BUILT LIKE A GUN?

Several motorcycle companies around the world started out as manufacturers of guns and other armaments before going on to arguably better and certainly safer things. Alongside BSA, Royal Enfield, CZ, Husqvarna and Benelli, the one which started it all was FN, the Belgian national ordnance factory established in 1889 at Herstal, just outside Liège, to make arms and ammunition. And from 1901 to 1967 FN also built motorcycles.FN – standing for Fabrique Nationale (d’Armes de Guerre) – manufactured the world’s first production four-cylinder motorcycle, was noted for the use of shaft final drive on the majority of its models built from 1903 to 1923 rather than the cheaper and less effective belts. They also achieved success in Grand Prix road racing and especially Motocross with a range of often idiosyncratically developed machines. Today it still produces a wide range of well-respected armaments – but nothing any more with wheels and an engine.

FN began motorcycle manufacture in the early 1900s, and this flourished in the balmy days of the pre-WW1 era, then again in the pacifist Twenties, before taking a back seat in favour of armament manufacture as the war clouds gathered in the Thirties. The Forties and Fifties were a rerun of the Twenties, but like so many other makes FN’s range of bikes was ultimately unable to compete against the Japanese onslaught in the Sixties. They died a lingering death, culminating in burial of the corpse in 1967 – OK, all rather macabre, but they were in the ‘bangers and mash’ business, after all!

In 1899, FN had begun building shaft- and chain-driven bicycles as a sideline, and in 1900 experimented with a clip-on four-stroke engine to produce its first powered two-wheeler. In December 1901, the first 133cc single-cylinder FN motorcycle appeared, followed in 1903 by a