Motorcycles that were so bad they killed the company
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- čas přidán 2. 07. 2021
- These are the motorcycles that were so bad, they played a huge part in ending the company
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Your knowledge of OIF Triumph / BSA bikes leaves a lot to be desired, same about your own Sunbeam project. OIF frame behaves much better on the road than former brazed frame, which had to be cleverly connected to the rear of the engine and to a swing arm to make a motorcycle solid on the road. The man who did it - Doug Hele - was one of the best British designers of this time. OIF frame was redesigned in 72 to lower under sit rails, so only 71 bikes are little taller than previous bikes. You don't recognize how innovative your own S8 was during the time it was designed, which was late forties. It was completely different from typical British design with cylinder block being made together with upper case ( Honda Goldwing and lots of current sport bikes come to mind ) OHC configuration, coil ignition and wet sump lubrication features common for much later motorcycles. Shaft drive was also used and instead of bevel gears worm drive was designed on the insistence of parent BSA company. This worm gear was a reason power was lowered to 24 KM, which actually was exactly an output of R51 BMW engine from the same period. Coming back to OIF bikes the weren't alone a cause in BSA conglomerate demise, they were just a last nail in the coffin of BSA.
NSU Horex were using oli in the frame designs in the mid fifties
The Ariel Square Four was an expensive top-dollar motorcycle that was not any faster than anybody's run-of-the-mill 650 twin. It was 1000 cc's of registration cost and insurance cost but only gave you 650cc performance. It was smoother, but the overheating of the rear cylinder was mediated by the alloy cylinders but not eliminated completely. I knew someone who had one and both Pistons seized in the rear and snapped the connecting rods. Ariel used second-hand scrap aluminum because being a smaller company they could not guarantee the race of exports like Triumph and BSA could so they were restricted to the metals that they could buy after the war. The soft second hand aluminum saved them money and production but all of the threads in the engine would pull out and would have to have inserts done and the first facts of Ariel Square Four sent to Australia had to have the motors redone, act locally high-cost as the British would say.
Let me add some about the Triumph 'oil frame'. It replaced the previous heavy lug built frame, it was a copy of the American Trackmaster brand flat track racing frame. For that racing it did not need a large oil capacity, but cutting the oil capacity on a street bike was dumb. Like previous English bikes (except the Trident/Rocket 3) it did not have a full flow thru paper filter, engine life was never great. The race bike could have a high seat, flat trackers do not sit down much! The high frames were used only in '71 and '72. from '73 on the rear frame loop was welded on at a lower level making the seat hight 'normal'. '73 was a nice year, the bike had the front disk but still had the rear drum. It also grew to 750 cc and got the 5 speedbox. The rear disc was a PITA! Forks on those bikes were truly inferior though, the electrical controls felt crude, and one detail I found incredible was that the header pipes were just pushed into the holes in the head! there was no real seal or gasket, the crossover pipe and below that simple straps to the frame 'sort of ' kept the headers in the engine but they always leaked! norton, BMW and Ducati al managed to have well attached head pipes as did of course every Japanese model, how couls Triumph sell this? The Trident as well as some earlier Triumph twins had headers that were split at the end and were clamped to steel spigots screwed into the exhaust ports, crude also but way better than being just shoved in ! The 2 separate rocker box gaskets, the rocker arm o rings and the pushrod tubes all added to very common top end oil leaks.
Keep the patina on the sunbeam once you get it up and running, it looks great.
The V-Due was a great concept but Bimota screwed up by taking large deposits to encourage bikers to get one of the first run of releases and therefore putting enormous pressure on themselves to push production without even getting close to resolving the fuel injection problems, there are actually quite a few V-Dues on the road now as many people bought the bankrupt stock from the receivers and a few firms converted them to carburetted engines. also the name is simply V2 the same as Ducatis Panigale.
The V-due ran great with carburettors Mikunis or Lectrons , more work with Lectrons but faster....today an after-market programmable injection turn it as lovely as intended !!
Oh poor Ariel - they were at least trying to be modern, pressed steel frame to reduce costs, an effective fairing, and enclosed engine, to appeal to commuters. I think it looks rather funky, and is no better/worse looking than the Velocette noddy bike. NB assume you know this but the four cylinder Ariel was nicknamed the Squariel, seen a couple still running here in the UK.
Just a quick comment, Ariel like Triumph was owned by BSA from the fifties after they went bankrupt, so the Leader was produced by BSA Triumph the parent company
You’ve gained like 20 subscribers within around 3 days awesome you’re growing you’re channel
The major sing wrong with the Ariel two-stroke leader was the fact that the British flying public was very conservative and stayed away from new design, or anything that looked out of the ordinary to their eyes, they restricted themselves to the Lerner Market to the detriment of the company. The 250 learner motorcycle that you learned how to ride and maintain your motorcycle with was not the bike you would keep forever and was not a big bike that was more profitable to construct and sell. By restricting themselves to the Lerner Market they cut themselves off from more profitable segments of the motorcycle Market. People in England did not want motorcycles that looked or performed like a scooter. If they wanted a scooter they would buy a scooter, but they wanted a motorcycle. What people say they want and what people will actually buy are two different things.
