If you're referring to the classic English bikes, you may be judging the products of 1950s engineering by the expectations of a later era. That is essentially what killed the British motorcycle industry, after all - the British bikes of the '60s were still basically the same machines that had ruled the world in the '50s, while at that same time over in Japan, they were already building bikes with the technology of the '70s. English and American bikers of the late 1960s were astonished to discover that a motorcycle did not actually have to break down all the time and leak everywhere. :)

Nowadays there are manufacturers who say they're Triumph, Norton et al., but that's a little like a company making modern Windows laptops out of old-timey brown plastic and saying they're Commodores.*

--G.
* which happened
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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