for you young bucks who think the japanese motorcycle industry commenced with production of the 86 gsxr 750/1100 rice rockets....think again. the japanese at the end of WW2 in 1945 really had no viable means of transportation. what they did have was in ruins and no immediate way to produce much of anything. the brilliant engineer Soichiro Honda copied what H-D initially did....which was clipping a small air cooled motor onto a bicycle. Honda gave the idea a new twist by using a small motor to drive the rear wheel thru a friction roller...then applying the same tech to the front wheel later on. the honda cub came next which was the original step-thru and still in production to this day. one of the really wild things honda offered in the 50's was the "MotorWheel". see pic. the idea was that it was an all-in-one self contained drive assembly. you simply bolted the wheel to the front or rear of your bike or small cycle, attached a gas tank, and off you went. pretty awesome that some still exist....probably a few more than we know about.Honda_motorwheel jpg.jpg
back in the day there was an American manufacture of the 'Chicken Motor'. It was a small two stroke motor that mounted to the steering head of the bicycle frame and used a frame mounted handle to engage the friction wheel to the front tire. Honda has always been leading the Japanese manufactures technology.
tried to link pics from the web but keep getting invalid something or another. Just do image search on chicken motor bicycle.
Last edited by mrlogix; 08-25-2016 at 11:42 PM.
hey john: i believe that set-up was marketed by sears under the J.C.Higgins clip-on bicycle motor if not mistaken. all i know is that i lusted after one as a punk child.img_4.jpgOriginally Posted by mrlogix
I've seen motor wheels before John but not a Honda model. The ones I've seen we're actually American made in Chicago if I'm not mistaken. Regardless, thanks for posting......LOVE the old stuff of days gone by, very important to be educated on such things.
steam punk?
Love all of this old mechanical stuff I find it quite interesting. Good find guys!
hey tom: wonderful vid you put up on that megala. that was news to me. i have seen a few clips and stills on rotary-radial plane motors but never one applied to a cycle. just the idea of an entire engine spinning around a fixed crankshaft is extraordinarly crazy....but on a bike? wow!
yeah but it was nuts, the bike couldn't idle or come to a full stop without killing the motors.. you had to pump fuel and oil down to all those cylinders it was nuts. I was dreaming up a way do it with tiny 2-strokes in between the mags on a central clutch in the hubs of both the front and rear wheels, maybe total cc's would be like 500-600cc's between both wheels.. the advantage is no gearbox and direct power transmission to the ground... the Nazis were still working on it up until the end of the war.
Last edited by Gloomshadow; 08-26-2016 at 04:47 PM.
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