The story started with the demise of Norton Motors Ltd in the years under Canadian ownership. I had discussions with the lawyer of the Aquilinis, trying to pry the Norton motorcycle business from him. However, what he wanted for it was totally out of the question and had I taken the offer bankruptcy was only a question of months.
The rotary parts and service operation in the old Norton factory continued, underfunded and on an increasingly smaller and less effective scale. After the buyer of the factory, Mr Moore, died a few years later the whole content of the factory was auctioned off in an auction in November 2003.
Richard Negus, “Head of Motorcycles” in Norton’s rotary era, and I bid for the stock, tooling, and drawings and bought the lot. We then set up Norton Motors Ltd in Rugeley, offering the Norton rotary customers with parts and service.
After Richard’s retirement in February 2009 we closed the workshop and integrated the Norton rotary parts cache in Andover Norton, then based in Hungerford. We continued to sell the parts obtained from the Shenstone factory plus a few improvement Richard had developed.
After the move to North Way in October 2019 we finally had the time and manpower to go through the whole ex-Shenstone stock. We unearthed a lot of parts and tooling we had previously suspected to be there but not located.
The stock is now being added to, mainly consumables that were out of stock for years like Bowden cables, brake lines and Yamaha parts that were used in the production of the rotaries. Since we opened the workshop the gaps in our spares stock became obvious and we now re-source parts that were not in stock but needed to run and repair the various rotary models.