A Brief History of Motorcycles (from my perspective)

I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio where there were always ample numbers of Harley-Davidson Motorcycles roaring around the neighborhood. It never occurred to me that I would actually own one of these things someday but I did always want one. I was never able to convince my mom and dad that I should have one of these contraptions so the only choice available to me was to build one. Now this, for an 8 year old, might seem like an insurmountable task but I was willing to go for it.

Actually, at 8 years old, I did not want a Harley (I knew that would be out of reach) but a Whizzer Motorbike did not seem like too much to ask for. Still my parents said no, citing my 8-years as being insufficient age to get a driver's license. So, like I was saying, I decided to build one.

As luck would have it, I had a 0.049cu in engine that came off of a model airplane that my parents, er.. Santa Clause, gave me for Christmas. The reason that I had the engine and not the airplane was that I started it up (on Christmas Day) in the basement of our house. Somehow it got away from me and flew directly into the opposite brick wall, creating hundreds of pieces out of what once was a brand-new model airplane. One of the pieces, still intact, was it's 0.049cu in engine. This was the engine I chose to power my motorbike.

Now my 0.049 engine was 1500 times smaller than my current 1200cc Sportster but, even at the tender age of 8, I realized that I should be able to gear the motor down to provide enough torque to move the bike along. It wouldn't go very fast but any degree of mechanized propulsion would be considered a success. My older brother laughed and said that it was a stupid idea and, furthermore, would never work (He is a Sociologist from Princeton now so I figured that what he knew about things mechanical could be sequestered on the head of a pin.). Only problem is that he WAS right.

I did get to the point of taping the motor to the top-tube of my bicycle with friction-tape, and I did get the motor started (I had replaced the prop with a pulley by this time) but that was as far as it went. I never did get around to actually gearing it down to drive the rear wheel of my bicycle.

The next stage of the saga occurred when about four years later I came into possession of an actual Whizzer motorbike motor. There is a little story behind that one too. My brother and I had built a go-cart powered by a B&S lawn mower motor. But during a test-run he encountered some "driver-induced divergent oscillations" (it was actually a bad steering design that had a rather jerkey response to steering inputs) and it tumbled over dumping him and the engine onto the ground (that image is still vivid in my mind. My emotions were torn because I did not know whether to laugh or feel bad for the go-cart that he wrecked). Anyway all of the oil ran out onto the sidewalk as a result of a crack in the crank case. The motor was trashed.

The motor would run for a few minutes but would then quit due to overheating and lack of proper lubrication. But it ran long enough to get one of our "friends" to trade a real Whizzer Motorbike motor for the busted lawn mower motor (we, of course, did not tell him of the recent accident). I thought we had struck gold with the Whizzer but we were never able to get the dang thing started. I ended up taking the motor completely apart and learned alot about internal combustion engines but not enough to get the thing actually running. To this day, some 50 years later, I still don't know why the motor would not run.

By the time I was sixteen I had pretty much given up on getting a motorbike and had obtained alternate interests, anyway. Cars and Girls. Following that revelation came marriage, pregnancies, kids and poverty, not necessarily in that order.

In the early sixties, while in college, I somehow managed to get ahold of a 1949, 125cc, Indian Scout motorcycle. I did all of the maintenance on it and kept it running for a while until one day while out riding with a friend, the rear wheel just froze, while I was downshifting (the engine was revving up pretty high) . The engine kept running but the rear wheel would not turn. I managed to trailer the bike home and began tearing it down to see what the heck had happened. When I got into the primary drive the cause became obvious. A screw had fallen out of the primary housing (I knew nothing of Loc-Tite then) and jammed the primary chain causing the rear wheel to freeze up. The motor, which had revved up to high rpm, kept turning but since the rest of the drive train had stopped, it ended up twisting the spline shaft in two.

Now the spline shaft was connected directly to the crank which consisted of two rather large flywheels with the piston's connecting rod attached between them. At the high rpm the flywheels stored enough energy to twist the spline shaft in two when the primary chain froze up.
At Hiram College the Physics Department had a machine shop with lathes, milling machines and all kinds of metal-working gizmos and they were accessible on weekends. We didn't have a machinist so it was kind of learn as you go but I was able to manufacture a new spline shaft from scratch. I even managed to sweat the new shaft onto the flywheel. I only had to go to the hospital once to get stitched up after I lost a tug-of-war with the lathe.

While I had the engine apart I got new piston rings, honed the cylinder walls, ground and re-seated the valves and installed new valve springs. I was able to get all these parts because there was an Indian Shop in Kent just 30min from Hiram. Every time I would walk into the shop the proprietor would greet me with "Hello Lucky" as if I should be congratulated for not wraping my bike around a tree between visits. But he generally had the parts I was looking for.

Anyway, I got the old Indian back together and low-and-behold it ran like shit through a goose on X-Lax! But I never trusted it again and ended up selling it for $125. Oh yeah, I recently noticed that restored '49 Indian Scouts are selling for $10,000.

To be continued...