The Legendary Nortons of Paul Adams

Anyone who ever lost a West Coast concours, anyone who raced AHRMA in the good old days, or vintage raced in New Zealand, or rode with the Velocette Club, knows the name Paul Adams. And if you’re really OG, you remember his front-page feature in Classic Bike back in 1986, with a devastating cover shot of the gleaming silver and black tank of a DOHC Daytona Norton Manx. That was one of Paul’s gorgeous restorations – which he happened to also race.  How he came to restore that machine, and many other ‘cammy’ Norton International and Manx models, is a story in itself.

A few years after wearing out that Classic Bike issue,  I met Paul Adams at a Velocette Owners Club summer rally, the annual week-long / 1000mile vintage bike adventure, on which Paul typically rode a beautiful 1959 Velocette Venom Clubman, which never broke down, and always looked fresh (unlike my bikes). One year he did ride a gorgeous pre-unit Triumph TR6C TT Trophy… and he’s keeping that bike, for now. As for the others in his remarkable collection – that Velocette Clubman, and all those Nortons – Paul has decided he’d rather see his collection go to new homes while he’s still upright, than wait to pass them on in his will, and make them his wife’s problem.

I interviewed Paul Adams recently regarding the sale of his garage for Mecum Magazine, as Mecum is selling his collection at this January’s huge Las Vegas sale.  Paul is an organized thinker (he had notes!) and is charmingly self-effacing (“Please print only my best lies!”). It was a pleasure to dig in on his history, which I’d never fully known, just heard bits and pieces over the years (and how often do you interview your friends?). A condensed version of this interview will shortly appear in Mecum Magazine, but for now, the following is a lightly edited version our conversation:

Paul d’Orléans (PDO): But let’s go back to the beginning. How did Paul Adams become such a fixture of the racing and concours scenes?

Paul Adams: “I’ll start at the beginning. I owe a lot to my father, who was a millwright, and taught me about handwork and craftsmanship. That’s why I’ve never considered myself a collector; I considered myself a restorer. I had seen Nortons race when I was in junior high; my dad took us kids to the sports car races at various tracks around Southern California, and they often had a race for motorcycles. These shiny silver tank things with black and red stripes always seemed to win – they were Norton Manxes of course. So I had that in the back of my mind.”

Paul d’Orléans (PDO): When I first met you, you were still working as a pilot on a commercial beat, so how did bikes fit in?

Paul Adams: “I was a Navy guy, I’d enlisted when I was 17 and was in the reserves at Los Alamitos, in a P2V squad. Then I went to college for four years and got my degree in electrical engineering, then I went to work for North American and actually got to work on the Apollo program moon lander. But I owed the Navy three years of active duty as my reserve obligation, so I applied for flight training; now I owed them five years! I wasn’t exactly smart when it came to managing that. I wound up flying A4 Skyhawks from the USS Kitty Hawk. My first cruise was 10 months in the western Pacific; the mission was to nuke Russia if necessary; this was 1963-64. Toward the end of that cruise Vietnam erupted, so we went down to operate off the coast in the South China Sea off Vietnam. Initially it was a big secret as we worked up in Laos, on the backside of North Vietnam. We lost a couple of guys there. When we were due for rotation after a 10-month cruise we came back home for about 6 months, then went back on my second cruise. That time it was all Vietnam; we did some flying in South Vietnam, but most of it was over the bad area. In North Vietnam we bombed big targets, so it was exciting, but we lost a bunch of guys, some were POW’s, good friends of mine. When I got out of the Navy I flew for Continental Airlines. A perk was free flying passes, which came in handy later on as I became a regular traveler to vintage motorcycle swap meets, riding, and racing in England, New Zealand and Australia.”

“Pilots had about the same hours off as firemen – you’d be gone from home for two or three days and then you’ll be home for two or three days. So I had a lot of time to get things caught up, and I got bored. I had bought a Honda in Japan when I was on a ship, a 1964, one of the little 50cc, it wasn’t the step through, it was a small motorcycle. I was bored with days off and looking at the walls so I thought ‘I’m gonna get another motorcycle to fix up’. I found an old R51 BMW – it wasn’t that old at the time but it needed fixing up, so I got it cheap and I got it running and really enjoyed the hell out of it.”

