IN COMING!
ROSE-TINT, OR REALLY RUBBISH?
I read with interest Rowena’s newsletter with RC169, particularly as I am the proud if slightly frustrated owner of a Sunbeam S8. It is very difficult to form a clear judgement on an old bike. Sometimes you buy a bike, like my old Matchless G80, and all you do is ride it, pump its tyres up and give it a service now and then. Other bikes; it is just one thing after another. You get maybe a week or two then something else fails, makes a funny noise, leaks, etc. How much of this is due to the maintenance of the previous owner or inherent design? Very difficult to tell. My S8 is in this category, although to be fair I have managed to put over 3000 miles on it in 2 years. It does, however, seem to be often up on the workbench.
I really like riding the Sunbeam. It is easy to start on my aged legs, handles well, doesn’t vibrate and the engine spins eagerly, even if there is not that much power. You can achieve quite respectable average speeds on it. But… there is always some niggling thing with it. The last thing was a blown head gasket. Taking the head off an S8 is nowhere near as straightforward or easy as with an A7 or a Speed Twin or a G80. You end up with the feeling that the engineering is all a bit marginal and you definitely would not have enjoyed it in the 1950s having to do a decoke every six months. Was it the Managing Director of BSA who said ‘Oh, they enjoy decoking their motorcycles at the weekend.’ No, they don’t!
However, I shall persevere. I really enjoy riding it and if I could just get it to go for several months without ‘issues’ then life would be perfect.
Geoff Stovold, member
I would like to put another opinion across about bad motorcycles getting better with age. As a younger man, I read the newspaper and magazine reports of contemporary motorcycles; less so in recent years. It has been traditional to denigrate anything that does not accelerate like ‘a scalded cat’, ‘turn on a sixpence’ and handle ‘like it’s on rails’. The only bit of journalistic skill has been how cleverly the motorcycling literary elite describe these attributes without using the previously quoted metaphors. Anything less than these ‘wonder bikes’ has been slighted.
Thus, some bikes that would otherwise be at least acceptable were doomed to an early death before their attributes could be realised. Now, with no one comparing these everyman bike with the latest weekend warrior’s weapon, we can perhaps be a little more subjective.
Charles Snow, member
I expect there is a retired Japanese engineer feeling very ill used by Rowena’s scathing criticism of the XS250, a machine that he probably felt he made quite a good job of. I had an XS250 in the late 1970s, when I