Bimota V Due , the name is not ridiculous , your pronunciation is .
Try to say it in Italian.
good contents and good voice and nicely paced
narration …subscribed
Shame about Bimota, they made some great looking and cutting edge bikes.
BTW i have read that Kawasaki, has bought a large share holding of the resurrected company to produce Bimota's with KHI components.
I remember all the articles when the Bimoto came out, it was supposed to be the schiznit
I hate to say it but the Buell used a Rotax engine, it wasn't an inhouse design.
Buell's last Harley based engine was in 2002. The Thunderstorm lump powered the XB lineup. It shared a set of pistons with a Sportster. That's it. The 1125r didn't kill Buell, the new Harley CEO did. He had never ridden a motorcycle and didn't understand what Erik was doing. People who own the 1125 love it
@@kenashcom7580 i had heard that Erik used a Rotax engine and it pissed off Harley so the CEO was the dick head but I heard they had Porsche help them with the v rod and that's OK. Harley is an ass hat and is too damn stupide to have a sport bike line
Background music is too loud. I can't hear you
Supplementary comment, the Sunbeam company was owned by BSA from 1943, so the S 7/ S8 were BSAs apart from the name on the tank
Thank you. The critical flaw in the S7/8 was the worm gear driven final drive which could not cope with the power the engine was capable of, hence it had to be de-tuned in order to be reliable. The result was a heavy, complex, expensive machine that struggled to keep up with bikes half the size costing half as much. What were they thinking?
"7 inches shorter in the 1970s than today"? that seems a hell of a lot for 50 years,. (edit) It was only 2 inches different in the 1950s, you have to go back to the days before America was America to get a 7" difference.
The V Due actually is a pretty solid bike when reworked. Dump the fuel injection and modified the crank.
Buell sadly failed largely due to the Harley sales floor basically doing everything they could to turn every person that came in to look at or purchase one to a big twin cruiser. Had Harley been able to convince the network or built an individual network for the bikes I really think the story would have been different.
Were these bikes a cause or a symptom?
I was literally drinking my second cup of black coffee when this came on my feed. 🤣
I was down Armoury Rd, small Heath Birmingham and saw the old Sunbeam and BSA factory which is now used Mercedes - Benz parts supplier. The building is huge, a bit like the Fort Dunlop tyre complex in Erdington, Birmingham where I am from. Great video , great topics and thanks for letting me comment twice. Cheers Bart.
50% of bue LL production was sold to Europe. Grand Prix horsepower in a bikes the size of a 250 with all of the updates and improvements that they had made them very good sellers for Harley wanted to sell Cruisers to fat old people with more money than God.
Triumph never ended, it just found new ownership. The fact that it didn't export to the US from 1983 to 1988 no doubt lends to the belief it was gone. Triumph is still the second oldest bike manufacturer (1902) while Royal Enfield is oldest (1901) and Harley-Davidson is third (1903).
Sorry mate. Moto Guzzi is the oldest manufacturer still in continuous production
Moto Guzzi was founded in 1921. I stand by my above post.
Triumph the new company has nothing to do with the old company, it started with designs copied from the Japanese. Even the logo is different.
The BIMOTA is pronounced vee-doo-ay, not vee-doo. It means v-twin in Italian.
I speak Italian and was saying that to my laptop as I was watching this = )
Your knowledge of the Ariel Arrow/Leader leaves a lot to be desired , they were and are reliable bikes that sold well , however the US were not ready for it .
The Ariel's monocoque chassis was way way ahead of its time..........
Yeah, that's right, we Yanks just were just not worthy of the ugliest thing on two wheels. Gosh, we were just not ready.
@@raymondo162 monocoque motorcycles had been around for years , one of the biggest two wheeled vehicles the vespa uses it , but way before that there was others
The problem with the Ariel Arrow and Leader was not so much the bikes as the reactionary character of the motorcycle market. Bikers were afraid of anything unconventional. Never mind that the Leader offered good weather protection, that its suspension gave good roadholding, that it was much less expensive to build than the two-wheeled anachronisms with brazed-together frames and heavy telescopic forks... This was a time when even an enclosed chain was regarded with suspicion.
the Buell 1125 engine wasn't produced in-house, it came from Rotax
The police did not ride the Ariel leader. They rode the v e l o c e t t e little engine design by Val page. His outdated design included hand gear shift, and side valves which were both outdated by the 1950s. They had so many hand controls the police could not salute so they would nod and that would give them the nickname n o o d d y bike. They were so unsellable that the military and the police were ordered by the government to purchase them.