“Then I found a 1962 Norton Model 50 that had been converted into a dirt bike, amazingly enough most of the bolts and everything on it were replaced with titanium! It was a real piece of work, and got me going on the Nortons. While I was restoring the Model 50, a friend of a friend from work, Jim Forrest, was introduced to me because he was a a similar soul, restoring an Ariel Red Hunter. We hit it off and he said ‘You gotta come on the Wednesday night rides.’ It turned out Jim’s dad was Howard Forrest, the guru behind Mustang motorcycles made in Burbank.

PDO: Didn’t Eddie Arnold did work for Mustang? [Eddie built my 1933 Velocette Mk4 KTT – The Mule]

Paul Adams: “Yeah I was just getting to that! Jim Forrest worked there on the assembly line before he went to College, and one of the guys that worked there was Eddie Arnold. Ed organized a ride every Wednesday night out of his house up on Mount Washington and up the Angeles Crest Highway. Jim said, ‘it’s really a lot of fun you gotta come along,’ so I did and got introduced to that world. Riding with us were Velocette riders John Munoz and Ron Thomas, so I fell in with a really bad lot! They got me going to the CAMA (California Antique Motorcycle Association) rallies every year, that Frank Conley put on. I got into the world of restoring; all these guys showed up with their restored bikes, and you could ride each other’s bikes; we’d ride them around look at them and everything, in those days it was just enthusiasts, it wasn’t a money thing at all. Everybody just did their own work and showed up at gatherings. That was my world, I fell in love with it. I’d been a model airplane junkie when I was a kid, and I wound up just doing restoration after restoration after restoration, because I was hooked on it and really enjoyed it. That started me off and I never looked back. Restoring bikes wasn’t a money thing then, people didn’t do it for money.”

“At one of the rallies there was a 1948 Garden Gate Manx for sale, all apart, so I started looking for parts. In the 1960s the original English bike dealers were still around, they still had parts. So people heard I was looking for Norton parts, and someone said ‘the person you need to meet is Bobby Fleckenstein, he has all of Clarence Cysz’ old parts.’ Cysz was hand handled the Garden Gate Manxes for the Daytona 200 races when the Norton factory team was competing. Bobby had all of Clarence’s parts he had accumulated from about 10 years of factory-sponsored Norton Manxes , from the plunger-framed Garden Gates to the early Featherbeds. That same restoration led me to Tom McGill; he was in Massachusetts but was from Canada, his father was the Norton importer for North America. There is a picture of Tom as a teenager with his father and legendary Norton race tuner Francis Beart; they were all at Daytona together. McGill’s father imported Nortons, but the factory switched over to Indian for their distribution, and McGill just locked everything up in a warehouse. Tom had all kinds of new old stock parts for Garden Gate Manxes and Internationals. Those were my parts sources.”

“When I bought that International at the CAMA rally it was missing things like the oil tank and stuff, but Bobby Fleckenstein had everything. And when Bobby wanted to move on I acquired all of the parts he had. That was led to me restoring a lot of Garden Gate Manxes, and some of the Featherbeds. I had all that crap laying around! They were no brainers. All the racing Nortons I restored are made with mostly new old stock parts, they are accurate all the way down to the hardware; Norton used beveled-edged washers, and all the nuts and bolts were matte chromed, with a zinc base – nobody does that anymore. All my bikes were restored down to that degree of attention, and the only thing I had a problem with was the cloth braided control cable outers that were shellacked; if you try to bend them they crack. But the original oil lines had wire coils inside and around the outside, so when you bent them they didn’t kink and choke off the fuel or oil supply. So my bikes have those kind of correct details, and all the instruments were correct as I had all access to all the data. I had the instruments rebuilt by Dennis Quinlan down in Australia. I paid very close attention to detail, and would stack mine against the Nortons restored in England and mine were better. I just was able to do it right because I had access to all those original parts, thanks to Jim Forrest. And Model Plating was the best chrome plater in the US; NASA used them for special parts on rocket engines. anyway I just fell into all this stuff, and was able to do really good jobs. “

PDO: I’ll say; your Nortons seemed to win Best in Show at every concours I attended, and took class wins at the Legend of the Motorcycle Concours against worldwide competition. But Nortons aren’t your only passion: as mentioned, you’re a Velocette man too, and had several KTTs and early KSSs at times. Tell us about your Venom Clubman?

