BEWARE – eBay auction for 1972 Norton DUNSTALL 810 MK 2

I have a pretty good paper trail for this one plus eye witness accounts of people who remember the bike and an english registration. If it is a fake someone owns a time machine.

It could be a Dunstall with a later added tag though ?
Be interesting to see what the factory records against that number ?

So has anyone seen anything similar on a Dunstall ?
There are several owners in this group....

There is a couple of other points about the bike that are not right. Firstly there is no way that a bike with less than 2000 miles on it would have the chrome worn off the discs. Secondly those pipes are very blue. The bike is hardly run in at 2000 miles but has surely done some long hard riding to achieve that blueing. The mufflers are not original as original mufflers from 72 did not have the raised weld line at the reverse cone, but were finish ground flush. The exhaust is a mess. The exhaust pipe kink up in front of the mufflers is in a different position from one side to the other and the exhaust appears to be made from different size pipes. The mufflers should finish a lot closer to the back of the bike. In reality a bike of that era is unlikely to have an original exhaust system, unless maybe the mileage was very low. The exhaust pipes and discs suggest otherwise.
ando

I'm quite sure Dunstall discs were not chrome but raw cast iron.

madass140 said:

I'm quite sure Dunstall discs were not chrome but raw cast iron.

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Yes, you are quite right on that score, but someone somewhere must have chromed them at some point as the cast iron kept rusting, (don’t ask me how I know) found the brakes were then worse than before so stripped the chrome off again.

Re; The brackets holding the mufflers to the rubber mounts are unlike any other Dunstall brackets I’ve seen.


The brackets have the Dunstall logo, and yes he really bid use Mini exhaust rubber bobbins to attach the muffers.


Re; In the item description of the auction the seller claims everything is “TOTALLY ORIGINAL AND PERFECT,” which is very much not correct, due to the fact that the original Dunstall Decibel silencers are missing.

I grant you that this can be misleading, the original Dunstall Decibel silencers having long since rusted or rotted away

Some of the rest of your comments might just be a tiny bit nitpicking on what is a 1972 750 bike.

Was the 810 kit available in 1972 :?:

Rohan said:

It could be a Dunstall with a later added tag though ?
Be interesting to see what the factory records against that number ?

So has anyone seen anything similar on a Dunstall ?
There are several owners in this group....

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Considering I have race paddock photos from the 1980s that show this neck tag I highly doubt it. I have seen other dunstall nortons with similar or the same neck tag, there was a silver 1972 810 on ebay last year with the same tag (and a lot of paperwork as well), and my friend with a '74 dunstall 850 has a similarly stamped tag. You have to remember - only bikes built at the Dunstall shop from new bikes would have these, leftover/used bikes they converted at the shop or bikes converted by dealers who bought the parts from dunstall would not have these stampings, that is a pretty rare situation.

Some good information here, still, it's a desireable bike, desireable parts.
We should take care to crtiticize constructively.
What is paid for it is what it is worth.
It is what it is.

As I understand, original Dunstall bikes came with a certificate of authenticity. I've only seen pictures of one such certificate with a bike being sold on ebay about 2 years ago. It is very possible the certificate could get separated or lost from the bike and so authentic Dunstall bikes may not always have them.

The 810 kits were around in 1971.

It's possible the bike came with 2-1-2 exhaust and Dunstall silencers and they were changed at some point. Maybe to fit the stock Norton centre stand or perhaps the headers were damaged. It is very easy to ding the bottom tube that runs under the bike as ground clearance is about 4". Lots of people didn't like the 2-1-2 for these reasons. The balance tube headers on it now came out in 73 or later. The emego may be the only alternative for new looking silencers today.

FWIW heres some photos of 2 different Dunstall silencers, both say Dunstall Decibel Silencer patent 1063409 but only the bottom one also says "Made In England" Hummm... perhaps they should have called them Dunstall Debacle Silencers and yes, I know the "b" and the "c" in the word decibels in the last photo are switched around but that's bc (because) I'm from bc (Britsh Columbia : ):

the discs on my dunstall norton were chromed new . the chrome on the discs probably lasted longer than most of the other dunstall parts, many of which needed repair sooner than they should have.
ando

Dunstall muffers also came with a couple of reducing collars that enabled you to fit them to different size downpipes.
There are several versions on the market, some with pop rivets, and some with exposed nuts holding the 6 interior tubes at the rear.
I assume that they may be made under licence, or the copyright licence has expired.

ando said:

the discs on my dunstall norton were chromed new . the chrome on the discs probably lasted longer than most of the other dunstall parts, many of which needed repair sooner than they should have.
ando

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I stand corrected then; Dunsall might have chromed them for the long shipping journey across the Atlantic to enable the customer gets a nice shinny metal and not a pair of rusty discs.

