Tuesday, 21 October 2008

Vintage Thing No. 28 - Norton P53 Commander

This bike belongs to one of Pete Low's mates (sorry, I didn't catch your name) and he brought it along to the Calstock Bike Show (see post for 12th August). He'd only just got it and was very pleased with it, for it had been standing outside a house in London for two years and he paid 800 quid for it. The engine ran well and the only major fettling he had to do was to the brakes, which needed overhauling.

Overall, he was delighted with his purchase, which was worth the price for the engine alone. However, he was disappointed with the brakes, which were sourced from a Yamaha XJ900.

I have a slight history with Norton Motors in that I was interviewed for an industrial placement during my industrial design sandwich course. I was due to work at the Shenstone factory for a summer when it the engineering training board that was to have subsidised my pay realised that Norton Motors had not been making payments to its scheme. I believe subscriptions to the engineering training board, or whatever it was called, were legally required once production was under way. Norton Motors had been a research company developing the Wankel engine for so long that nobody had noticed the company when it started selling motorcycles to police forces. And Norton forgot to tell anyone as well. So there was a big fuss and I ended up working for John Mockett instead, which was probably a far better fate.

One thing that struck me during my interview and tour of the factory was the number of people who had worked for Yamaha NV in The Netherlends. This studio was closed when Yamaha entered difficulties during the early eighties following an ambitious new range of radically new bikes, such as the YZ550, that were flops. Japanese companies don't go under, they get rescued but a casualty of the rescue was the European design studio. Sourcing brake parts from Yamaha probably seemed like a good idea at the time but for a bike of the Commander's performance and weight they weren't up to the job.

My interview at Shenstone was an odd one in that I had four interviews, all one after another, just me showing my portfolio to a member of Norton staff. To be honest I thought three were dickheads and can't even remember their names but the fourth one (actually it was the third) was with Doug Hele. Doug was completely different. He was down to earth and genuinely interested in what a student had to say. That session passed in a blur for me. I didn't find him intimidating as the others had tried to be but what struck me most was his quiet intelligence. Doug Hele didn't have to try too hard. He mentioned his work with British Seagull, the outboard motor manufacturer and I later learned that Doug had been tempted back to Norton Motors to help solve slow running problems on the rotary engines. Instead of making the flywheels even more heavier, which had been the approach up then, Doug embarked upon a programme of minute changes to port design and timing and solved the problem by proper design and not by bodging.

Norton rotaries are rare beasts and sound unlike other engines, being somewhere between a four stroke and a two stroke - a three stroke maybe. It's a design that still has much going for it but I don't think Norton managers had the faith the engineers had in the engine.

The fairing design of the Commander was a great success, coming from the drawing boards of Seymour/Powell a product design company that took on some of my fellow students from Lanchester Polytechnic.

Nortons were really about race bikes in the eighties and nineties so a tourer seems an odd choice. But it was really a civilianised version of the P52 Commander police bike. On my tour of the factory, there were plenty of police bikes at the works.

My interview took place in the winter of 1984-85 not long after the miner's strike. Quite a few police bikes had become damaged during the dispute and these were being repaired at the factory. One rider had survived an axe being thrown at him. It cartwheeled harmlessly over his shoulder but hit the front of the fairing and smashed the top box behind him. When it came to escort duties the Norton proved much quicker than the BMW flat twin. The bikes had to paired together, for if BMWs were paired up with Nortons, the latter's superior performance could provoke engine blow ups as the slower bikes were ragged to death trying to keep up. At least, that's what they told me at the Norton factory. These were all air-cooled motors.

Later water cooled engines met noise emissions standards and added to the air of sophistication. Cubic capacity is 588cc - an ancient engine size for Norton's dating back to the Model 19 of the roaring thirties - but Wankel rotary cubic capacities are often increased by various factors to allow comparison with conventional engines. In the Commander, output was 85bhp at 9000 rpm with 75.4Nm of torque at 7000rpmand a kerb weight of 235kg.

When I visited the factory, they were making lost of engines for unmanned target towing drone aircraft so maybe government surplus stores would be good source of spares. It just seems such a shame to shoot at such a Vintage Thing.

With different brakes and forks - they're XJ900 components, too - the Norton Commander could have been the best tourer of its generation.

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