You deserve one more sub
Are you going to do a build series on the Sunbeam?
I'd love to! hopefully as I find more time to work on it.
Did the V Due kill Bimota? Yes. Was it worth it? Damn right. Also: Its “Vee Doo-aye”, as in “V 2”, for “V-twin” and “two-stroke”. It’s Italian, numnuts.
numnuts really
@@johnrhodes101875 yes really, he does not now much about British motorcycles to but that does not surprise me. Most Americans do not,
Vdue sounds bit like vittu in Finnish. Sometimes people pronounced T as D.
I let you to google what it means. [Warning: Parental Advisory.]
Wow you seem to really know your stuff! The oil in the frame works on speedway bikes, but I don't understand why Triumph did this.I really like the Ariel, for if nothing else a conversation piece. Even the Bimota looks cool, but wierd. Love your video's, you really do them well.
Ah, our friend doesn’t know all THAT much. The Oil In the Frame Triumphs were not plagued by engine failures caused by lack of oil, UNLESS the owner just didn’t ever chack the oil. In over 50 years of riding, I’ve NEVER heard that idea floated by ANYONE, even bike mechanics who hated Triumphs. Why Triumph did this was the same reason that Voncents did it, back in the 1940’s and onwards; to reduce width and make as much use of every frame member as possible. It’s also why Yamaha did the same thing with their 550 single in the late 1970’s. It’s NOT a bad idea at all, but the motorcycle press made a big deal out of it and like most media, they don’t like to retract anything and admit that they were wrong. Unfortunately, MOST books about motorcycles are written by people who were once writers for motorcycle magazines and so the misinformation continues. Triumph was kiled like dnay other company is killed, by incompetent management making poor decisions. The most disastrous of which was the refusal to go ahead with several great designs (including a DOHC 350 twin that managed a top speed of 120mph in 1965, as a prototype) and a FOUR cylinder 1000cc Bike that was like a Trident on steroids. These bikes could have been on sale by the mod 60’s, if not for the petty jealousies of the parent company BSA, of Triumph’s sales successes. That was the reason the Tridents weren’t released at the beginning of the decade, rather than at the end of it; they had to wait until there was a BSA equivalent! Nothing at all to do with Oil In the Frame Triumphs at all.
Due is two in Italian. V due is V2. English is not only language and you should add some basic research
yamaha SR 400 has for 40 years had the oil in frame concept. Japanese know how to make that work
Buell 1125r in my country we call it the death ticket 🙄😐
The Due in the V Due is pronounced Dooay. It's Italian for 2.
Sunbeam vibration - typical British solution of the time. Don’t actually fix the problem, just do a patch downstream to make the problem less obvious.
Due, as in number 2, in Italian 🤣
#1 wasn't for "Motorcycle Riders" it was to coax drivers on to 2 wheels that's why it was a 250cc, learner legal in the UK at that time.
what did kill the British bike was it being so "Un-reliable", "Expensive" & "Slow" compared to the "Japanese" bikes that were available.
spot on Roger.
was`nt the jap bikes , try Lambretta , , they had already taken the market that the leader was actually after ,but your spot on with the engine , it was slow and the aftersales was`nt great
DOO-eh, not Dew.
It's Vdu-e.
You actually pronounce the
(e) like you would on the word
(e)lephant.
Okay, I love that you love Triumphs, but you have posted a few videos that contain some terrific plagerism of the standard motorcycle press versions of the history of Triumph motorcycles, but not much actual real information about what really happened to Triumph in the 70’s, which flowed on from what happened to them in the 60’s. Your evaluation of the Oil In Frame Triumphs is long on media hype and short on facts. They were not lacking in oil volume by any measure and I never heard of anyone blowing a motor due to the bike being an OIF Triumph. Low on oil maybe, or late in doing an oil change, but never purely as a result of the bike having the oil in the mainframe member. The ONLY problem was with the seat height of the first such Bikes in 1971.
Mate, I owned a 1973 650 Bonneville with oil in the frame that was my only form of transport for over two years; 1976-1979. I know that the FIRST oil in frame model (1970-71, depending on where it was first registered) was too tall, but that was rectified by the following year. The bike I owned was an ex-Police bike and suffered from being lugged around at low revs in top gear by the Officer on patrol, so my first priority was to rebuild the engine from the crankshaft up. I surface ground all the mating surfaces and that bike never leaked oil. It always started within two kicks and never once showed any reluctance to perform due to any perceived lack of oil anywhere in the engine. The only failure I suffered was the first gear cog in the 5-speed gearbox, which was not as strong as it should have been, so I put in a fourspeed box from a 1971 model and never looked back. It went pretty quick too. In 1978 I was clocked at 122.5mph by a Policeman with a radar on his patrol car, but I managed to avoid a conviction because as it turned out in court, the Officer had not had the device calibrated by the due date before he booked me and although it was deemed accurate AFTER the reading that day, the fact that on the day in question the radar was officially uncalibrated, meant the charge was dismissed, so I missed a hefty fine and loss of licence by a haair’s breadth.
