Classic Motorcycle Restoration
and Maintenance

May 2015

Nigel Clark | Crowood Press | Classic bike book

It's written by Nigel Clark, is published by Crowood Press, and is priced at £35 (hardback), or £28 from the Crowood website.

This title, we're advised, is "a complete workshop guide to restoring and maintaining your classic British motorcycle".

The dimensions are 210mm x 296mm. There are around 800 images and diagrams (mostly colour). The covers are hard, not soft. And the book number is ISBN: 9781847978813.

We've got a copy (courtesy of Crowood) and have been reading and thumbing through the pages for the past few days, and we've got mixed feelings. Firstly, the book isn't really in-depth enough to impress anyone who's seriously looking to maintain or rebuild his or her classic bike, and (secondly) much of the content is likely to go straight over the head of anyone new to the scene and uninitiated in the lore.

In other words, this volume presumes a certain amount of knowledge/savvy, but doesn't do enough to feed the appetite of the more serious enquirer. Meanwhile, the design is run-of-the-mill, the pictures range between not bad and not good, the picture quality is often flat and lifeless, and the captions are mostly pithy and trite. Such as:

"There's no better way to blow out the winter cobwebs than a ride-out on your favourite classic."

Or:

"A brand new Vincent Black Shadow, sir? No problem, that'll be £a lot, please."

Or:

"You'll always find nice bikes and interesting people to talk to at any classic or vintage gathering."

Oh yeah?

Clearly, a fair amount of thought has been put into this one, but the book covers much of the same old turf without giving us a fresh grass on which to graze—which probably won't make a lot of difference to someone new on the scene who hasn't heard it all a dozen times before, but to the rest of us, it feels stale.

The writing is okay, if maybe a little clunky in places. For example:

"So with the outbreak of peace, they [the factories] had no new designs and even those lucky enough to have any tooling survive at all were left behind as the likes of Triumph had a head start. Many never reappeared at all."

Or:

"The government had requisitioned all Triumph production to be for the military, but the original Coventry factory was bombed out in the devastating blitzkrieg raid of November 1940. As is (or at least was) the British way, with backs to the wall, a temporary factory was established in Warwick, tooling repaired and made good and production restarted in double quick time. Meanwhile, a new factory was built at Meriden, a village between Coventry and Birmingham, and one Edward Turner set about designing a twin-cylinder machine, which, once the war was over, would be ready to set new standards and leave the opposition floundering in Triumph's wake."

Note too that that twin-cylinder machine was actually the Speed Twin which was in fact designed in 1936-1937, therefore pre-war. And later, there's a (caption) suggesting that the Tiger 100 was "a breathtaking sports machine within the financial reach of most..."

Only, you pretty much had to be in the professional classes to afford that kind of hardware. The average working guy was riding far more humble machines, and largely singles and two-strokes.

The book index isn't as helpful as it might be, either. The overall aim is more shotgun than sniper rifle. And the overview is limited with some stark omissions (nothing much on two-strokes; almost nothing about the cornerstone motorcycles; nothing much on the key personalities, or designers, or events, or traders, etc. And no list of classic marques).

So the book is terrible, huh? No. It's got some useful stuff in there. It's just not properly thought through, and the book doesn't sparkle in any way. Had we been able to say "at least it's very funny", or "but the pictures are great", or "this really is a new way of seeing old stuff", that would mitigate our negativity.

Instead, the book is kinda ho-hum. Useful, but not essential. Informative, but questionable in places. And certainly not exciting or desirable—and it might have been produced any time since the 1980s.

You'd maybe forgive it all that if it was priced at fifteen to twenty quid (which might be unrealistic). But at £35 (RRP), we'd expect something ... sharper.

www.crowood.com

— Big End