For decades, the motorcyclist’s basic approach to vibration was, ‘If something unpleasant can’t be avoided, make a virtue of it.’ Basic motorcycle engines – most of them with only one cylinder – could not be balanced, that is, made to produce zero shaking forces. And so leading journalists either said nothing about vibration or dismissed it as ‘minimal’.
The coming of the ‘British Twin’ in the form of Edward Turner’s 1937 500cc parallel twin did little about piston shaking force, but it did increase propulsive smoothness. Instead of
