YOUR CLASSICS
Chris Cooling’s dad helped him to start restoring his Norton over a decade ago – but these things take time...
The saga of a Canadian Commando’s restoration
Idecided to find a classic British motorcycle to restore in 2009. I had spent the last four years flying aeroplanes in northern Canada and, at the age of 24, was given the opportunity to move back to my home city of Vancouver, where I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands and no hobbies to occupy myself. My dad had restored a 1960 Austin-healey throughout what seemed to be my whole childhood, so I thought that maybe he’d be interested in restoring a motorcycle with me, as a nice father-and-son thing to do. He’d had a Triumph Bonneville and a BSA Lightning in the late ’60s, so it was obvious that this would be a British bike. I liked the Triumph Bonnevilles and BSAS, but nothing was sexier to me than a Norton Commando... so where would I find one?
I joined a British Motorcycle Owners Club (BMOC) to help navigate this community. My dad came with me, which was good because I stood out as the youngest person by around 40 years. Before my first meeting even started, I found the club president had a love for Nortons and he even joked about selling me one. I hounded him again after the meeting and he agreed to sell it to me for $2500 – everything was going according to plan!
This 1974 Norton Commando 850 had 11,000 miles on it and had been inert since 1979, when it had suffered an accident – the frame was bent and it didn’t have the original tank. It came with a picture of two Nortons in the Rocky Mountains (see above right); the story goes that two friends bought them new and rode from Toronto to Vancouver with all of their belongings – a great romantic story.
I was so overwhelmed when I got the bike home that I could only sit and stare at it, imagining what it would have been like to ride this motorcycle back in the ’70s and wondering what had happened to the original
owner who had crashed the bike 30 years ago.
I decided to name the bike Cassandra, a reference to Tia Carrere’s character from the movie Wayne’s World, who was beyond beautiful. She was a passenger on one of my flights years later and the flight attendant told her that one of the pilots named his motorcycle after her. I had to go back and explain myself; she was very nice and told me that rapper Snoop Dogg calls his Porsche Tia!
I was so excited about getting started on the restoration that I neglected the mundane task of properly documenting everything and I slowly filled the garage floor with oil-covered Norton parts. This was all against my father’s wishes – and my future self wasn’t too impressed, either.
I spent hours using the parts cleaner and many more hours de-rusting everything with a wire wheel. I measured every nut and bolt and finally made my best effort to document them (I was starting to get the hang of this by then) before putting them all in a bucket and taking them to get cadmium plated. This was done at a shop that usually dealt with industrial components, so it was nerve-racking giving them all of these irreplaceable parts (I’m convinced they lost some). While all this was going on, the frame was being straightened and I was getting the parts cleaned up that had to be powder coated (including the head and barrel). This was an allconsuming hobby I had stumbled upon – and it wasn’t a cheap one, either.
I was committed to doing as much of the work as I could myself – so when I was able to get my hands on a wheel jig, I thought it would be fun to spoke them myself. I spent over 20 hours on this task, doing my best not to rip a spoke through the hub. When I’d ‘finished’, I brought them to the club to have someone look at the job I had done – but they were much too loose and not up to standard, so they had to be redone. At least I’d given it my best shot.
I ended up putting a racing camshaft in the bottom end, and we replaced the aluminium pushrods which were worn down from rubbing on the head gasket, but besides that I kept all the other engine internals. I did decide to change the pressure-fitted transmission bearings – pounding the old ones out wasn’t an issue, but putting the new ones in would have to be a more delicate task. It was recommended to put the transmission casings in the oven, to expand them, and put
‘I WAS SO OVERWHELMED WHEN I GOT IT HOME; I COULD ONLY SIT AND STARE AT IT’
the new bearings in the freezer, to contract them. The day we decided to do this, we had just got the head back from the powder coater. I remember my mom coming home while my dad and I had the transmission cases in the oven and the engine head in the dishwasher. She was not impressed...
When I was over at my parents’ place to work on the bike, that’s all I did – and when we were having an issue, we were both very quiet at mealtimes, as we tried to solve the problem in our own heads. My mom was incredibly supportive and patient, but she was used to this type of behaviour; my dad had spent most of the ’80s and ’90s restoring an Austinhealey, after all. This was a fun time and we got along quite well in the mentor/protégé role. There was nothing worse than having a couple of days off to get as much done as possible and then hitting a snag which meant I was forced to sit and wait for parts – patience is not my virtue.