Anyway, I don’t know where you get your information from, but what killed the Triumph company of the 1970’s was the usual bureaucratic BS and interference from accountants that is so common in manufacturing companies. I’ve worked in manufacturing for over 40 years and in my experience, when you get everything run by committee, the end is near, no matter what your products are like, or how popular they may be.
I LIVED THROUGH the demise of Triumph and I get nauseous listening to or reading the absolute TRIPE that is spouted about why the company died. My first Triumph was a Trident and it galls me to think that they could have had that Bike up and running by 1963, except for the fact that this upset some of the people in the parent company BSA and so it was delayed until they had worked out the ridiculous Trident/Rocket Three compromise, but even then, these idiot board members and desk jockeys played around until the release of these incredible bikes was finally seen in 1978-9, some five to six years after they could have been selling them and improving them. The fault here is squarely in the laps of the accountants and other clowns who spent more time navel gazing than making decisions. Bert Hopgood and Doug Hele had plans for (and prototypes built and running) a four cylinder upgrade of the Trident and an OHC 350 Twin, both of which could have been in production by 1967-8 and which posed some serious competition for the pending Japanese bikes. What prevented these plans? The management. So the death of Triumph can be directly attributed to the management of their parent company BSA, weighed down as it was by far too many Indians and not enough Chiefs. It had very little to do with a lack of sales, as much as with a lack of bikes TO sell. Although the motorcycle press made a lot of noise about the OIF Triumphs at the time, their diagnosis of just how bad the OIF idea was holds no truth in reality. After all, it was hardly a new idea, having been utilized by the Vincent motorcycle company and it was also used by Yamaha in the late 1970’s, to great effect. The reason the 1971 OIF Triumphs were so high? Because like the Trident, the styling and design layout of those bikes was the responsibility of the ‘special design team’ at ‘Slumberglades’ (as they were referred to by many at Triumph), BSA’s overpaid team of designers who had never before designed any motorcycle. Please stop regurgitating fake news. Triumphs of the 70’s are just as sought after as the 60’s, with one or two exceptions, the 1971 OIF Triumphs being a notable one. The 1969 Bonnie is much sought after, but unless you like the dreadful Amal Monobloc carburettors a whole lot, I wouldn’t own a stock one.
I thought that the original Juke would kill Nissan. They sold like hot cakes!
That was a Buell 1125 CR not an 1125R. Yes essentially the same bike with a different front front fairing but if you’re going to make a technical video you need to be technically correct. Also as stated it was an outsourced Rotax engine not an in house engine, kind of like what Harley did with the vrod engine just a few years earlier.
How about Moto Morini?
How about a company that killed the motorcycle - like the fabulous Norton.
Hey, ya got a citation for that claim about average height of Americans being 7 inches less in 1972? I'd be very interested in looking at that.
The leader's were known for being badly affected by side winds with all that side paneling and light weight. Bit of a death trap in it's time.
sounds like a made up fact to me
Triumph frame was too tall. I went to the dealer to buy one. When I sat on it I couldn't touch the ground. I tried leaning it to try to balance it on one foot...nope the lean wanted to tip it. On a slippery road it was crash waiting to happen, even when stopped in traffic. The bike wanted to slide out from under you. I could not fathom how Triumph would build and try to sell a bike like that. I walked out of the dealership and never went in a Triumph dealer again. I simply thought Triumph didn't respect American riders and thought we wouldn't recognize how truly poorly designed and dangerous their bike was. They shortly went bankrupt and I was not surprised. Wasn't there anyone at Triumph with the balls to step up and save the company?
PS I'm 5'10".
I dissagree. I put saddle bags on so I always had extra oil with me. Plus lunch. Yes they use oil but easily cured with saddle bags. Have owned it over 40 years.
"Sunbeam's" were pretty crap, they were a "Budget" bike built for a "Budget" market they never really matched any other "British" bike out there for anything really, even the "Royal Enfields", they were more un-reliable than most & that in its self is pretty damning & the performance was woeful, it was definitely not the fault of any single bike they built, but virtually every one of the later bikes they built, some of their early stuff was pretty good, compared to the other "British" bikes at that time, it's not a bike I would choose to put my time & effort into if I was intending to sell it as the price they fetch even for a good(?) one would insult even the lowest of "Hourly Rates".
Man I thought the buell bike were awesome
FFS REALLY
👍👍👍
"Having an American sportsbike was cool"......... only to 'Merkans.