PIP HIGHAM
Pip’s a frustrated carpenter…
As a second-rate chippy I’ve worked on many a roof in my yoof. Nowadays I try to keep within falling distance of T Firma. But I still get asked to fix stuff, so it was while on a visit to our local builders’ merchants I was loading a few sheets of ply into the van and Mick, my co-loader, chirped up: “Oy Pip, what’s that motorbike engine?” I couldn’t resist: “That’s not a motorbike engine, it’s a Ducati!” “But, but,” Mick stabbed at a couple of words before he realised that I was taking the mick.
But I sort of meant it. Taglioni’s little masterpiece is, and will always be an exceptional mix of form and function. Regardless of how well it works, it just looks right. It got me thinking, what else really fits into this category, not necessarily whole bikes, but maybe just parts of bikes? Like what exactly? Well, IMHO the eight-stud cylinder head on an early 1960s Triumph (preferably a Trophy or Tiger 110) is so pretty, the slender angular finning really works for me, it’s a keeper. I know I’ve mentioned Honda’s little jet, the CB92, before. It’s a fantastic little bike, every inch of it screams ‘must try velly hard’ and you don’t have to go far to clock the first chunk of amazing: the front brake. It’s big, no it’s huge.
It’s lining area is double that of a similar age Triumph 350 twin that weighs almost twice as much, and it’s a twin leading shoe design into the bargain. This was Manx Norton territory and totally unheard of before the CB range landed (the CB92’S big brothers, the CB72 and 77, also wore twin leading shoe brakes, plural, one at each end!). I’ve huffed and I’ve puffed, but I can’t find a production road bike of any make or capacity wearing a twin leading shoe brake prior to this (please prove me wrong.)
Not content with all that retardation overload they also made it look trick. Just clock the actuation lever, all curvy and, well, right. I can only assume that the head boffins at Soichiro Towers sent down a request, no, I’ll re-phrase that, a supplication, accompanied by much bowing and promises of great personal ‘Bushido’ to create a bike, the like of which had not been seen before. They accomplished that with knobs on. The later 1960s was a fertile period for the
Japanese to hit the USA and Europe, with many bikes sporting eye-popping appendages on a huge scale; there seemed to be a competition between them to come up with a huge coefficient of funk, particularly in the areas of exhaust systems and instrument clusters that makes the offerings very appealing. When I first saw a T200 Invader (sounds better than ‘Intruder’, but you can see where they’re heading) it was a real knockout, although it was extremely similar to the eponymous T20 Super Six, but just a touch cuter. Sure, the tank didn’t have chrome side panels (later in the model run), but aren’t they just a touch ‘late 1950s, early 1960s?’
It had a twin leading shoe front brake, and it had ‘Posi Force’, Suzuki’s patented way of eliminating embarrassing kit malfunctions due to oil bottles splurging down your leg at inopportune moments. Now the bike decided how much, (and, more importantly, how little) 2T to pump into the motor as the three-way throttle cable control reduced the oil use and the following blue haze at small openings, and vice versa. Whilst the standard bike was pretty, the T200 ‘Stingray’ with dual high level pipes was prettier still. Sadly, Suzuki GB didn’t import the somewhat controversially monikered ‘Stingray’, which only served, in my eyes at any rate, to make it even more desirable. Sadly I’ve never owned one.
Not to be outdone, Yamaha and Kawasaki showed that they were capable of turning their road-bike twins into fire-road duellists by the simple expedient of kecking the exhausts up, one on each side, a process which (depending on how effective the heat shields were) may, or may not have resulted in a visit to A&E. But who cares, they looked great then, and they look even better in these risk assessment laden days than they did back then.