When a customer sent me pictures of his featherbed Inter to put up on my webpage to sell a decade ago I nearly fell off my chair since the bike looked 100% original in all parts. The bike was painted black and many components that shouldn't were chromed (hence I called it "Zebra") but it was all there, waiting to be put back to the metallic grey. Though I did not plan to buy an Inter I decided I wanted it there and then and, without a quibble, paid the fair price the customer wanted for it.
Looking it up in the production records yielded a pleasant surprise: This was the first featherbed Inter ever produced, earmarked for the Earls Court Show, then sold to Norton's Swiss importer.
With the bike I received a file from its first owner for many years, showing parts and component purchases from many sources since it wasn't easy later in the bike's life to get hold of the relevant Norton parts.

Probably our motorcycle. Unfortunately, I could not find the original of the picture on the left, reproduced in Roy Bacon's "Norton Singles". It looks as if the silver on the petrol tank is the traditional Norton silver, whilst the chassis parts are a darker metallic grey. The Norton parts we have in original finish from those days- notably an instrument panel and an outer primary chaincase- are a darker grey than the petrol tank of our Inter, the paintwork of which looks original, and are most likely the grey the rest of the bike was painted in.

As first-of-the-line bikes were often photographed as templates for the highly-retouched sales brochure pictures, this is most likely the machine you see in its current state at the head of the page.

It must be said the bike looked far better in its original colour.