The Golden Van: Birmingham

Showing posts with label Birmingham. Show all posts

Saturday, July 14, 2018

Barber Motorsports Museum

Call it a pilgrimage but every time I drive through Birmingham Alabama I pay a visit to the largest collection of motorcycles on display anywhere.

Five levels of machines including Lotus racing cars in the basement and a thousand motorcycles on display, all for $15 admission. An extraordinary ambition by a local dairy distributor who increased his family fortune developing real estate in Birmingham.

There is also a race track outside the museum building and they recently added a pedestrian walkway to allow visitors to view the racing close up. I didn’t have time to walk out on this visit but they were apparently giving driving lessons on the track as cars raced around outside. I was here for the two wheelers.

A 1940s Harley Davidson such as my Italian grandfather would have ridden. This place is a bottomless pit of nostalgia.

A Vespa 50, my first two wheeler. They aren’t terribly interested in scooters at the Barber. This one was mislabeled as a 125 and there are very few of these iconic scooters, such a huge part of motorcycling history, in the collection. They do now have a Russian copy, a Vyatka 150 on display which is a nice catch.

The first motorcycles from before and after 1900 are displayed as replicas and the interesting thing to me is that they are clearly motorcycles, just as identifiable today as they were then. There is no mistaking these as anything but power two wheelers, directly related to the most modern machines today.

The peculiar sport of board racing from the 1920s is set up as a diorama in the vast museum. No brakes at 75mph on what were essentially motorized bicycles. No guts no glory!

Harley Davidson is well represented along with its early rivals from the first part of the 20th century.

Such is the purchasing power of the Barber and its team of mechanics and restorers they have some of the rarest motorcycles on display.

And then there are the run of the mill machines from the 1970s, my dream bikes which I shall never get to ride.

And so on...The motorcycles I saw ridden to work daily in my youth now considered Italian classics.

I can never quite make my mind up if this is a good use of money or not. Purely on aesthetic grounds it is lovely for someone like me who relives his youth in these displays but I wonder at the expense in a world where there are so many more pressing needs.

As a rather more practical non motorcycling friend of mine put it, at least he’s out using the money and hiring people. Better a museum than storing it in a Swiss Bank and I think Birmingham Johnny is right so I reserve the right to enjoy the Barber, a fine first world indulgence.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Barber Museum 1960s

I love the Barber Vintage Motorsport Museum near Birmingham, Alabama. Sometimes they display not one but two examples of an incredibly rare motorcycle, like this:

The AJS "Porcupine" is a legendary race bike equipped with lots of spiky cooling fins on the engine, hence the porcupine nickname. It also had a huge weird saddle fuel tank. And here we see two pristine rarities displaying the wonders of this unique bike. Amazing to see two in one museum highlighting the particular oddities of the motorbike.

They have more than a thousand bikes here at Barber and the display does rotate from time to time, so on this visit I decided to focus on the 1960s, the time when I was wishing for a motorcycle and I could only read about them in magazines. Ah nostalgia.

If you have no interest in motorcycles skip this essay and wait for tomorrow! These pictures are purely my pleasure. The pictures of the bikes are accompanied by pictures of Barber's own notes on display, legible I hope on enlargement on your screen, as they are on mine.

First the 1960s icon, a Bonneville: well not quite actually. It just looks like a Bonneville. Read on and discover the single car TR6!

Here's an actual Bonneville 13 years on and not that different. Sigh, they had no money to improve anything, that the factory knew needed upgrading, so they just did some fancy paintwork to celebrate the Queen's 25 years on the throne and called it good. It was all they could afford in the 1970s at Triumph.

Harley Panhead 1961 Duo-Glide.

The valve cover on this Duo-Glide is supposed to resemble a frying pan, thus the nickname Panhead. Motorcyclists aren't always masters of the subtle.

Like these chromed "pans" on the replica of the chopper used to film Easy Rider. Both bikes used in the iconic movie, ridden by the late Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda had back up models in case of damage to the bikes that were actually ridden on screen, but all four of the original machines disappeared, so Barber has a replica on permanent display... A Panhead!

Yet this is obviously not a factory original Harley Davidson Panhead! Fonda said it was desperately uncomfortable and impossible to ride in anything but a straight line. Yet the movie got us on the road. I used a Vespa though I did think of taking a Harley on my cross country trip in 1981. That might have been tough!

The Trident built to save Triumph in the late 60s though it was ugly and lacked amenity and was fiddly to set up right and it got blown away by Honda. Bummer. This bike is why the signature of modern Triumphs is a three cylinder engine - done right.

Better styling and less maintenance came later... Very collectible today, are these beautiful and well put together later Tridents. They had five speeds, electric start and disc brakes. Too late to save the company.

BSA had their version of the triple, the Rocket 3 seen here with the small American tank and huge buckhorn handlebars.

Big touring Harley. Some things never change! And they are going from strength to strength today.

MV Agusta is known for sport bikes and in the Seventies they made some great machines, double overhead cam four cylinders with shaft drive (designed not to outdo factory race bikes with chain drive). I love them. My first motorcycle in 1975 was an MV350 twin, so I have a soft spot for it's big brothers. If Barber had an MV350B on display I'd show it, of course.

But their first big bike was a pig. No, really, look at this ugly 600cc four cylinder heaving pig:

I want to see a lightweight touring 500 single on the modern market, like these Indians.

Narrow and light.

These bikes were part of importer Floyd Clymer's cunning plan to use a much loved American name and put a British engine in it. Ta Da! Not a success however and Clymer had a heart attack and died before he could work his marketing magic. He mixed British engines, Italian frames and US labels in ways that were very promising

Try this one out.. A Spanish 500 single by Sanglas.

They were popular in Spain when the Caudillo Franco limited imports into his dictatorship.

Slow sweet and simple. And old fashioned, even then.

Triumph had a hot 500. Ted Simon struggled round the world with this poorly assembled but fast twin. He got the last one from the factory and he became a mechanic fixing it as he went. Simon is no motorcyclist but he is a great writer and motorbikes are his schtick. He is revered by motorcyclists today ironically enough! In a fever in India he dreamed himself a god and thus the book's title, Jupiter's Travels was born .

But then in 1969 Honda changed everything. Clean reliable, electric start. Fast. Didn't leak oil and came in weird sexy colors. You meet the nicest people on a Honda.

And a few years later the much easier to ride and live with 500 version appeared.

Would rather buy this or the more expensive leaky, vibrating Triumph Daytona above?

I rode Italian bikes and in Italy Japanese imports were limited and expensive so I supported the Italian bikes which I thought were sexier. They were too but it was years before I rode a bike with electric start, mirrors or turn signals...this was the one I wanted but couldn't afford. And yes it turned heads did Moto Guzzi's LeMans Mark One. It's still lovely in Mr Barber's museum.