Page 44 - Australian Motorcycle News (January 2020)

ATLAS NOMAD & RANGER

This extremely compact engine was entirely
developed in-house at Norton, according to the
company’s Head of Design, Simon Skinner – but
its commercial manufacture is linked to a deal
which Norton made almost at the start of the
project to supply Chinese giant Zongshen with
a 650cc twin-cylinder engine design. As part
of that, Zongshen will be supplying certain key
parts to Norton with which they can manufacture
their own more powerful version of the motor,
including the horizontally-split crankcases,
the eight-valve DOHC cylinder head and both
crankshaft and camshafts, leaving Norton to
source the other parts necessary to build the
engine locally in the UK.
Essentially this means that Norton has found
a dependable Asian supplier of key parts at
affordable prices, without having to copy its
near neighbour Triumph in establishing its own
factory in Thailand or elsewhere to achieve this. 1 2
“Zongshen approached us late in 2016 after we’d
taken the V4 engine design back in-house [from
R&D firm Ricardo], and soon after we’d begun
work on drawing up the twin,” says Skinner.
“They’d read about our plans for such a bike in a
magazine article, and knocked on our door to see
if we’d be interested in working together on the
engine, which we were.
“The company is immense – literally, raw
materials come in one end of the factory, and
motorcycles come out the other – they make
everything themselves. They have machine
shops so large it practically shows the curvature
of the earth, and they have their own foundries
etc. – everything’s made in-house. Last year they 3 4
built 4.5 million engines and 2.5 million complete
motorcycles, so it’s a huge business it’s good to
partner with.”
The Atlas duo’s UK-developed engine is fitted in
a tubular-steel perimeter chassis – again, entirely
designed but also manufactured at Norton – with
the engine as a semi-stressed component, and
an aluminium swingarm mount either side. A
fully-adjustable 50mm Marzocchi-made upside-
down fork branded as a Roadholder (the name
given 60 years ago to the suspension on Norton’s
legendary Manx GP racer and its streetbike
spinoffs) sits at a 24.5° rake on both models, but
the Ranger has 200mm wheel travel against the
Nomad’s tauter 150mm range. Same at the rear,

“[THE DESIGNS 6

WERE] DONE AT

HOME ... ON MY

KITCHEN TABLE”

SIMON SKINNER

44 amcn.com.au