Classic Motorcycles - Japan

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] what you're trying to do is to excite someone from absolutely ground zero as soon as you look at it the instant you see it a whole stream of messages have to come out of occur here in me the fact that it's fast that it's light that it's state-of-the-art but it's super dynamic all this stuff has to come across instantaneously what are these beasts that Street can burn the stagnant ash valve of the late 20th century the humble virtually every car and lesser bike that accelerate from nought to 60 in less than 2.5 seconds top speeds of over 160 miles per hour [Music] they are engineering design gone to the limit the milling suits want these bytes off the road they're just too fast too much fun [Music] Japanese sports bikes they are much closer resemblance of these race bikes and sports cars due to racing home the sports motorcycle has always been a magic Steve the vanquishes alone its par its ancestor is surely the young CAD stallion note the single saddle a low type range they're gripping lean today's designers fight the satisfy for winning demand rating performance on the road but this is now possible is due to one man Japan was flattened after World War two the population of starving city dwellers had to travel to the field for food an engineer from Hana Matson saw an opportunity he bought two hundred war surplus generator engines and attached them to bicycles they soon sold out his home village is now swallowed up by the industrial sprawling instigated an empire bared his name such Hero Honda this is Honda's 1949 model D the dream despite its simple design it is now a priceless rarity at a time when other Japanese manufacturers were still offering bicycles of clip-on engines Honda produced the bike to European standards his obsession to produce the best motorcycles for the masses drove Japan up the technology ladder he was a maverick that woke up a conformist Society the first time and you decide was the boat sweeping the floor tearaway but a good engineer lots of stories down they loved him he was a great one for employing young engineers and given the opportunity to say there's a blank sheet of paper there on a 250 or 500 this is what we think it's like design it one of the biggest secrets of Honda success is the company's force of 30,000 youthful and satisfied workers a key to their satisfaction is the way they use their time away from the job with plenty of encouragement and financial support from Honda Honda's philosophy that of linking ease-of-use for the customer with highest quality engineering and mass production soon made the company the largest motorcycle producer in Japan [Music] by 1958 Honda's growing range of machines had swamped the domestic market and he urgently needed a bigger return on its heavy investment with a Japanese reputation abroad for second-rate products he knew the only race success that attract global customers his target was the toughest race in the world the Isle of Man TT the first event of the 43rd tourist trophy ridges is about to begin Jim red riding a Honda number 2 starts off the Honda team were laughed at in 1959 became sixth seventh eighth and eleventh in the 125 event in 1960 they were fourth fifth and sixth in the 250 event then only the third attempt Honda achieved his goal the first five places in this event were taken by riders on thunder and achievements that was go down in the history of the TT races Taylor would a young man of twenty one years age come into the gold first seven and once ten seconds ahead of severity [Music] in 1961 the British industry offered oiling badly made bikes that were unreliable and troublesome motorcycle sales are in a slump the arrival of Honda's small colorful well-made bikes who vitalized the market this is a Honda c92 it's got a 1 to 5 cc engine takes in about 1963 as you can see it's got a press steel frame press still leading link front forks they've sold as a advanced right-to-work bike with a complete package which also included the indicators decent brakes enclosed rear chain and it was main feature is that it was very very reliable and economical to ride they look beautifully put together quite different add square headlamps and lots of unique features but generally they know the way they were engineered impress me so much they ticked over nicely and they didn't bid we any old leaks you know we boiled one and tried it out we rush around Vance action and it still kept going you know and I thought it's good value for money [Music] but Honda knew he had to get the backing of the cognoscenti the speed freaks this is a Honda CB 92 it's a one to five Super Sport and it immediately hit headlines of seen by far the fastest one to five road bike that's been around for a long time he brought many features from the racetrack it's got a twin leading shoe front brake a very fast Prince cylinder they came to a bend in the first when I saw and the first one I rode which the Japanese mechanics had taken to the Isle of Man for personal transport when they came over here on the first trip in 1959 they used it as a runabout and my eyes lit honest my arsenal could have borrow it for a