They do (they're the prime contractor for the WDF's license-built version of the ExoSalusia BR55-HBSR battle rifle, for instance); it's just that they make other industrial stuff too, including a well-regarded line of street motorcycles.

>A-ha! Googling found me the Triumph Hurricane (which I had never heard
>of, not really being a British bike fan)

ASA is a nod to another British bike company from days gone by, Birmingham Small Arms, which started out as a firearms firm and eventually evolved into one of those huge companies that makes pretty much anything metal before fizzling out altogether during the great British industrial collapse of the 1970s and '80s. My father used to have (many years ago, long before I was born) a BSA Spitfire, the bike that inspired the ASA Hurricane (note the similarity of the badges).

--G.
-><-
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
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

And now I know...the rest of the story.

--
-Pasha (who still doesn't like British bikes. Style over substance, IMO)
What was that feeling again?
Oh yes.
-Rage-

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
-><-
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
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Really, it's the bikes of the '70s/'80s that I didn't like. My first bike was an old (well, 77, which was almost 20 years old by the time I got it) honda xl550, and a buddy of mine had a british bike of some sort (Norton I think?) from not too much earlier. Mine leaked a bit of oil, but other then that ran flawlessly.

The british bike was in the shop what seemed like 4 days a week, and wouldn't run in the rain, which considering that I grew up in Northern California was a problem.

He did look like a badass when it was running, though.

--
-Pasha
What was that feeling again?
Oh yes.
-Rage-

"Yeah."

"Properly? All the time?"

"Yeah. Great, innit?"

"Isn't that a bit, like, you know... cheating?"

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends