So as the guys at the track day would know. I have had the privilege of seeing, hear running and riding one of these classic bikes. So I was up there again today and got a couple of pictures of it. It's not in A1 condition. You had to manually set the timing on these guys. And the front shocks are actually friction plates. I'm not up to date with all the facts. So if anyone else can let us know what they know about these guys. Would be great.
Ok so it's a 500cc single cylinder engine. The gold star rating was only given to bikes that could get to 100mph. And on something like this would be scary as all hell. I recently read that a matching number factory registered bike sold for $50k. So I felt privileged to ride it. We did try and start it this time but the carb begin leaking. So we thought it best not to keep trying. The compression on this thing was scary it kicked me back a couple times.
The SR500 of the fourties. Simple to work on (which you had to do frequently to keep them running right) and cheap to run. Should do close to 100mpg (160Km to 4.5Lt. You can work that into metric) if ridden sensibly and with the low power tyres would perish before they wore out. The engines did not have high compression (about 8 to 1) as they were designed to run nicely on standard petrol of the time (about 89 RON). The feeling of big comp when trying to start is because of the high gearing through the gear box to the kickstarter. The girder forks with the friction damper and rigid rear would have been fun on the roads of the times. Big hoonies required to push these old bikes to 160Km/h, these days just so easy to do.