Paul Adams: “The bike I rode on all those Velocette rallies came from a neighbor, Don West in Palos Verdes. It had originally been sold by a San Diego dealer, and later acquired by Steve Tillett. He found it hard to start and traded it to Don for his BMW. Don brought it to a couple of the CAMA rallies but he was getting up in age – if he’s still alive he’d be about 105. He sold it to me in the mid-1970s, so I’ve had it for 50 years. My friend Mick Felder, another neighbor on the coast of SoCal, invited me to a Velocette Club Spring Opener. That’s when I really had a purpose for the Velocette, so I started riding it all the time, on the 1000-mile Summer Rallies. I’d retired by then and could ride on the rallies I wanted, always on that Clubman.”

PDO: You have three other Velos coming up for sale at Mecum’s 2025 Las Vegas sale; a 1939 MAC, a ’61 Scrambler, and a crazy one-of-one Thruxton Scrambler. What’s the story with that one?

Paul Adams: “My Scrambler is unique, and documented as the only Thruxton-engined Scrambler ever built by Velocette. It was a special order from the factory by one of the ‘canal zone’ guys living in Panama, who all ordered British bikes direct from various factories to ride down there. Bill Hannah wound up with it, and he converted to look like a strandard Thruxton, so the only thing that was still looked like the Scrambler was the frame. That’s the way I got it, but luckily Bill saved all the original Scrambler parts and it was all in great shape, so I converted right back to how it came from the factory. Then I used all the Thruxton bodywork and combined it with parts from Yashiko Thomas after Ron died. That used a Scrambler frame too. It looks like a brand new bike, but it’s a bitsa.“

PDO: Since you’ve been at it so long, how do you see the collector motorcycle scene changing over the years?

Paul Adams: “The motorcycle scene has developed over the decades especially in California, at some point it stopped being the CAMA rally when the car guys drifted in, or I guess they were wannabe be car guys but were priced out of the market. They brought all these car collector attitudes to the bike scene, like you gotta have matching numbers, provenance, and on and on. The collector bike scene turned it into what it is today, a money game. The first to go were the Vincent owners, and then of course the Brough Superior guys got into it, once everybody figured out that’s where the money was. We had a lot of fun before guys got priced right out of it. Luckily I got all my bikes early, and I’ve had my fun so it’s time to move on.”

PDO: Are you keeping any bikes?

Paul Adams: “I still have the bike John Munoz left me in his will, a rigid MSS with Swallow sidecar. I’m keeping my ‘Norton 4’ four-cylinder creation, and I can still ride that in my old age, it’s push button with electric start. I also have my Triumph pre-unit TR6C TT, I still ride that and just redid the engine. I was having problems with seizures, and I rebuilt it twice, finding things like worn out cams and stuff. I figured it was a timing problem that was causing it to seize, but the last time I took it apart I was blowing off the cylinder head and noticed bubbles coming up around the valve seats; turns out the head was cracked around both valve seats. I called Bill Getty, he goes all the way back to the early days, and he sorted me out with a new cylinder head, and it’s been no problems since, it runs great.”

PDO: Any further thoughts you’d like to share?

Paul Adams: “One of the highlights of my career as a restorer and sometimes racer was in New Zealand. After Continental Airlines went bankrupt I returned to the the space world and went to work at Hughes Aircraft as a Flight Director of satellite launches. One day at work I got a call from a Ken McIntosh who wanted to talk about Nortons.  It led to him inviting me down to go vintage racing at Pukekohe, near Auckland.  I was a guest of Ken, we became good friends, and I kept going back for over 20 years!  In the course of their events they always brought in noted racers as guests of honor and one of them was John Surtees. I met him at Ken’s house on my first trip down there, and we hung around a little bit, and on my second trip down I arrived early and had to stay at a motel; John was there too, just the two of us, and we were eating breakfast and hit it off, not talking about bikes so much, and he offered to loan me one of his Manxes to ride at Goodwood Revival! That that was a highlight of my so-called racing career – to get an offer from a ride from Sir John Surtees. But all I could think of was ‘what if I dropped one of his bikes?’ I couldn’t do it! I dropped my Nortons more than once, but that’s racing.”

While John Surtees is a hero, there’s room for another in this story, and Paul has always been one of mine, ever since I read that 1986 Classic Bike article, which inspired me to start collecting bikes myself. Have a look at the remarkable Paul Adams Collection coming up for sale, it’s a corker, and if you want some really special, rare machines…call your bank manager.