Incentive for next year's season

[Fire-medic]

Here in south Florida, it's getting into prime weather for riding. Next month is a Dania Beach FL AMCA event (just south of Ft. Lauderdale), which has several hundred bikes of all vintages show-up for a great show. You see all-kinds of bikes, some are as-discovered, some are restored. All are entertaining. Here are some pics to do the same.

March is Daytona Bike Week, I'll be there!

Here's a mix of bike pics from FL events, and a couple of shots from the H-D Museum in WI. Does the engine layout of that last bike look familiar? It was being considered for production before the VMax was released, at the time the H-D management team bought the business from AMF. They had also been working on what became the Evolution engine, and in the money crunch of new management after the AMF buyout, they could only afford to release one engine design. So, the 'traditional,' air-cooled one got the production 'go-ahead,' so the existing H-D owners wouldn't be traumatized by being faced with a liquid-cooled V-4. It's interesting to note that the VMax, released shortly after the AMF H-D sell-off, lasted until 2007, well-into the second engine redesign by Harley, the Evolution superceded by the Twin-Cam in 1999.

As a sort-of Christmas present for the house, I just had installed a fiber-optic phone & internet (ATT) and the difference in upload is dramatic. I often would wait minutes for a single photo to upload, and if I tried to upload multiples at-once, forget it! Sometimes it just wouldn't ever load them! And, if I wanted to upload say, ten pictures, I'd have to be resigned to it taking more time than I was willing to spend at the keyboard. Now, a pic takes about 15 seconds, so I'll be able to post more pics, more-quickly. :clapping:

 

[Jan Bee]

The Henderson and Kaw triple i like the best.

 

[Kronx]

What in the world is that Hercules? Never heard of that and that motor almost looks like some old 70s vacuum cleaner. I'm going to have to look those up!

There's a pretty big vintage scene here in St. Louis. During the warmer months they do a big Vintage Bike Night once a month at one of the local breweries. Definitely a cool place to go to see some interesting custom jobs. There's also a shop here that has all sorts of very rare classics come and go through there.

One Saturday while taking my V-Max for spin back in the wine country of Missouri, I stopped at a gas station to fill up and there was an older gentleman decked out in the old school cafe racer gear standing next to a Norton he rebuilt. His occupation is making custom airplane parts for old and obscure aircraft. It was a beautiful bike, and he was a super interesting guy. He also gave me some good advice on the local roads to ride on which were some of the best!

 

[Foxviewnet]

What in the world is that Hercules? Never heard of that and that motor almost looks like some old 70s vacuum cleaner. I'm going to have to look those up!

There's a pretty big vintage scene here in St. Louis. During the warmer months they do a big Vintage Bike Night once a month at one of the local breweries. Definitely a cool place to go to see some interesting custom jobs. There's also a shop here that has all sorts of very rare classics come and go through there.

One Saturday while taking my V-Max for spin back in the wine country of Missouri, I stopped at a gas station to fill up and there was an older gentleman decked out in the old school cafe racer gear standing next to a Norton he rebuilt. His occupation is making custom airplane parts for old and obscure aircraft. It was a beautiful bike, and he was a super interesting guy. He also gave me some good advice on the local roads to ride on which were some of the best!

Looks like a rotary engine on the Hercules. Never seen one before but looks like some ingenuity went into the design.

 

[Fire-medic]

I am familiar w/the Hercules, and yes, it's a Wankel. In the early 1960's Wankel licensed his technology to the major manufacturers, GM, Mazda, Ford, and others bought them. The only auto manufacturer that brought a vehicle forward to market was the Mazda. Twin-rotor Mazdas were very powerful, but they were thirsty. Still The Mazda RX-3 was very successful, and begat many other members in the Mazda family. GM had its Corvette-based Wankel, Mercedes had the C-111 but they never developend them into a car sold to the public. The Mazdas were often put into other vehicles for backyard 'specials,' one that I used to see here in south FL in the 1970's was a Ford-Courier minitruck. Last I saw it, it was owned by a Chevy mechanic at a Ft. Lauderdale dealership. Still running.

The Hercules was an NSU motorcycle and it was the first production bike using a Wankel powerplant. Another was the Van Veen OCR, try bringing up that name with your local 'know-it-all' gearhead. In theses days, anyone can 'google,' but I learned about this stuff the old-fashioned way, by seeking out info in obscure publications, books, and research journals, think Kevin Cameron without the mechanical skills or racing mechanic chops.

Of course there's the Suzuki Wankel engine bike which had a very limited lifespan in production, w/weird styling its first year, the instrument panel was a transverse round pod and the taillight matched it's shape, perhaps to provide 'symmetry.' One of the failed designs of Giorgetto Giugiaro of which there are few. He designed such iconic cars as the DeTomaso Mangusta, http://www.motor1.com/news/86817/de-tomaso-mangusta/ the VW Rabbit (version 1) and Scirocco. One of my FL friends bought a Mangusta in the early 1970's and it was a real spaceship. Not much on the roads then looked like one, and it pre-dated the Lamborghini Countach by a few years.

Anyway, back the the Wankel engine bikes. Did you know, YAMAHA bought one of those licenses? Supposedly, they had done their development work (the license allowed you to keep your engineering breakthroughs) and were poised to release multiple (!) displacement Wankel-engined bikes, but they withdrew from the business plan at the last minute. Suzuki tried, and while their bike ran and was sold, three years later, the game was up, and they stopped production.

So the Hercules was 'the first' rotary engine bike, the Van Veen OCR was a very low-production bike about the same time, and Yamaha abandoned their plan to release multiple displacements powered by Wankel engines. Now these bikes are footnotes in motorcycling history, like the Hesketh, the Britten, and the Armstrong (the bike that gave Eric Buell his first intro to production motorcycles).

 

[Kronx]

Thanks for the information! That Mangusta was a sharp looking car IMO! I wonder how may of that 400 are still around? Call me odd, but I really dig the look of it!