Norton 16H

The Norton 16H is the designation of a long-running British motorcycle built by Norton from 1911 to 1954, built around a single-cylinder 490 cc side-valve engine with a bore and stroke of 79 by 100 mm. The H stands for Home, to tell it apart from the Colonial export model with more ground clearance that appeared in 1921. It was thought of as the poor man's Norton beside the racing machines, but it became the workhorse of the British forces: the army began buying the WD16H in 1936 and kept doing so through the Second World War, a ten-year record for one make, and nearly 100,000 military Nortons were produced. After 1945 many were sold off and converted to civilian use, and from 1947 the machine gained telescopic forks, staying in production until the mid 1950s.