Well...despite all of the speculation and "should have this" and "doesn't have that "comments", on this thread, IT SOLD FOR $20,000.00 USD.....

I hope that it goes to a good home and a happy owner.

OldBalz said:

Well...despite all of the speculation and "should have this" and "doesn't have that "comments", on this thread, IT SOLD FOR $20,000.00 USD.....

I hope that it goes to a good home and a happy owner.

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You bet! The eventual buyer first bid 12K and I believe shortly thereafter a "20K" reserve showed up and 4 days later, Bob's your uncle. Can safely assume there was plenty of communication between those two events and that the new owner is very pleased. Hope so.

despite all the "hater-ade" that seems to flow pretty freely on this site as to whether it was real or not I don't think you could have built that bike for $20,000 if you tried, real dunstall pieces are too expensive these days (seen the dunstall forks sell for over $1800 by themselves - that is better than cerianis) and the sheer number of pieces you would need to fake a MK2 is staggering, not to mention paint work, machine work, service items, labor, etc....

even the corvette people will make excuses for modern safety equipment like tires, and they set the standard for fanatical for originality, so whomever faulted it for not having original tires is being ridiculous.

I believe the guy who started this thread admitted he might be wrong. So it would seem like he was less of a hater and actually genuinely concerned that it might be a fraud. A little dialogue can go a long way, might even have saved some other poor sucker $20 grand.?!

Geeto 67 said:

despite all the "hater-ade" that seems to flow pretty freely on this site as to whether it was real or not I don't think you could have built that bike for $20,000 if you tried, real dunstall pieces are too expensive these days (seen the dunstall forks sell for over $1800 by themselves - that is better than cerianis) and the sheer number of pieces you would need to fake a MK2 is staggering, not to mention paint work, machine work, service items, labor, etc....

even the corvette people will make excuses for modern safety equipment like tires, and they set the standard for fanatical for originality, so whomever faulted it for not having original tires is being ridiculous.

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Nobody here hates Dunstall bikes or was faulting the bike, just the way it was being misrepresented. As was discussed, the claims about it being all original were not true.

And a few years ago Dunstall stuff was a lot cheaper, too, so to build or "fake" one from scratch might not be practical but even now I think it could be done for less than 20K. Anyhow, I posted to suggest it wasn't all original, and then listed all the things that I thought weren't correct or indicated the bike had been apart and restored. That's very different from suggesting an estate speculator was trying to fake an 810. The seller's reputation elsewhere in various web-based motorcycle communities was suspect enough to mention an alert, too.

OldBalz said:

Well...despite all of the speculation and "should have this" and "doesn't have that "comments", on this thread, IT SOLD FOR $20,000.00 USD.....

I hope that it goes to a good home and a happy owner.

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And do you believe it sold for that much? With all the cool Nortons that sell for less than 20K, I don't believe it actually sold for that. From what I could tell the seller has a lot of experience selling classic vehicles, so I wouldn't be surprised if this sale was to establish value for some other purpose, or if there was something else thrown into the deal behind the scenes.

If the bike shows up a year from now, say for $15K, with the seller bemoaning the loss they're having to take (on their tax return, too!), remember this thread.

Bernhard said:

The brackets have the Dunstall logo, and yes he really bid use Mini exhaust rubber bobbins to attach the muffers.


Re; In the item description of the auction the seller claims everything is “TOTALLY ORIGINAL AND PERFECT,” which is very much not correct, due to the fact that the original Dunstall Decibel silencers are missing.

I grant you that this can be misleading, the original Dunstall Decibel silencers having long since rusted or rotted away

Some of the rest of your comments might just be a tiny bit nitpicking on what is a 1972 750 bike.

Was the 810 kit available in 1972 :?:

Click to expand...

Bernhard,

I wasn't referring to the large aluminum plates that the footpegs are mounted on. The brackets I was referring to are the metal fittings making contact with the mufflers themselves, not the large aluminum plates that anyone can clearly see have Dunstall cast into them. If you examine the pictures again I think you'll be able to see what I was referring to.


Your nitpicking comment, and the Geeto hate and Oldbalz remarks, reminded me of the inane stuff we all had to suffer through when Carbonfibre was trolling around.