Photos Classic Motorcycles and Traditional Knives

Jolipapa said:
Thanks for the fantastic pictures and story. Was it a factory DomiRacer? That looks like! Did you meet Ron Wood? (not the RS I mean :))
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The word "Domiracer" has a history almost nobody knows. The AMA had a history of banning successful foreign racing machinery. In the 1950s it banned the featherbed Manx Norton, and gave the OHC G50 Matchless a hard time too. So Norton made racing versions of it's twin-cylinder bike and started sending them to the USA in 1953. At first they were mostly street bikes with racing tanks and bodywork, then they started using mostly racing parts but with a fairly standard twin cylinder engine installed. Finally in 1961 they built a twin-cylinder road-racer from the ground-up and THAT was the original Domiracer, and of course the AMA BANNED it from competition !!! So for 1962 Norton built more "Domiracer" bikes but those for Europe used the standard Manx racing chassis, and the three sent to the USA used the "slimline" frame so the AMA might not give it such a hard time, and that is what Heinz Kegler's racer is, a 1962 works racing twin. What made these seven bikes special were some engine components like bucket camshaft followers running on a oil-pressure fed cam, larger than standard rod journals and right and left handed Amal GP carbs with long-bodies, parts which were never available to the public and never made again after 1962.

I have talked to Ron Wood, and most others in the USA and some in the U.K. and Europe about Norton racing bikes over past decades. Most of the old timers have died off now and I have not been nearly as active in motorcycling as I was in my youth.
 
gben said:
The word "Domiracer" has a history almost nobody knows. The AMA had a history of banning successful foreign racing machinery. In the 1950s it banned the featherbed Manx Norton, and gave the OHC G50 Matchless a hard time too. So Norton made racing versions of it's twin-cylinder bike and started sending them to the USA in 1953. At first they were mostly street bikes with racing tanks and bodywork, then they started using mostly racing parts but with a fairly standard twin cylinder engine installed. Finally in 1961 they built a twin-cylinder road-racer from the ground-up and THAT was the original Domiracer, and of course the AMA BANNED it from competition !!! So for 1962 Norton built more "Domiracer" bikes but those for Europe used the standard Manx racing chassis, and the three sent to the USA used the "slimline" frame so the AMA might not give it such a hard time, and that is what Heinz Kegler's racer is, a 1962 works racing twin. What made these seven bikes special were some engine components like bucket camshaft followers running on a oil-pressure fed cam, larger than standard rod journals and right and left handed Amal GP carbs with long-bodies, parts which were never available to the public and never made again after 1962.

I have talked to Ron Wood, and most others in the USA and some in the U.K. and Europe about Norton racing bikes over past decades. Most of the old timers have died off now and I have not been nearly as active in motorcycling as I was in my youth.
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It's always better to get infos first hand ! The last time I saw a Reynolds framed DomiRacer , Tom Phillis was racing it! I knew of the slimline racers but never seen a picture until now! :thumbsup:
 
Jolipapa said:
It's always better to get infos first hand ! The last time I saw a Reynolds framed DomiRacer , Tom Phillis was racing it! I knew of the slimline racers but never seen a picture until now! :thumbsup:
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The Domiracer program was run by a man named Doug Hele. Only the one bike with the lowboy frame was made, but there were two extra frames. Because the USA sanctioning body "AMA" outlawed it no more were built. Later in the mid-1960s Paul Dunstall had more lowboy frames made and he marketed them for sale, and even later more people made them both for sale and for personal use, so there are lots of replica lowboy bikes around now, originally there was only the one. The 1962 bikes with the wideline and slimline frames were great bikes, but in Europe it was hard to convince old riders to choose them over the old single-cylinder Manx racer, only Rudi Thalhammer and Luigi Taveri were enthusiastic about riding them. Thalhammer crashed his and almost died at the Isle of Man in 1962, but he came back and raced it in Europe in 1963, and Luigi Taveri only raced his for a couple of years. The Italian four-cylinders and the Yamaha twin made all the old British bikes obsolete in GP racing, and of course Honda and Mike Hailwood did too.

So in total there were only seven bikes world-wide with the special engine parts which Doug Hele and his racing shop put together those two years, so you were very lucky to get to see the lowboy racing for the Norton team. Dunstall ended up with the 1961 bike and it's spare parts and he raced it to death on the track over the next few years.
 
My father's brother on a Greeves back in the 60s, he was a great rider:

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An old friend of min Mike, who is recently deceased on his old Norton Model 99. Mike was a mechanical genius who knew more about engineering than any ten other people that claim to;

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OK, I give up. What are we looking at, here? There is a certain lack of symmetry. Something in the breaker’s yard?
 
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jmh33 said:
Like that 40 Ford coupe in the background..:thumbsup::cool:
John
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That was my coupe when I was a kid, my brother and I used to have old Ford cars my father gave us, sometimes we would get them running and drive them through trails in the fields and woods. My brother fixed up a 34' Ford that sat around my father's house since the late 60s.
 
mbkr said:
Its a teal green, G10 handled, Red Trout made by Canal Street Cutlery Co-Op perched on a BMW R100GS. The cylinder fins are visible on the left and the valve cover is peeking out on the right.
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Wow. Try as I might, I still can’t make out that valve cover. Now that I know what to look for, I can see the plug cap and the Bing.
 
gben said:
A 1961 650cc Norton that Robert Hogan bought new at Imperial Cycle Sales in Buffalo, NY. An old acquaintance of my father's, when Bob was done with it I rode it for quite a few years before trading it for a 1959 Norton Manx racer.

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She's not aged, just mellowed! The French importer used to replace the twin cam brake and sell it apart! No small money!
 
Back in the 1980s I rode both of these bikes on the street and also took them to a local quarter-mile drag-strip. I was able to get the Harley dirt-tracker titled, insured and registered, but not safety-inspected since I just bolted some dummy lights on it. I did have a nice disk-brake on the front of it for a while. The Norton Commando would do about 100mph at the end of the quarter-mile, the Harley would do 110 easily. The Harley would have gone much faster, but it's good traction and a short wheelbase kept the rider from being able to keep the front wheel on the ground through the low gears. It would even loft the front wheel in high gear if the rider wished. Eventually I bent the valves on the Norton from over-revving it, and the Harley was hard to find parts for, so I sold the Harley and traded the junk Norton Commando to some fool for another old bike that was worth far more than it. Despite the cops giving me my usual tickets for having fun with the bikes on the street, have my fun I did and then moved on to the next victim.

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