One of my solo tasks was to get all the aluminium to shine again – this took about three hours per component, sanding it with three different grades of paper first and then polishing it up on the bench grinder. I couldn’t believe the results – each piece was shinier than it had come out of the factory! One of the comments I get about the Norton that annoys me the most is: “Nice chrome”. I spent over 100 hours polishing aluminium – it’s not chrome!
When it was all ‘done’, the restoration had taken two and a half years – but there were still some issues that we were running into. The transmission would get stuck in gear, and after taking it fully apart (more than once), we found that we had not installed a circlip that held one of the shafts in place. The existence of this was an oversight in the rebuild manual, but the parts book showed it and I had never taken note when I had removed it two and a half years earlier. Our next big issue came with the engine shutting off while riding it for a short while; this problem was remedied after much research that directed us towards removing the handlebar cluster that contained the kill switch – where a rusty connection was revealed. Problem solved...
After we’d finished the bike in 2011, I got my dream job – flying for Canada’s International Airline out of Toronto – and wasn’t able to get the Norton to me, as I had no place to store it (and no tools of my own). I would ride it a bit when I got home to Vancouver, but it wasn’t fulfilling the dream I had intended it to. And it became more finicky as the years went on. We had put an all-weather cover on it in the garage, which was keeping the moisture in (Vancouver has very ‘English’ weather), so we were getting sporadic electrical issues. I was also neglecting to drain the carbs occasionally. So there it sat, until I bought a house in 2017 and got it sent out to me. The Norton was back where its journey had begun in 1974; they even still had it on file when I registered it with the province.
I rebuilt the carburettors again and it wasn’t running too badly, although another problem arose – the clutch was very ‘sticky’, which made it stressful to ride in traffic; when it stalled there wasn’t much sympathy from other road users and it’s no fun trying to kick over a bike while cars are whizzing by you. I took it apart and found half the plates were stuck together (from lack of use, presumably). Oh, and sometimes at idle with the turn signal on, the engine would shut off. So I didn’t venture far from home.
The next winter, I replaced the clutch with something more modern and started it up in the spring. I was very excited to test it out, but when I took it around the block the first time I flicked the turn signal on and the engine started to buck and then died. This was followed by a heavy electrical burning smell, so I pushed her home, gritting my teeth the whole way as bystanders told me that they smelled burning. The next month I had a child and that summer came and went. I would get anxiety just thinking about my bike and how unlucky
I had been, although it wasn’t totally her fault.
I was determined to fix her up to as good as new in 2020, and with the global pandemic I wasn’t working much. The wiring for the right-turn signal was charred all the way to the transformer rectifier unit and the battery... and I realised I had installed an American 35 amp fuse instead of a British one (yes, there is a difference... apparently). I had to change some wiring, the battery, the transformer rectifier unit and get a new handlebar cluster that houses the turn signal, kill switch and horn. I also went all in and got new carburettors; the slides and needles were worn and when I tried to order new parts over the phone the guy said: “You’re just putting new wine in an old bottle”. This sounded very sophisticated with an English accent and I was sold. It took a couple of weeks for them to show up, but I found that there’s nothing like the new Amal carburettor smell – they were all put together and ready to go!
She started right up, the new clutch was beautiful and it gave me no issues. I took the bike around town, going further and further from my home until I finally had full confidence in her. I got up to 80mph on the highway... then remembered that the tyres are 10 years old and quickly took the next exit! The Norton was something that gave me a pang when I thought about it for many years, but now I can’t stop thinking about it – in a good way. It is the most beautiful thing on the road and I promise to never let it rust away or be neglected again. The sound and feel as it accelerates down the road is something I cannot explain. I must make it a priority to find a BMOC in my home town to share this experience with – and this time I will be the youngest by only 30 years. I’ve put Cassandra to bed for the winter – but I can’t wait for next spring. Then my first task will be to get some new tyres...
‘I WAS DETERMINED TO FIX HER UP AS GOOD AS NEW IN 2020... NOW SHE’S THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING ON THE ROAD’