It is that time of the year again where car and motorcycle enthusiasts flock to Knysna for the Annual motor show.
Over 60 classic motorcycles and over 300 classic cars will be on display at the 2019 show which is set to take place on Sunday the 28th of April.
The classic bikes will range from the early 1900 to the classic superbike era of the 1970's and 80's.
Apart from the 70-plus classic motorcycles on display, there will be over 300 invitation-only classic and vintage cars including over 20 Bentleys from the early 1920's onwards.
The Morgan sports cars will celebrate its 110th birthday at the show with the Mini celebrating its 60th.
Classic Ducatis.
Neville Fisher is a Ducati fanatic that hails from East London, and he will be showing two special examples of the smaller Ducatis that created such a stir in this country in the early 1980s, the Pantah series. The 500 cc and 600 cc Ducati Pantahs claimed Superbike race track glory here in the 1980s, notably in the hands of the famous Petersen brothers, and today the small V-twin machines are hugely prized collector's items.
Fisher will be showing a pristine original-specification blue Ducati Pantah 500 SL from 1980 and a modified 1979 Ducati 500/600 FRP TT Special in silver, with a red frame. He also modified the frame to later TT2 geometry, which includes reducing the steering head angle from 30 to 24 degrees, giving it a much sharper appearance and handling. It now runs 17-inch wheels instead of the original 18-inch wheels and a mono seat.
Neville will also be entering his track racer-cum- café racer 1969 Triumph Bonneville T120. Bonnevilles are very dear to Neville's heart as he made his race track debut on a Bonneville at the old Roy Hesketh circuit in Pietermaritzburg in 1981, and stunned the locals with a performance that saw him competitive on the old 1969 machine alongside all manner of much more modern Japanese superbikes!
Triumph specials
Gavin Venter is a Knysna-based motorcycle specialist builder who has a national reputation for the amazing machines he creates. This year his display will include six motorcycles, and heading up the list is a bike known as War Bird!
"This is the first so-called "art-bike" that I have built, as it was specially commissioned by a lady customer who wanted to display it in her living room as an art object," says Gavin. "It is based on a 1957 Triumph Thunderbird 650 cc machine and includes all sorts of interesting items such as early-period girder front forks. The War Bird name is a play on the Thunderbird name.
"Another really interesting and whacky motorcycle will be another customer commission, built for an antique dealer. It has a military theme, based on a small 300 cc Sherco trials bike, and features an artillery gun shell for the exhaust, while the headlamp is a converted World War Two gas mask!"
Venter will also display his own longtime favourite, a 1971 Triumph Tiger 650 done in the classic Bobber style with the massive front wheel and no mudguards, while his wife Alta's considerably modified Yamaha XT500 will also be attracting lots of attention.
Two more Triumphs will include 1964 model-year 650 and a customised rare 350 Twin, in café racer style. Brian Davidson's original-spec 1968 Triumph Tiger 650, re-built by Phoenix, will provide a valuable reference point to the custom-bike fantasies indulged in by Venter and his crew.
The oldest bikes
The honour of displaying the oldest motorcycle this year goes to Brian Wallace, with his 1911 singe-cylinder FN. This motorcycle was built by the same Belgian company that produced the famous FN rifle, used here by our military. The second-oldest motorcycle on display was also restored by Brian Wallace, but is now owned by Adrian Denness. This is a 1912 Bat. It was named after the founder of the British company, Samuel Robert Batson. Extremely rare, this single-cylinder machine uses a belt drive with a gigantic rear pulley and is a single-speed machine. Being a 500 cc model, it has tremendous low-speed torque.
The third machine in the Wallace line-up is a 1914 Douglas, a two-speed model but with no clutch. This is a horizontally-opposed twin-cylinder machine, and Douglas was the first to produce this configuration of the engine, long before BMW started with "boxer" twins in the 1920s. Starting and pulling away is a complicated affair as there is no clutch, and the technique is to pull in a cylinder decompressor, paddle the bike forward in first gear using your legs, and then releasing the decompressor, which starts the engine, and away you go!
All these very old bikes feature "total loss" lubrication systems, which means that there is a separate oil tank, but no sump, and the oil that is fed to the engine either burns away or drops earthwards, once it has done its lube job. So if there are oil droplets beneath them, rest assured that that is the way they are supposed to be!
British Thumper
A motorcycle familiar to many who did their military training here in the 1950s and 1960s is the AJS 500 single-cylinder model. The parts were obtained from the famous Rubes Motorcycles shop in Main Street, Johannesburg, which specialised in all manner of British bikes, long after the so-called Japanese invasion of the 1960s and 1970s.
Lofty has also entered a Moto Guzzi 850 Le Mans Mk II from the early 1980s, which he rebuilt from a box of bits as a café racer. Being a Ducati lover, he fashioned the fairing after the famous "Duke 900 SS" of that period, and the bike also features special exhausts, made just a stone's throw away from the sports fields that today host the Knysna Show! The exhausts, manufactured in the 1980s, were called Rex pipes, after George Rex Drive in Knysna.
