[DavidGraves]

I hope to have attached an image of my other single road bike.....have owned it about 25 years.....last BMW I bought.....have never gotten round to it but enjoy pride of ownership nonetheless.

It has an iron barrel.

[cyrusb]

NICE You know I love it just the way it is....

[Bilgemaster]

Talk about "patina"...Looks like a mid-'30s R4. How the devil did you come by that? You had a relative in the postwar occupation send it back home in the hold of a Liberty Ship?

[DavidGraves]

Bilgeperson

You went directly to the central part of this mystery.

Earliest retailer of BMW's in US (that I knew of) was a fellow up in Pennsylvania in 1953-54 or so.

I bought the bike from the widow of a small blacksmiths' shop owner...a few miles south of Fredericksburg Virginia.

It had been brought there for magneto work in the late sixties while I was in high school....when I first saw it.

I went back about it several years later and shop owner was dead. His wife said I could look around and sold it to me after I found it around the back in her woods.

A friend and I drug it out of the woods and put in in my Dodge van and then I headed off to Oregon on one of our multiple moving forays.

Maybe a GI brought it back....but how ?

Maybe a diplomat brought it with his personal allowance during stint in DC.

Maybe it was rafted ashore on the Outer Banks of Carolina from a German Under Sea BOOT so they could ride it to Hatteras for sniztzel.

I dunno.

   

[cyrusb]

Talk about "patina"...Looks like a mid-'30s R4. How the devil did you come by that? You had a relative in the postwar occupation send it back home in the hold of a Liberty Ship?

You mean there were no B.M.W.'s for sale in America at that time?

[Bilgemaster]

You mean there were no B.M.W.'s for sale in America at that time?

According to How to Restore Your BMW Twin, 1955-1985  by Mick Walker on page 10, "1938 [...] saw the first BMW motorcycles imported and sold on a commercial basis in the USA."  The R4 model had already ceased production two years earlier.

[cyrusb]

Well I'll be damned. I wonder why no sales between the wars?  That bike reminds me of a Zundapp. Do they share parentage?

[Paul W]

I suppose you could optimistically call that bike in "oily rag" condition. It could have done with a  bit more oil on the rag, though! 

[Bilgemaster]

Well I'll be damned. I wonder why no sales between the wars?  That bike reminds me of a Zundapp. Do they share parentage?

According to Wikipedia's article on Zündapp's KS 750 at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCndapp_KS_750 , the heavy hand of the wartime Wehrmacht was the motive factor in the similarities between it and BMW's R75 model. In fact, they wanted BMW to just produce the Zündapp model, which they much preferred in tests, but finally settled for interchangibility of many parts. Hence the resemblance.

I was lucky enough just a couple of years ago to enjoy a nice long day's jaunt through the southern Ohio countryside on a buddy's '50s Zündapp KS601 "Green Elephant", basically the peacetime descendant of their KS701, and also, more briefly, on his mid-90s BMW R100RS, the very last of its big "Airheads", and I felt MUCH more at home on the Zündapp. Any Bullet owner with the wherewithal to get their hands on one of those big Zündapps would do well to do so.

And to our original poster David: Should you have any serious hankering of getting that beast of yours running, shoot me a PM, and I'll be happy to share my buddy's contact info. He's basically "Mr. Zündapp" in North America and might well be crucial if that thing's ever to thump along again. My German's also pretty fair, if you think that might help with needed parts contacts and such.

[DavidGraves]

Hey Bilge

An older local friend has one of the Zundapp WWII sidecar rigs and it is an amazing machine.....It has, I think, three gear ranges including a low low low that was intended for the machine keeping pace in a long line of marching soldiers....and air cooled !

Perhaps most amazing about it is that the driven outboard wheel actually runs thru a differential ...meaning it is not in lockstep with the bike driven wheel...to better go around corners.....

This neighbor is a Danish national who bought the rig while living in London and then restored it himself after moving here to Oregon.

He also has Nimbus....rides them all rain or no rain.

Sorry for the rant but these older bikes get me all excited.   

[Bilgemaster]

It rains like 250 days a year in Denmark. It makes Seattle seem like Death Valley. In fact, your buddy might feel somehow ill at ease if it WEREN'T raining, 'cause he's got an innate and finely developed sense of "hygge", as described here: https://behere.co/journal/rainy-days-and-hygge/

Say, those Nimbus things are fine rides. Anyone'd be lucky to own one. As for that low-low gearing of the wartime Zündapps, that was, just as you said, a feature required of them under the German military standards in order to keep pace with soldiers afoot.