few hours and it was unbelievable it had a maximum speed as a Tomb Raider but 70 miles an hour with me sitting upright honors the brakes honors were incredible they were better than most racing machines we've had the technology was outstanding the method of manufacture the casting the die casting the quality of finish these people were very very serious about engineering they took concepts engineering concepts and mega step forward [Music] unders rise to preeminence mirrored and often led Japanese post-war growth in a country with no natural resources survival was dependent on communal effort people worked hard unhindered by a Victorian manufacturing legacy and backed by American war aid they had the chance to get it right from the start first of all the youth scale in a way that had never been seen in the industry before they used the expansion in the domestic market to build new factories that had innovative techniques at the time used transfer lines automated conveyors for assembly they use special-purpose machinery rather than general-purpose machinery new techniques of casting and foraging all were made possible at very large volumes in order to assure the highest level of efficiency and precision under has found it expedient to design and construct many of the machine tools installed in its factory much of the machinery used on these engine production lines was made by Honda itself and in particular what made very aggressive investment during the high-growth years of the fifties and sixties and took on very large levels of debt but with that investment they achieve very low cost positions very high margins were able to pay that back their debt quickly and in the end they had a higher profitability than they had the rest of the motorcycle industry in the world the British industry was much more interested in short-term profitability and Japanese were investing for longer term returns and we're taking much less dividends at that time they were also giving the customer more features like push-button electric starting in the process they were modernizing motorcycling faced for such a threat foreign competitors resorted not to innovation but to ridicule it's a common misconception in the West that the Japanese copy and full-stop the word for learn and the word for copy in Japanese did the same word if you think of judo or kendo these are arts that one studies a series of preset model things that you have to do you repeat them again and again and again study them until you can be perfect at them and only when you have perfected these pre-established prototypes can you then move on to extemporize to develop when we saw the Japanese motorcycles of 25 years ago that just seemed to be copies they were this was during the early booth stages this was the getting to grips with what the thing was all about how should you make it what is a motorcycle then we saw the improvement phases we've been in a dominate phase for quite a long time there it's 80/20 to super six first introduced into this country in 1966 it was claimed to be the first 250 cc motorcycle to reach 100 miles per hour it does have six beads in the gear box which is enables the engine to make the most of its power at the time it not response off the general British competition including bikes like the Triumph Bonneville which it would give a very good run for its money in its day [Music] [Applause] [Music] by the mid sixties the other Japanese manufacturers have caught up on Honda's lead for the big four Honda Yamaha Kawasaki and Suzuki the game was simple sell lots of well-made well-designed bikes they created some true classics [Music] the losers were the European and American manufacturers for them the nineteen sixties of the litany of underinvestment patronizing dismissal of the opposition and lost chances too little too late the Japanese ran riend round everyone and soon they would drive a statement [Music] yamazaki she's messin recipe on [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] these are the first disc brake seen on a mass-produced motorcycle they're a symbol of a deep-seated Japanese obsession with constant improvement in 1969 this bike simply leaped from the European industry this is 1969 Honda cb750 the biggest reaction to the 750 Honda was the four cylinders and the racing pedigree that went before it for months was top speed of about hundred and twenty hundred twenty-five miles an hour which is very good for the time people didn't really believe that anybody was ever going to make a fortune in a motorcycle so she Ronda proved that it could be done and done successfully the first true Superbike determined was actually kind to describe this motorcycle there was a paradigm for the future it was a machine that was closely tolerance engineered its crank case was split horizontally it didn't drop on whatever the floor things that seemed quite obvious to us now it's just good basic engineering had been applied and it worked there are no horrible bugs you know you didn't have people coming back after saying funny noises or you know tire chains breaking or tap it slitting no oil leaks that unheard of it just worked and you know for a four-cylinder overhead camshaft