1949 Sunbeam S8 500cc

Dry Stored for past 9 years, good compression but will require a proper service prior to road use. The bike has matching numbers to the V5 and I have personally owned this bike for the past 8 years and it has formed part of my private collection of historic bikes that have been used in my showroom as visual displays. MOT & Tax Exempt. I purchased the bile around 8 years ago just because it was such a lovely example,, what i know about the bike is that in 1995 the bike was purchased by local engineer David Watts of Shefford who set about a full restoration of the bike to standard seen here today. This took David around 4 years to complete to the standard seen here today and has been ridden just over 300 miles since its restoration.

The Sunbeam S8 is a British motorcycles designed by Erling Poppe with styling loosely based on the BMW R75 designs that were acquired as war reparations by BSA (full rights to the Sunbeam brand had been acquired from AMC in 1943). Built in Redditch, the unusual engine layout was similar to that of a car. The engine was a longitudinally mounted inline vertical OHC 500 cc twin based on an experimental 1932 BSA design (the Line-Ahead-Twin - LAT) with coil ignition and wet sump lubrication which, through a dry clutch, drove a shaft drive to the rear wheel. The inline engine made this technologically feasible—horizontally-opposed ("flat") twin engines on BMW motorcycles had already used shaft drives following the system employed by Nimbus in 1918.

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