Simple pleasure

I often laugh at what my colleagues on the modern motorcycle magazines refer to as a ‘workhorse.’ What they term simple, dated and utilitarian is still worlds apart from even the most advanced of postwar machines; a marvel of electronics, hydraulics, alloys and aerodynamics – I wonder what they’d make of Gordon Hallet’s 1955 Nimbus, with its exposed valve springs, pressed steel and rubber-bands.

The Nimbus would have raised a few eyebrows with the motorcycling press in 1955, its design being so at odds with the vast majority of its contemporaries – no swinging arms, hot cams and race-bred performance here. That’s not to do it a disservice by any means though; the Nimbus was conceived in a different time to fulfil a very different brief, and although it looked fairly crude, in its own way it was as intelligent and advanced a design as you could find.

The original Nimbus was designed in Denmark in 1915. The common belief is that its creator Pedar A Fisker (then a successful producer of electric motors and vacuum cleaners) inspected a motorcycle parked at the side of the road one day and although impressed by the concept, was less so with its design and construction, and vowed to design and