earliest surviving Norton Villiers commando

Rohan said:

Nice catch. I wondered if this is where that was leading....

If it now has a metal gas tank (and seat) then some of it is not so original ?

Did we ever resolve that 123xxx and 126xxx business ?

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never got an answer , probably never will, not enough memory left in the collective. :cry:

If anyone out there still has an intact widow-maker frame, they had better not ride it. They still break. The last one i heard about was just this year and the rider had been riding it hard up and down twisty roads. It only came apart when he stopped. As he said, he was lucky it wasn't true to name.

Dereck

126168 stuff for sale
interesting frame read, I guess I'll refrain from jumping my fastback :shock: :shock: , and riding down railroad tracks and I'll be OK :lol:
(note; they broke all the tested frames eventually,even the improved braced ones :shock: )

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Gearbox-Transmi ... Sw3h1ZXBFv
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Engine-Motor-Ca ... SwjKFZXBGr

Neville could be spot on. The first recorded modification to the model was on engine 126125, so I doubt if this was actually done on the first bike of the production run or test models - they would had to had reason to instigate the modification implemented at engine number 126125, which suggests that there were previous models. Even in those days, something would have been made and tested, I doubt even in those days the the management of the time would have been that stupid not to do so and put a model to the market place, but then again, have a real close look at the early show models - shocking!

The numbers on the headstock are most probably stamped that way to make the stamping easier and the impression more readable, otherwise they would have been in a stamp holder to align them correctly.

Madnorton said:

Neville could be spot on. The first recorded modification to the model was on engine 126125, so I doubt if this was actually done on the first bike of the production run or test models - they would had to had reason to instigate the modification implemented at engine number 126125, which suggests that there were previous models.

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126125 is supposed to have been the first production Commando, so which modification is it that supposedly occurred at 126125?
The frame breakages didn't begin until some time after the bikes had gone into production and Commandos with the widowmaker frames are known to be in the series from 126125 to 128634.

https://www.automd.com/recall/campaign_c53422/

Believe me , the prototypes were tested hard, but initially it was all on public roads. I was doing 500 miles a day (4 a.m to noon) and a second rider did the same from 4 p.m. until midnight. We did it 6 days a week up to 25,000 miles. We also did high-speed endurance testing at the Motor Industry Research Assocication test center near Nuneaton.

With the benefit of hindsight, we should have also tested in MIRA's "Belgian Pave" track. This is a very uneven track made of cabble-stones. My uncle was a test driver the Leyland Motors (the bus manufacturer). He was sent off to MIRA to test on the Belgian Pave with suppies and funding for a month of testing. He was back at the Leyland factory after just three days with all the passenger seat frames broken off at their floor mountings.

If we'd tested the Commando on that Pave track, I think we'd have found the top tube problem real early.

The AJS motocross bikes (later marketed as the "Stormer" ) originally had a similar frame design to the Commando, except the top tube was welded close to the bottom of the headstock. We had several failures, similar to the Commando, but round the top half of the tube. On one occasion, I took the gas tank off the bike we'd used at a race, to find that the tank was the only thing keeping the frame together. Motocross was a very punishing activity.

The frame was redesigned with a tapered top tube, made up of two half-round sections with a long triangular spacer welded between on both sides. It was circular at the rear and "obround" at the headstock. Wolverhampton's development engineers tried to convince the Commando folks to use a similar design, but they considered it "too complicated".

Re “I was asked by a show visitor if the stand had been funded by the Irish government. When I asked what gave him the idea he said it was the colour combination of the orange seat, the green blob and the silver frame which looked like the Irish flag.”

I bet that raised a few eye brows :shock:

I revisited the article about the frame testing and found that I misread it, they did notbreak the improved frame . OOPs

the following is wrong


(note; .................. eventually,even the improved braced ones :shock: )