Norton Motorcycles Rebooted
Norton Motorcycles is certainly one of those legendary companies—and not only because it has been around since 1898—that creates products for a discerning clientele. One of the challenges faced by owner Stuart Garner, who bought the company in 2008 and moved it to Donnington Park, Derby, UK, from the U.S. was re-engineering some of the products produced—the bikes had carburetors, not fuel injectors, which made them unable to meet some environmental regulations in various locales—as well as coming up with new designs for the bikes.
For purposes of design, Norton hired Simon Skinner as chief designer, who had been with another of the motorcycle greats, Triumph.
For the design and engineering work, Norton deploys Pro/ENGINEER tools from PTC (ptc.com), which was convenient for Skinner, who noted, “Coming from Triumph, I was familiar with PTC’s Pro/ENGINEER design tool, but that wasn’t the only reason we chose Pro/ENGINEER for Norton Motorcycles.” He said that it is “a very capable system and represents a good value for all of the capability you get.”
One of the first assignments tackled was designing the Commando line—which consists of three models, the SE, Café Racer, and Sport—based on the work that had been started by Kenny Dreer, the former owner of Norton. Said Skinner: “We used Dreer’s bike as a basis, so our bikes look very similar to his, but from an engineering point of view, they are completely different.”
In fact, he went on to say: “There is not one component on the bike that we didn’t re-engineer in Pro/ENGINEER. It took us about 12 months to do that, which is a phenomenally quick time.”
Among the tools deployed by Norton is Pro/ENGINEER Foundation XE. Skinner said it is used “for the majority of our work because it’s got everything we need.” He added, “It’s more than capable of doing all the surfacing on a motorbike, and I don’t need to add any separate surfacing software. I don’t have to go and spend over £10,000 a seat for a CAD surfacing package—so that was important to us. And obviously, the Assembly is very robust and easy to use as well.”
Pro/MECHANICA is used for analysis of frame components. And PTC machining software is used for machining in the company’s CNC shop. “It’s really an ‘art-to-part’ process where we can design a part in CAD and literally, a couple of days later, we have a part for the bike which is fully integrated with our machine shop.” They’re both prototyping parts as well as making limited production runs.
“The fact that we can buy an off-the-shelf piece of software that does 99% of what we need as a motorcycle manufacturer just makes my life a little bit easier, rather than having to go around trying to find a module for this and a module for that, and try and piece that together. It’s great that we can just have something at a reasonable cost off-the-shelf,” Skinner stated.
And the new owner is undoubtedly happy with that price-sensitivity, too.
