Description
THE RICKMAN STORY
Unlike today's sporting superbikes, the café racers of the sixties were custom motorcycles. It wasn't possible in 1965 to go into a shop and buy a motorcycle with clip-on handlebars, rear-set footrests, and a racing fairing. This created a market for aftermarket suppliers, and the Rickman brothers, along with Paul Dunstall and others, were at the forefront. When Honda released the CB750 it set a new standard for performance and reliability but many diehard British bikers believed the Honda was too heavy, and the handling not up to the finest British standard. So in 1974 Rickman produced a CR (Café Racer) kit for the CB750 Honda. The kit included a frame, made of the usual 531 Reynolds manganese molybdenum, bright orange 29-litre fibreglass tank seat and fairing, Italian Borrani 18-inch alloy wheels with British Dunlop TT100 tyres, hefty Spanish Betor forks, and British Girling shock absorbers and Lockheed 254mm disc brakes. You needed a donor Honda 750, complete with carburettors, air filters, exhaust system, wiring loom, instruments and controls, and side and centre stands. Rickman's assembly instructions proudly proclaimed, "The stock Honda parts bolt straight on without modification. No drilling or welding necessary." But if you wanted to retain the stock gear-shift pattern the gear lever for the rear-set linkage needed to be cut and welded instead of reversed, and from all accounts the assembly process was as straightforward as expected. A claimed six and a half hours later your Honda CB750 could be transformed into the Rickman CR750, a lower, better-handling, better-braking sporting motorcycle that, at 199 kilograms, weighed 20 kilograms less than the original. Not only was the Rickman considerably lighter, it came with an extremely punishing café-racer riding position, with particularly low handlebars and a high seat.
An estimated 300 Rickman CR750's were built.
THIS MOTORCYCLE
This CR750 is exactly as it was built in 1974 - 44 years ago - by the Rickman brothers, Derrick and Don, based in New Milton, Hampshire, where they developed a long line of Japanese 'specials' sporting their own frame and bodywork. The four cylinder Honda engine boasts a big bore kit, taking the capacity out an extra 100cc to 836cc, breathing through the original 28mm Keihins. It was shipped out from new to Vancouver, Canada, where it remained for the next 24 years in storage, apparently unused. As might be expected, records at this point become a trifle sketchy but it appears that - at that point - this was a one owner from new machine. In 1999 it was brought back to England. Since then it has had 2 other owners. It got serviced for the last time in 2016, since then I competed in a few classic sprints with it, but most of the time it has been displayed proudly in my office.
A 5 pages long article about this particular motorcycle has been published in the May 2001 edition of Motorcycle Mechanics. It is still carrying the same license plate 'BBK 211M' as on the pictures in the article.
Note: this is not 'just' a Rickman kit mounted on a Honda motorcycle, but a motorcycle built by the Rickman brothers which makes it a Rickman CR750 ( CR for Café Racer ), not a Honda CB750. The make on the registration papers therefor states 'Rickman' and not 'Honda'.
