A Military Harley

I'd heard of these, but haven't seen one. I like the provisions for a firearm.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=4540069696&category=6707

It is one butt ugly dirt bike. But, it is a Rotax engine and was actually a company called CanAm prior to being purchased by H-D.

Can-Ams were pretty competitive bikes in their day. '70's-'80's I believe.

Well, actually, Can-Am was a Canadian company owned by Bombardier, makers of Ski Doo snow mobiles. They even bought out Lear Jet and produce private corporate jets now and some sort of fire fighting plane that swoops down on a lack to load its water. Saw that one on some discovery channel show. Anywho, Rotax is an Austrian engine manufacturer. They produce the 1000cc V twins that Aprilia uses in the Mille and Tuono. They were used in the early post iron curtain MuZs before they started buying Yamaha 660 motors. BMW also uses a Rotax thumper in that little 650 GS adventure tourer. They even make most of the two stroke twins used in ultralight aircraft and small hovercraft. They built an in line two stroke water cooled rotary valve induction GP engine for 250GP road racers back in the early 80s to compete with the all conquering TZ Yamahas. An English chassis manufacturer used this engine in their low boy single shock state of the art at the time chassis. That company was named "Armstrong". I knew a kid that was really fast that started racing an Armstrong rotax. He had a great tuner, but it just wasn't up to the TZ competition at the time.

Anyway, well, so Armstrong got the British contract to build military motorcycle to their specification. Armstrong, of course, used the industry standard Rotax thumper, built in Austria. THEN, HD came along while competing with Kawasaki and others for a US military contract for similar spec motorcycles to what Britian had. HD bought Armstrong and it's tooling for the rotax powered military contract bike and that's what this ebay bike is. I'm not sure if the contract was canceled, just exactly what happened, but HD got stuck with a bunch of bikes to sell to the civilian market. The military can be fickle, just ask any Bantam engineer of the late 1930s.

So, Rotax is still Rotax, Can-Am, Bombardier's motorcycle division closed many years ago, Armstrong now belongs to HD for what that's worth. I think it went the way of Aremacchi.

Another aside, when AMA went to 505cc four stroke rules in place of 250cc two strokes in AMA short track racing, HD bought a couple of hundred Rotax 500cc thumper motors for homoligation reasons and built team short trackers that have had great success over the years in short track. The latest CRF450, YZF450 type water cooled DOHC stuff from the Japanese have equaled the Rotax thumper designs, but the Rotaxs are still competitive. I know of a couple of Wood Rotax road racers that have run in our single classes here in Texas that make around 80 horsepower out of a 600cc single, the equal of the Ducati supermono. Guy who built one of my XR100 thumper racers, Jay Wright of Bare Bones Machine http://www.barebones.net , builds some UNREAL Rotax thumpers. Jay is DA MAN for any thumper, knows his stuff! Go to that site and check out some of his stuff. He sticks Rotax thumpers in TZ250 Yamaha road race chassis and makes them fly as well as stay together. His head work is art work and his heads flow better than any other. I also have an XR mad dawg class 150 stroker from Frank Nye of http://www.xr100.com , currently my only running flat tracker until I can get my bare bones motor rebuilt. His head does not come even close to Jay's. It's running a 24mm flat slide, Jay's can handle a 28! And my Barebones motor is only a 123 big bore, the Frank Nye motor is a 150 stroker! Jay is the guru of thumper art, that's for sure.

Here's one of Jay's Rotax creations stripped of body work and tank. Down draft carbs are just too cool.