motorcycle that handled reasonably well and smooth beautiful unbelievable [Music] the cb750 is engineering sophistication destroyed foreign competition hundred state-of-the-art manufacturing megalith and a decade of racing dominance were overwhelming the Italian and American industries had to be saved by government the British fell apart overnight it's important to remember that at the time they had production volume of over two million units and the whole British motorcycle industry was only about 20,000 units there's competition between the big four producing extraordinary machines the Boyd's a Kawasaki h1 was built by Kawasaki Heavy Industries and the main features of the bike is a 500 cc two-stroke 3 cylinder engine well they were built purely to build on Kawasaki performance image which was the image that I wanted to create specifically for the United States market because the bike was built specifically for straight line performance the handling is not too good if they could take on a human form they'd definitely be in prison for murder this is a Suzuki GT 750 first produced in 1971 this actually is a 74 model the first one's had a drum break they very shortly brought out the twin disc to compete with Wonder and the Kawasaki it's a three cylinder water-cooled two-stroke so therefore it's extremely smooth the thing is actually called a GTO grand tourer as opposed to the more sporty models from the other makers this one is being a late one it'll do about hundred and twenty hundred twenty-five [Music] many of the early seventies bikes were gas guzzling smokey two-strokes environmentalists attacked them and one Kawasaki like Honda saw the future in the easy to tame four-cylinder four-stroke but they went further they came up with an all-time classic Zedd won the king the bike started development in 1967 code name in New York Street but HMDA rather stole its thunder in 1969 when he launched it 754 Kawasaki realizing they had to come back with something bigger and better and hence they decided on 950 course and range in the double overhead camshafts it's not really a thing quite awesome because even today when you ride it it's very very smooth and it's very talky and in its day very fast it was road tested at over am being thirty miles an hour and wherever you go it creates an enormous amount of improvement [Music] yet beyond the macho posturing of sport bike down the catalog in the commuter section light a 35 year old bike the Super Cub we look back to when Shiva the first gay marriages and to deny and we see something slightly quaint and old-fashioned but when it came out it was the most extraordinary object it was completely new it wasn't a scooter it wasn't a motorcycle yet it combined the benefits of both well this was designed really as a motorcycle for a non motorcyclist it's very simple all the working bits were covered up and plastic so that Victor average wouldn't know what was going on so wouldn't frighten him and it was a very successful thing it came into this country in about 62 and it carried on until the present day with this model here but facing leave your concept hasn't changed at all it's been very very successful they've sold millions of them located to put 20 pound down at the balance over a year to the 500 week and the things just went on and on and on you know twenty thirty thousand miles unbelievable I've benefited the ganon and they crack that you know spite of racing in spite of diet all the rest of it they have sold worldwide particularly stage at a phenomenal number of cars and they're still in production [Music] the Super Cub and its derivatives are the golden geeks of the industry designed in 1958 the super Cubs worldwide sales recently top 20 million far outstripping the VW Beetle with it Honda has changed the face of motorcycling in the early 1960s they changed radically the perception of the motorcycle from a vehicle use for transport for a cold item for Hells Angels type and opened it up to a vast public Honda ingeniously chose not to advertise in a motorcycle press but in magazines like time and flavor it what the Japanese did was they look to people they thought to themselves what do people actually want to buy whereas many British manufacturing European manufacturers are going what do we want to make [Music] customers can now have just about any conceivable form of motorcycle they want but the fantasy object of the majority is still the same a lot of motorcyclists when they get bored the machine they imagine themselves a little strength might see themselves as some sort of protagonist out there carving their way through the field motorcycle racing is now more popular than ever it's the shop window that sells the name its centrality to the industry will also ensure a constant supply of future classic Road machines and the myth of the motorcyclist as racer come lone Warrior rides on motorcycling is now big business a leisure activity for a technological aid mr. Honda thought of that [Music] you

Channel: discoreview

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Keywords: japanese motorcycles

Id: szWnwdjk16o

Length: 25min 1sec (1501 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2017