TALE BEHIND ONE GREAT BIKE
Owner surprised he had rare Norton
During the chopper craze of the 1970s, this rare Norton P11 almost met its end simply because its owner didn’t know what he had.
“Motorcycles began to fascinate me when I was in high school at Viscount Bennett,” says Calgarian Keith Macauley. “One of my friends had a Norton, and I never forgot about that.”
Macauley didn’t get a motorcycle until four years after graduating. In 1973 he went to Bow Cycle and looked at all of the new machines on the showroom floor, but couldn’t afford any of the offerings.
A salesman suggested Macauley go out back to look in Bow Cycle’s boneyard.
“There was this dirty old Norton leaning against the fence,” Macauley recalls. “It had knobby tires on it, and no fenders. I was told it had been used as a hillclimber, but it worked and that was all I was concerned about.”
Macauley paid $400 for what was sold to him as a 1969 Norton Commando. He made it street legal with a set of fenders and proceeded to ride the bike, hard. By the second summer of riding, the engine required attention, and Macauley was also taking an interest in the chopper scene.
Simply put, choppers are customized motorcycles, often equipped with extended front ends and rigid rear frames.
Macauley took the Norton apart, delivering what he thought was just a Commando frame to a local fabricator to have the swing arm and shocks replaced with a rigid rear section.
After disassembling the top end of the twin-cylinder 750-cc motor, Macauley delivered the cylinder head to Motorbike City, a Norton, Triumph and Suzuki dealer on Richmond Road.
“The mechanic at Motorbike City took one look and told me I had a Norton P11, not a Commando as I thought,” Macauley recalls. “He said it was a rare machine, and that I should put it back together the way it should be.”
Here’s why the Norton P11 is rare. In the mid-1960s a pair of American desert-racing enthusiasts, Bob Blair and Steve Zabaro (of ZDS Motors in Glendale, Calif.), wanted a powerful motorcycle to race in off-road events. In 1966, they took the 750-cc engine from a road-going Norton Atlas model and put it into an off-road-based Matchless G85CS frame, creating a powerful, lightweight “desert sled.”
Their prototype machine was shipped back to England, where Associated Motor Cycles, which owned both the Norton and Matchless lines, developed it into the P11 model, which was introduced in 1967. In all, it is thought only 2,500 P11s — and its descendants, the P11A and Ranger 750 — were produced before being dropped from the Norton range in 1969.
“I rushed back to get the frame from the guy who was chopping it,” Macauley says. “But the damage had been done, it was cut and a rigid rear had been welded on.”
In search of a proper frame, Macauley got lucky when he visited Greg’s Cycle in Calgary. In a pile of old frames out in the yard, Macauley managed to locate what turned out to be a correct Norton P11 frame. At that point, however, the project stalled. The entire Norton was boxed up, and over the next 40 years the pieces were stored away.
In 2013, Macauley’s son, Kieran, a journeyman autobody technician, told his dad it was time to put the Norton back together.
“Yes, it’s a rare motorcycle,” Kieran says, “but it’s worth more to me because it’s Dad’s old bike, and it was something we could do as a father/son project.”
John Oland and Ross Elliot (Rossco) of Motoparts in Edmonton gave the pair some advice, and together father and son began work on the Norton P11 in Macauley’s basement. Brakes, hubs and forks were rebuilt and the engine and gearbox pieced back together. Kieran painted anything that was black using a spray can and fixed a single dent on the gas tank. A friend painted the tank, oil tank and battery cover in the P11 metallic red.
Back on the road in 2015, the Norton had a persistent carburetor issue that continually fouled spark plugs. They’d changed many of the internal carburetor components, but it wasn’t until Colin White of Time Cycles in Cochrane took a look and changed the needles that carburation really improved.
Now, there’s close to 1,000 miles on the Smiths speedometer that was rebuilt by Andy Henderson of Vintage British Cables in Medicine Hat.
“It wasn’t an over-the-top restoration,” Kieran says, “because we built it just to have some fun with it.” Macauley adds, “All those years ago I didn’t have the time or the money to put it together, but I also didn’t want to sell; it was always something on the horizon.
“Now that it’s running, I’ll ride it to go meet Kieran for coffee or over to see my grandsons. It lives in my garage now, but one day it’ll move over to Kieran’s garage.”