A friend of mine recently completed a 30-year rebuild of a Jawa....
"A what?", I hear you ask.
Jawa is an old and revered bike builder from central Europe in what eventually became Czechoslovakia - now simply the Czech Republic.
They are most famous for building Speedway bikes (that's real Speedway, not that watered-down mamby-pamby Nascar crud!), demon-fast two-stroke MX bikes and hordes of smokey 250 and 350cc two-stroke twins that become Eastern Europe's family minivan in the Communist era - when fitted with a sidecar.
In the 1950s, they were building GP-winning race bikes: 500 four-stroke twins. When the competition got faster, they added a second camshaft into the head, and won a bit more.
Trouble is, they only built 9 of them; they were effectively the equal of today's CRT MotoGP bikes and each bike came with a spare engine. They had some features that other factories would miraculously "invent" decades later: square-section frame tubing, 16" front wheel, etc, etc.
(I'll get back on topic soon, promise!)
My friend Lofty saw one of these bikes being raced when he was a kid - (at age eight, he was already nearly 6 ft tall!) - in SOUTH AFRICA. One of a handful of men to win World championships on two wheels and four was a guy called Paddy Driver (great name for a racer!), who had one of these Jawas on the world (ie, European) championship series; because of the seasonal differences a lot of Euro bike (and car) racers came to compete in either Australia/New Zealand or South African racing series during the Euro winter with their machines, which had by now done a year's hard racing; they often sold the machines to cashed-up locals so that they had the money to buy the next year's machine in Europe for the following season.
A car or bike which had done well in the Euro summer would often be worth more than it had cost new, as 'modifications' were almost always needed to even ex-works machinery to keep them competitive, so a winner was likely to keep on winning. Thus there are still a lot of very interesting race cars & bikes in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.
Paddy's Jawa was sold a few times and ended up with a young guy who was killed racing it in Cape Town; his heartbroken father dictated that the bike be broken up and buried in his garden....
Somehow, one of the engines (probably the "spare") turned up in a Norton frame; my friend Lofty acquired it as part-payment of a debt over 30 years ago. I first saw it as a lump of metal under his bench, covered in filings, dirt, butts and all the crap that accumulates under the bench of a guy who has 30 bikes, three kids and a demanding, bitchy, wife.
I last saw it almost exactly 20 years ago and it was in that same state.
Well, time moved on - and Lofty worked sporadically on the Jawa around a messy divorce, the death of a newborn, parents, friends, etc. Remember, he had only an engine.
There are just two other bikes known to exist in their entirity: one is in a museum in California (
http://www.motosolvang.com/bike_pages/1 ... _Racer.htm), the other is in a private collection in Europe. Lofty went to California and took hundreds of photos - then got a friend who lived nearby to return to get detailed pictures as the work progressed.
Over the years, he had many, many letters - this was before e-mail or the internet, remember! - to and from both the museum and the Italian private owner.
He tracked down the house where the family of the young deceased racer had lived decades before - and unbelievably, got the permission of the current owners to dig up their lawn! He actually found a part of the square-section frame - which gave him it's exact wall-thickness & dimensions. Tubing that size is no longer available - but he manged to get a foundry to recreate several lengths of EXACTLY the same material - chemically and dimensionally.
In stripping the engine, he found that the crank shaft was bizarrely made (his home language is not English, my command of his home language is poor and his description was clouded by rum...
) in that the con-rods and weights were not parallel - until it was all torqued up to EXACTLY the specified torque. For whatever reason - and I believe it was that once used and disassembled, they were irrevocably damaged - the bearings needed to be replaced.
Of course, they were no longer available either and were VERY specialised, so he contacted a Japanese bearing company to see if they could reproduce them.
At this point you should know that all records of who had bought the original nine bikes, all plans about their design, all the engineering rawings and many special dedicated jigs and tools were lost in a fire in the 1970s.....
Work on reproducing the frame, wheels, bodywork etc continued over many years: one of the quandries about restoring a racing machine is, what stage in its evolution do you aim to reproduce? These things evolved very quickly during a season, as the riders needed to race for money nearly every weekend just to survive and they needed to stay competitive: one of the first thjings to go was the 16" wheel, as racing tyres were hard to come by and the handling was frightening.
Interestingly, the owners of the two other bikes both gradually become less and less communicative as Lofty's project progressed - as it became apparent that yes, he WAS going to recreate a third bike, they obviously saw the rarity factor of theirs going down and were less willing to share information. Funny hw the minds of rich people work, isn't it?
Back to the bearings: eventually, a couple of years after he'd entrusted his only surviving bearings to the Japanese factory representative, he had a visit from the same man, who bowed, shook his hand, and passed over two new bearings.
Of course Lofty was ecstatic, but asked after the cost, fearing the worst.
The Japanese man smiled and said, "There is no charge; if there was, you couldn't pay it." They had had anything up to 400 different engineers working on those bearings for nearly 9 months, trying to figure out how the Czechs had made them, fifty years before! Apparently they had never seen anything like them, materially or design-wise - and struggled to recreate that level of technology, with all the modern facilities at their disposal!
Anyway, the engine was built, the bike was completed - but along the way, more tragedy struck my dearest friend - his 31-year-old daughter died in her sleep; he found her dead in her bed one morning. The rebuild of the Jawa is dedicated to her memory: Beverly Pretorious.
Remarkably, he was able to get the bike's original owner and racer, Paddy Driver, reunited with his old machine: it's now in a museum outside Johannesburg.
http://www.jawaczownersclub.co.uk/image ... Paddy2.jpgRead the story here:
http://www.mctrader.com.au/news-and-rev ... 77372.aspxSo, specialist engine bearings aren't new - and I suspect that there's a reason the bearings on a CBR125R are different.....