Blueprint for girder front end and harley rigid frames
The mixture patiently stirred around within the crankcase until pressure created by the piston’s downward thrust pushed the fresh charge up through the transfer ports and into the combustion chamber where ignition took place. A tiny carburetor fed pre-mix oil and gasoline that was stored in the peanut-shaped 1.75-gallon gas tank to a single intake port before the air/fuel mixture found its way into the crankcase as the piston began its upswing towards top dead center. That’s when Italian-made 2-stroke tiddlers such as the M-50 and Rapido replaced the German-based single in the model line during the Swinging Sixties.Īs 2-stroke designs go, Harley’s original DKW-based 125cc engine was based on the piston-port concept. The big bucks then, as now, rested with the Big Twin models.Įven so, the S-125 proved to be efficient and reliable enough for Harley to keep it, and later variations based on the original, in the lineup through 1966. Rather, it’s “More like a fable complete with moral, which is that having a good idea isn’t always enough.” Simply, small bikes generally equate to small profits for the mother company. But in his book Harley-Davidson: The American Motorcycle, author Allen Girdler suggests the Model S isn’t a success story. Moreover, the bike was rather successful in terms of overall sales, its 10,000 units sold in 1948 accounting for about one-third of all Harleys sold that year.
Thus was born the Model S-125 (although, depending on the source, the bike was also called the M-125, or simply the Model S or Model M). That was of particular importance for Harley because the Milwaukee-based company was in want of an affordable, low-maintenance model to attract entry-level riders (read: beginners, consisting mainly of young people) to dealerships. In any case, as a reward for its role in supplying the Allied armed forces with more WLAs than Hitler and his gang could blow up, Harley-Davidson was awarded its own set of DKW blueprints.
All this sharing makes you wonder: Had obscure countries like Iceland or Andorra expressed interest in supporting their own motorcycle industries, might they too have gained access to the DKW for their prototypes? And, in a weird twist of fate, the little DKW even helped Yamaha of Japan enter the motorcycle market in 1955 with its YA-1. Later, with the rise of the Soviet-backed Eastern Bloc of nations, Poland’s engineers were made privy to the DKW’s blueprints, leading to creation of the SHL M03 for adventurous comrades to ride. Rasmussen called his small yet efficient piston-port induction 2-stroke engine Das Kliene Wunder, which roughly translates to “The Little Marvel.” In later years, people in Nazi Germany knew the bike that it powered as the DKW RT-125, and at war’s end plans for the little motorcycle were judiciously passed along to the U.S., Great Britain and Soviet Union to do with as they pleased.īritain gave BSA (British Small Arms) the nod to build what became known as the Bantam, and the good folks running the Kremlin turned their DKW blueprints over to Soviet industrialists to build what became the Minsk M1A.
Wait, motorcycles? Well, yes, and in this case the reparations included plans for a small bike powered by a 125cc single-cylinder 2-stroke engine originally developed in 1919 by Danish engineer Jorgen Akafte Rasmussen living in Saxony, Germany. Among the booty, the Allies gained access to intellectual property belonging to Nazi Germany for such things as the V1 rocket (space travel, here we come), submarine and jet-propulsion technology - and motorcycles. To the victor go the spoils, and since the Allied Forces (led by the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union) were victorious in World War II, they helped themselves, in the form of war reparations, to some of the loser’s goods.