From: James Shanks (n1vbn@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Apr 17 2006 - 03:46:41 PDT
The first plant was in Moscow and went into
production in late 1940 early 1941.
Spring of 1941 Operation Barbarossa launches
and the Russians after their army wasn't able to
blunt the invasion declared the Motorcycle plant
to be a vital to the was effort and moved it to
the town of Irbit, Siberia, Russia where it is
today. (Irbit is in the foothills of the Ural
mountain range hence how it acquired the
nickname.) The Russians deny it of course but BMW
still has the signed documentation. The Russians
acknowledge that the Germans did help in
acquiring the motorcycle plant.
At it's peak the plant employed 60,000 people
and was capable postwar of making 800 motorcycles
a day. Now they make around 1500-2000 bikes a
year and occupy leass than 10 percent of the
floor space in the original factory. I have a
tape showing the plant in full production in 1993
and 90% of the machine tools they were using then
were made in the USA and were still stamping out
parts. They were acquired in WWII under FDR's
Lend-Lease program.
Original bike was a 750cc 22 HP Flathead which
was in production from 1940 to 1955 when they
ceased production and retooled to produce the
650cc 35 HP OHV engine. The tools and dies for
the Flathead were sold to the Chiang Jiang
Aircraft Company of Shanghai, China where they
still produce the bike today. Which you can still
buy new in 6 or 12 volt versions. The design has
not been upgarded since the Chinese started
production and still looks exactly like it did in
1940 same light and all.
The OHV 650 (iron jugs) was produced from 1955
until early 1992 when it was replaced with a new
design using western parts to make it more
reliable and was bumped from 650 to 750cc at 40
HP and made of all aluminum.
The Dnepr factory was built in 1955 to provide
motorcycles for the Red Army and allies while the
Irbit plant switched to full non-military
production.
By the way the "Gear-up" model Ron purchased is
also available to any army in the world and comes
stock with a PK model 7.62 Mounted belt fed
machine gun!!! Unfortunately BATF won't let em
sell em to us.. Yup, they have gone back to the
roots so to speak.
I own a 1998 model called the Tourist which is
650cc and not a bad bike but they are not what
you'd call highway machines. backroads and
byroads or no roads they are a blast.
James Shanks
1985 M-1009
1998 IMZ 8.103
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Tue Jul 18 2006 - 21:43:59 PDT