Antique & Classic Cars Blog

In the bike-show piece below, I mention the Ural motorcycle story I heard at a party 15 years ago–that Urals looked so much like BMWs because the Soviets got hold of a BMW production facility during the war, seized the tooling, and turned out the same bikes with a different badge.

The story sounds good, given the resemblance, but none of the PBS documentaries I’ve seen has indicated that the Germans established motorcycle manufacturing plants near Russia or that the Soviets invaded Germany and swiped one.

The Ural website gives two stories, the “official” one, in which the Soviets slyly purchased Bimmer bikes through Sweden and reverse engineered them, and the “more likely” one, in which Germany provided them with blueprints and casting molds as part of a friendly agreement (the Molotov/von Ribbentrop Pact). Either way, production began in Moscow but the Soviets moved it into the Ural mountains for fear the Germans would bomb it, hence the name.

Yeah, history. It’s interesting but so much of it is yesterday’s news. Point is, Urals are cool and they look a lot like BMWs because they derive directly from the war-era Bimmer R71–that whole boxer engine, hang the cylinders out horizontally to minimize vibration, improve airflow for cooling and provide easy access for maintenance thing.

(I like the Ural sidecar look but if Schwarzenegger, the Terminator himself, can crash a sidecar bike, they’re not to be approached cavalierly on the first ride.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Car parts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.