Cars and bikes I’ve come across in my travels

The Volvo estate with the Ford V8 was a favorite of Paul Newman. He built a couple as I recall and they were sold by his estate for big money. It’s a popular modification and there used to be installation kits for sale. Like John’s Cars kit to put the SBC into the XJ6, another popular swap.
 
it’s been a while since I’ve seen anything interesting, but this little thing caught my eye. A trail style 115cc Yamaha that is very popular here in this part of Asia. This one is well kitted out too.

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Not hardly, practically every new bike you see has shocks with gold reservoirs. Apparently Ohlins was unable to enforce the intellectual property rights to their colors.
I know Yamaha owns Ohlins now so thought they might be trying to cash in by fitting a cheapo version to their low-end market.
 
I know Yamaha owns Ohlins now so thought they might be trying to cash in by fitting a cheapo version to their low-end market.
Interesting. I don’t doubt that there are many aftermarket bootleg knockoffs with the gold reservoirs, but I’ll have to look closer at the new bikes. It could very well be that on new machines they are exclusively on Yamahas. There are a lot of them around!
 
I know Yamaha owns Ohlins now so thought they might be trying to cash in by fitting a cheapo version to their low-end market.
You are almost right, Öhlins was part of Yamaha, I wondered about this and looked to Google and found in 2024 Öhlins was sold to Brembo….
 
And bizarrely, many Yamahas haver Brembo brakes! Oooh, spooky!
Because Yamaha used to have a stake in Brembo!

Yamaha has a manufacturing facility in Italy, the bikes made there use lots of italian-made stuff such as Brembo, CEV, Paioli, Marzocchi, etc, mainly to avoid certain tariffs.

Brembo also swallowed Kelsey-Hayes many years ago. K-H used to supply Harley Davidson, H-Ds of a few years back had Brembo-inspired calipers. :rolleyes:

AfaIk, Marzocchi is also now under the Brembo umbrella, since they filed for bankruptcy a couple of years ago.

Eat, or be eaten...

piet
 
Nicely modernised Porsche Speedster. With Subaru engine. Some very fine attention to detail.
 

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Had a ride out today on the Jarama to a regular haunt of ours, Poolehall Cafe, on the Bridgnorth to Kidderminster road. Excellent venue and on a Thursday each week has a large classic bike presence. They also do the most wonderful mammoth portions of bread pudding. Anyhow spotted these two bikes in attendance today who I regularly meet on my travels. Have a close look, things are not what they may seem.
 

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