Although the Norton Motorcycles brand has been in existence since 1898, the latest chapter in Norton’s history started in 2008 when Stuart Garner bought the company and moved it from Oregon, USA to the United Kingdom. The new owner embraced the Norton designs, but understood they would have to make some changes to meet today’s market requirements.
The challenge. The small design team at Norton soon realized that the bikes needed to be totally re-engineered from the ground up. In order to sell the motorcycles in regions such as Europe and California, a fuel injection system was necessary to meet environmental regulations. This would require extensive changes to the original bike, which was only designed to run on carburetors.
The solution. Using Pro/ENGINEER, the Norton engineers were able to create all of the parts, as well as complete all of the surfacing for the motorcycles. They also enlisted a computer numerical control system to try out new parts incredibly quickly, and finite element analysis to test the frame and various components.
Result. Norton Motorcycles was able to design three new motorcycles in about 12 months—an incredibly rapid turnaround time. The motorcycles are now in production, with several hundred of the bikes already pre-ordered and paid for. The company is expanding rapidly and plans to double both staff and the size of the facility over the next year, as it starts designing its next line.
Norton designs the most quintessential and famous of British motorcycle brands
Over the past year, Norton Motorcycles’ design team has been meticulously recreating a line of motorcycles to capture the sporty character of the Norton brand, while re-engineering the bikes to support the fuel injection systems needed for today’s environmental requirements.
The first new Norton motorcycles recently rolled off the production line, and the company’s head of design, Simon Skinner, sees that all the hard work that he and his team has put in over the past year has paid off.
Skinner was the first employee hired by the company’s new owner, Stuart Garner. Over a period of 12 months, three new motorcycles in the Commando line were designed, and they are now being manufactured and sold.
Norton’s head of design, Simon Skinner
“It's all quite exciting. The company is growing, we have a full order book, and we’ve pre-sold a few hundred bikes already. We are planning on building just 1,000 bikes this year and nearly 2,000 next year,” Skinner says.
Prior to joining Norton, Skinner was at Triumph for seven years where he used a whole host of PTC products to design Triumph motorcycles.
“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,” Skinner states. “Pro/ENGINEER is a very capable system and represents a good value for all of the capability you get.”
Designing the Commando line. Norton Motorcycles’ Commando line is comprised of three models—the high-end SE version (which has a limited production of 200 bikes that have already been sold), the Café Racer, a traditional-looking sporty bike with low handle bars, and the Sport, the least expensive of the three with a slightly different spec wheel suspension.
In designing the Commando line, Skinner and his team had a very good start in the work that was done by former Norton owner, Kenny Dreer. Skinner explains, “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.”
The biggest challenge facing Norton was re-engineering the bike for a fuel injection system. That meant quite a lot of additional components on the bike, such as engine management systems, sensors, fuse boxes, and a much more comprehensive wiring harness. All of this had to be hidden away on a bike without any fairings or bodywork.
“There is not one component on the bike that we didn't re-engineer in Pro/ENGINEER,” Skinner says. “It took us about twelve months to do that, which is a phenomenally quick time.”
Many additional components were added to the bike
Benefits of Pro/ENGINEER: All-in-one. A main benefit of PTC’s Pro/ENGINEER was that it was a design tool that included everything that Norton Motorcycles needed to get the job done.
“We use Pro/ENGINEER Foundation XE for the majority of our work because it's got everything we need,” Skinner states. “It is quite a comprehensive package and a very good value, which is another reason we wanted to go to PTC products.”
“For example, it's more than capable of doing all the surfacing on a motorbike, and I don't need to add any separate surfacing software,” he continues. “And obviously, the Assembly is very robust and easy to use, as well.”
All the work, from surfacing to structural analysis, was done in Pro/ENGINEER
Norton Motorcycles also uses Pro/MECHANICA to do analysis on frame components, such as swing-arms, and wheels. They have a full CNC (computer numerical control) machine shop next door, and are starting to integrate PTC machining software there as well.
“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,” Skinner says.
“With the computer numerical control of lathes and milling machines, we could design a metal component on a bike in CAD on a Monday morning and have it on the bike on a Tuesday afternoon,” adds Skinner. “The CAD data goes straight to the machine, using PTC software, and out pops a part. We can put it on the bike and try it or even make 50 or 100 production parts—so, it's very robust and quite slick.”
The Next Chapter. With the Commando models designed and launched, Norton is looking ahead to its next line of bikes, as well as to expanding the company. “We’re growing on a daily basis. We employ 30 people here now, and I think the staff levels will easily double by the end of the year,” Skinner says. “Our design team will also grow from six to about a dozen engineers. On the physical location side, we just doubled the production facility; and we have planning permission to double the size of our entire premises.”
In the midst of the expansion, the design team is starting to work on a whole range of new, modern motorcycles for a 2012 launch. “We’re working on number of new products, which will obviously be designed on Pro/ENGINEER,” Skinner states. The first one that Norton will launch is a rotary engine motorcycle; that will predominantly be a race bike. That will be followed by a range of ‘engine motorcycles’ or ‘piston engines,’ but water-cooled, not air-cooled like the Commando.
“The way that Pro/ENGINEER has developed over the past few years, particularly with the introduction of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire, has just made it more user-friendly. It's a lot easier and we can turn out parts and drawings very, very quickly now,” Skinner concludes.
“In addition, the ability to plug into the range of other modules like finite element analysis and surfacing packages if we need it makes Pro/ENGINEER very versatile,” he continues. “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 all that together. It's great that we can just have something at a reasonable cost off-the-shelf.”
Norton is also looking at PTC’s Windchill ProductPoint for Product Data Management (PDM), as the company expands.
“We’ll most likely implement Windchill ProductPoint before the end of the year because we’ll probably have eight or nine seats of Pro/ENGINEER running at once, plus we’ll have three or four active products being developed at the same time. So, we will need a PDM system at that point for sure, and I think Windchill ProductPoint fits the bill.”
Norton Motorcycles Ltd, based in the UK, designs the most quintessential and famous of British motorcycle brands.
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