Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

.LONG·TERM TEST Triumph Trident 900 British engineering industry could build first-rate products. We motorcyclists . should be grateful he chose motorcycles to make his point, not machine tools or washing machines. The German market is also innately conservative· it tends to stand back from a brand-new product for at least two years. Once the consumer is convinced it really is a quality item, he will buy it. They even treat products from local manufacturers like BMW this way, and they've treated Triumph no differently. Now that the German consumer is beginning to realize that Triumphs really are well-built motorcycles, any resistance they fel t to buying British will fade away. Germany was the first market the Hinckley factory delivered to and they were puzzled. by the underwhelming response. That has changed slowly, but as customer confidence builds they should find sales not just increasing gently but accelerating rapidly. .On our test bike, the man who did (Left) All of the critical tolerances of this 1992 Triumph Trident 900 were meesured at the factory when the machine _s n_. (Below) During the 9OO's 6O,OOO-mlle-plus test It was raced In BEARS competition at the Osterrelchrlng. THE !iii'" E!!iii!iii By Julian Ryder· Photos by Jo Soppa I f there's one moan magazine staffers always hear from you out there, it's "Why can't you tell us what bikes are really like?" Which means "Can't you do more real-life, long-term tests?" The answer is that we often only get test bikes for a few weeks at a time (if we're lucky) but generally manage to put a fairly sizable amount of miles on them in that time. Outside of the normal roadtest program, you might hear about a staffer's own bike now and then, but my experience is that journalists' personal bikes tend to spend much more time gently corroding in garages than they do on the road. Here is the exception to that rule: a Triumph Trident 900 bought by the German magazine MO in June, 1992, which has since covered 100,000 kilometers (62,140 miles) on all sorts of roads before being stripped righ t down to nuts and bolts at Triumph's Hinckley factory. It is the second-most-used example of the new generation Triumphs. The only one' that's covered more distance is a Trophy 900 belonging to a London courier, who didn't want to swap his even highermileage machine for a new one because he was so pleased with it; that is, until Triumph made him an offer he couldn't refuse and bought the bike just before the October International Bike Show in Birmingham. What you are looking at on these pages are the innards of the hardest-worked new Triumph yet disassembled. Between June, 1992, and February, 1995, this bike has covered the equivalent of twice the circumference of the Earth, a mileage high enough to thoroughly check the qualities of any new bike. The 900 triple is the archetype of Triumph's modular-concept design, so the results of this test can easily be extrapolated to other Triumph models. Most of the mileage was on autobahns and primary roads, but the Trident also saw its fair share of Stuttgart inner-city traffic jams. It also saw most of Europe. It was immensely popular for foreign touring trips to England (several times), Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Denmark, Belgium, the etherlands, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Austria, and the Czech and Slovakian Republics. The Austrian trip involved the Trident being raced in a BEARS event at the fearsomely fast Osterreichring - and it didn't finish last. This bike has not had an easy life. It's not been pampered, either. It hasn't been polished often, and it's been through three winters on salt-laden roads with only the occasional jet-wash to keep the corrosion at bay. Despite this treatment, the frame doesn't have any rust spots and the other painted parts, the wheels, the exhaust system and the aluminium parts are still in good condition. The men from MO consider that Triumph sets the standards of finish that the competition has to live up to. This is doubly significant. The German consumer market has great problems believing that Brits can actually make anything worth having. The first vehicle to challenge this idea was the Rover Metro, a little car hailed as the market leader by the m.otoring press of every European country - except Germany where it was dismissed. When the first new Triumph (the 1200 Trophy) appeared, a German publication (not MO) said it weaved in high-speed corners. This was rubbish, but symptomatic of the German market's mental block about British-engineered products. It was this prevailing attitude toward British products that really motivated John Bloor to put a large chunk of his personal fortune into proving that the the majority of this Triumph's miles is MO editor Gunter Wimme, who rode the bike over to Hinckley for its strip' down. Along with Gunter and MO's technical man Jo Soppa, representatives of Triumph Germany and factory engineers looked on anxiously as the motor came apart and the calipers and micrometer came out. Before long there were broad smiles all round. Basically, it doesn't look like a bike that's had much use at all. It could quite happily be built back up with the same parts and carry on. The engine was nearly perfect, as you can see from the measurement panel. Nearly every part was judged to be "as new," even the camshaft bearings, ·despite the fact that the oil takes longest to get to them after a cold start. The triple is built to last. The key to this, says Triumph's technical training man Gary McDonnell (one of the very few Hinckley men who used to be at Meriden, incidentally), is regular servicing and good oil - in this case Shell Quadro TX. It was very useful that Triumph had

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