me and Wayne have been posting alot of pictures of antique motorcycles in our friend Curvy's thread and after many months of riding on his generous coat tails we feel the need to strike out on our own. with the recent opening of Motorcyclepedia to the public the time has come to share with everyone here at advrider what we've been privvy to for....40 years. :eek1 yes 40 years. motorcyclepedia is the lifetime collection of Ted and Jerry Doering of more Indians, Harley's, Excelsiors, Hendersons, Excelsior Hendersons, Ace's, Merkels, Thors', Clevelands, Pope's, Marsh & Metz's, 45's, 4 cylinders, singles, 8 valve's, board track racers, hill climbers, choppers, sidecars, trikes, pacers, drag bikes, servi cars, kettenkrads (ok there is only one) etc etc etc than you can shake a stick at this side of Alabama. why drag it out? there can be only one and without further ado to start things off wayne says we have to start with the Spacke Deluxe. Hail to the king.
the Spacke Deluxe is the result of 3 years worth of a deranged collusion between one man with a twisted vision and one man with the ability to make it happen. not many people chose 50 inch steel antique hay rake wheels when planning a custom motorcycle but than again not many people chose the Spacke V twin as the power plant, and even fewer chose to mate 2 of them together. do the math.
this thing was built to look old. vast sums of money were saved in chrome and nickel plating by chosing rust and bare metal as the finish of choice, and it makes upkeep a lot simpler too while you're bullshitting.
loud pipes save lives but I'll take a distributor any day of the week when it comes to distributing high voltage around.
It's all fun until you pull up to the gas pump and someone asks if that's the new Harley..... Tom in Salem
all right then. dinner's been served. where were we? spacke twin? one shot of the brute in full sail and then it's on to Cleveland. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O69L2mO9y-4
I know someone somewhere will forgive me for posting an X3 shot. moving right along. Cleveland. I'll tell you everything I know which isn't much but it is what it is. I stared at this thing for years, never paid much attention other than it was weird. with piles of 4 cylinder Ace's to stare it it just never registered much more than a who cares. but I was more than a little surprised recently when on reading some in the Sucher book that the damn thing was actually a 2 stroke. :huh its been part of an ongoing education spending so much time with these relics. I just haven't had a mechanically analytical mind but it's starting to come. what does THAT do??? so lets have a look at a Cleveland 2 banger.
from what I can gather the Cleveland 2 stroke was somewhere between a Yugo and a Ford Maverick. they weren't exactly lining up to buy them but according to Sucher they were popular with delivery drivers and city commuters cos they was cheap and they was cheap. hardly serious contender for board track racing but it beat walking.
this caught my eye. seems VTEC wasn't exactly something Honda came up with to juice a Civic. these variable exhaust chambers are/were more common than I realized. I can just see the owners manual. For more power push the exhaust lever forward. right on.
what really caught my eye was the exhaust and intake sharing common space on the front of the cylinder. :eek1 whoa. weird sit there but if it worked who's to say what was right or wrong?
That seat look like a Minneapolis Moline. Reminds me of the tales told by my Dad and uncles about some of the contraptions they made up during the depression. They had a Model T with seat and controls set up so they could drive with their heads sticking out the top. Back then whatever was laying around the farm yard for free was all they had to work with. Between the 4 of them they didn't have 2 coins to rub together.
talk about a contraption. we've got the gear housing made to hang back to create a perch to bolt shaft driven magneto on to. christ talk about archaic this is a major engine component manufactured to act as a wing to bolt another major component to. this just struck me as really weird.
it won't win any awards but after spending a few minutes investigating it I did come away with a new appreciation for the Cleveland 2 smoker.
