slimline frames, or a race version thereof ?
 
Rohan said:
beng said:
The AMA rules changed all the time, so you really can not quote them from one year and apply them to others.
At the time the G50 and Manx were banned, all a manufacturer needed was 25 bikes to qualify, but they had to have lights and an electric generating system, which the Manx did not.
Click to expand...

Funny you should mention that.
The 'escape clause' that permitted the late 1940s manx to run at Daytona has come to light.
For 1948 that little sentence below the Norton logo "The Models 30M and 40M are also available fully equipped for road use". This sentence doesn't seem to appear on all versions of Nortons catalogs and brochures, so maybe this was a special printing for USA consumption. ?
To get race bike eligible for Daytona.
Whether any of these were dohc versions of manx is an interesting question though.
The 1949 Daytona manxes appear not to have been.
Norton Manx and 88 twins at Daytona.....
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I might be able to clear the air a little on that one, the Norton Inter was basically a Manx with a kick start and lights, it might have softer cams and a plate below the barrel to lower the compression, but one or two people had a Garden gate Manx built to ride on the road, I was too young to remember it , but a future brother-in –law had one.
 
Bernhard said:
I might be able to clear the air a little on that one, the Norton Inter was basically a Manx with a kick start and lights, it might have softer cams and a plate below the barrel to lower the compression, but one or two people had a Garden gate Manx built to ride on the road, I was too young to remember it , but a future brother-in –law had one.
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I don't think you are going to clear anything with that statement Bernhard, you need to be a little more careful with your statements. There is almost no part of a Manx that is identical and interchangeable with an Inter in that era. Although broadly speaking they do look similar.
The frame in the manx is constructed with hi-tensile steel tubing to begin with, if you flick it with your fingernail it goes 'ting', where the road bike frames go 'thunk'. After that almost everything else is different too - even the steel rear rim in the manx is quoted as hi-tensile steel. Although a lot of manx parts can be bolted to an Inter, to make it almost a manx.
And now, it seems, Inter road bike parts bolted to a manx, to make it a road bike !

We'd be interested to see a pic of your brother-in-laws bike.
A lot of old manxs were converted to roadbikes back then - once the featherbed dohc manxes came out, sohc plunger bikes were largely obsolete as race bikes - as even Dick Klamfoth said about his 1949 Daytona bike...

Cheers.
 
Rohan said:
So, the 1962 Nortons that appeared at Daytona were slimline frames.
Production slimline frames, or a race version thereof ?
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The reason I ask this is that its ~50 years since these bike appeared at Daytona.
In the intervening years, or immediately after, the frame could have been substituted for a road bike frame ? It has never been involved in a race crash ? An account of how it went at Daytona even seems obscure ?

And as previously mentioned, I've had a Model 7 road bike frame that had been tubed with lightweight hi-tensile steel - so even though it looked totally standard, it had to have been a factory special of some sort, for one reason or another. If they could do it then, they could do it later ?
 
Someone has produced some results for the 1962 Daytona 200, from Don Emdes book.
(Floyd Emde, his father, won the 1948 Daytona 200 on an Indian 648).

Don Burnett Triumph 1st, Dick Mann G50 Matchy 2nd, BSA's in 6th, 7th, 8th, 15th and 19th, the others in the top 20 were all Harleys. What happened to the Nortons ? Anyone know all their names ?
Anyone know who rode the Nortons ?

A sort-of replica of the Triumph at
http://www.tioc.org/memb_bike.htm
since pics of original Daytona bikes or Daytona pics seem tough to find...
 
It was previously mentioned here, variously, the reasons later model Manxes couldn't compete at Daytona. (And the primary reason for this thread in the 1st place).

This from the competition committee notes. Motorcyclist Magazine.
Sorry for the small type, couldn't capture it any other size.

http://i1113.photobucket.com/albums/k50 ... nx-AMA.jpg

DOHC short stroke, no lights, not like an Inter = no race.
 
Nice find and link Matt, thanks.

No race carburettors or race magneto, in particular. ? (and no tank etc, obviously).
And totally unknown condition, going to be interesting seeing where the bidding goes and what the reserve is...

Any pics anywhere of it at Daytona ??
 
If it’s just a Dunstall bike, it may not be as good as you might hope it would be, as these engines were generally standard Norton 88ss, it may have H. comp pistons and a full race cam, if it is Dunstalls own full race cam which had flats ground every 5 degrees-no I'm not joking!
If its the works Norton it might have an alloy barrel, but you would be very lucky!
 
Nothing too standard about them at all, apart from maybe the frame ?

Since the race report lists that some of the Nortons had 'engine troubles' (including Franks), then the chances of the engine still being original in any way are rather slim - especially after 47 years !! Presumeably it raced again too ?

BTW, we have heard the list of race retirement reasons, haven't we ?
"magneto trouble' = conrod came out of the engine and smashed the magneto.
'gear selection problems' = gearbox exploded, and gears all over the track.
'clutch problems'= clutch parted company and last seen at high speed in the grass verge.
'carburation problems' = someone didn't lockwire everything, and the floatbowl was gone.

Been to a racemeet where a Duc v-twin left a whole piston sitting neatly upright on the track. Suppose thats 'piston problems' ?

Cheers.
 
beng said:
The 1949 Daytona winning bikes and McKeever's bikes all had magnesium crankcases. Armchair experts will be mislead by photos etc. though...

There is a photo of a 1959 Manx at the Earl's court show in Walker's book on Manx racers with silver crankcases, I suppose they are aluminum too?
etc etc
Armchair experts should contemplate this pic of a prewar (?) project.
Note the color of the crankcases, and the location of the top front engine mount.
What does that tell us about the choice of crankcases available to factory bikes ?
Norton Manx and 88 twins at Daytona.....
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Rohan, you have done the same thing again. You found a photograph somewhere and claim the ability to identify metal type and presence/absence of silver paint from bare aluminum from it, that is real talent! Maybe the police could use you in criminal cases along with those other psychics?

You clog up and ruin threads on Norton forums worldwide with your hearsay and assumptions, that is what you are known for.. Learn to use the PM (personal messaging) systems maybe until you come up with something real?

As it is most of the time when I read any thread I save lots of time reading here and elsewhere by simply skipping over your posts, easy to do because thankfully you use the same name everywhere.
 
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