Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/126023
can Motorcycle PART I By Lane Campbell It's out there somewhere. A rough beast slouching toward - where? - to be born. Where indeed? In Providence, Rhode Island near the birthplace of American industry? In York, Pennsylvania where Harley-Davidson already lays claim to being the one and only Great American Motorcycle? In Spencer, West Virginia, among the dark hills and communities ravaged and left empty by a previous industrial wave? Will it rise from the flat corn fields around Rantoul , lllinois, where Craig Vetter's complex of low, pre-fab broods pregnant with buildings promise? Or will it tum up in Detroit, the step-child of some as-yet un committed car builder? Or have we missed it co mp letely ? Th e: idea of a new American motorcy cle, thought to be a blue-sky impossibility only a few years ago, has been ticking along at a low idle ever since CN broached it publicly in 1973. When Nixon first dev alued th e doll ar , it seemed only a matter of t ime until a domestic m achine could be come price-competitive with imports, and as the prices o f J apanese and European bikes skyrocketed, the time seemed even more: ripe. 14 But the co un try was locked in materials shortages as all th is was goi ng on . You couldn't get aluminum castings poured at any price; and th e order backlog on machine tooling stretched for two years or more. So we waited. Then cam e the oil embargo ; the auto industry started to shrivel up, and the materials situation started to loosen. Finally, with little fanfare, things began to happen . Today, on the eve of the Bicentennial, it's safe to say that the Great Am erican Motorcycle dre am is alive and well in several minds and in several places. Cycle News went on a fact finding tour of a few of the pla ces to meet a few of the people who are keeping the spark alive , breathing it carefully into a full flame. . "" . , .. Day One Providence, R.I. Powerdyne Vehicles On a bright and sparkling morning in the fifth Indian summer of a late and lingering New Eng land fall season, the Providence area has a lo t going for it . In this spot the very first factory in Colonial America spawned a whole industrial revolution. The textile industry bloomed here, flourished a hundred years, then died or moved south, leaving the area a contrast between the opulent wealth of Newport resort homes. each on its resplendent manicured acreage, an d the grinding unemployment amo ng the manufacturing trades. The only b ooming industry is th e cre ati on of exclusive custom jewelry for the gre at mercantile houses of New York . Powerdyne's singl e 55,000 square foot steel-sided building is a part of a small industrial par k nestl ed in the woods on the edge of town. In it tw o b ro th ers, Dave and Irv Berger (Preside n t and General Man ager , respect ivel y), along with plant engineer Ray Cab ral, struggle to manage their company in to profitability. It has been a losing b at tle. Walking through the darkened pl ant (shu t down for in ventory th is day ), Irv Berger points to an elephants' boneyard o f frames and engine parts . uy a u 're looking at four-and-a-half ye ars o f mistakes," he say s, with a sweeping gesture. The company's history has been one of solving production problems with diligence and imagination. only to wind up producing the wrong product for the times. It has left the Bergers somewhat disillusioned with the dirt bike market, even though they have fina lly come up with a co mpe titive short track racer (" When we won the Daytona sh ort track. mu ch of the press said it was a Yamaha," Berger sighs ruefully) . Is the PDV "Gringo." a co pyc at Yamaha? It is this confusing cnsis of identity that has hurt the sales and distribu lio n of the model mo re than any thing else , this image of "copier" that has caused Powerd yne to be actually detested by m an y elements of motorcycling's old guard. The engine is, for all practical purposes, Yamaha from the cylinder base gasket down. Lower cases and gearbox internals are purchased, not necessarily from Yamaha, but from 6'Japan, Inc. n much as the American au to gian ts purchase gearcases and transmissions from Borg-Warner or Eaton, Yale & Towne. The crank halves, pin and rod are manufactured by American vendors from tooling developed in Japan. The piston is from an American source, while the cy linder barrel, porting and head design are the result of yea rs of cu t-an d-tr y by Ray Cabral . The barrel and he ad are permanent-mold cast by a vendor. Powerdyne then machines the rough barrels in a one-room shop that contains a turret lathe and precision hone, plus mill ing and drilling stations. The bores are sent o u t to be chro med hy the English-patented Leasthall Process, wh ich uses a special plating mandrel to deposit an even .006 inch thickness that requires no finish grinding. Most other processes yield an uneven th ickness of plate, especially around port edges, which means up to one-sixteenth inch must be deposited and then finish-grou nd, with the risk that if the finish grind is not perfectly true to the cylinder axis, there will be thin spots at either end of the cylinder. The engines are bench-assembled by one man in a mezzanine-level room about the size of an average motorcycle shop's workspace. Cranks are pressed up and trued on the bench, and the pins tack-welded to prevent slippage (which tends to indicate that their dimensional co ntro l of t he jobbed-out cranks an d pins is less than perfect, but because it is done, makes their cranks practically bullet-proof], From t here on, it's straight workbenc h hand asse mbly , wi th par ts in dividual ly fitted, and extra Care taken o n weighing reciprocating parts and checking combustion chamber volume. "We may be doing mo re inspection than is necessary," Irv admits, "but we don't have enough vol ume statistical data to know what inspections we can omit and get away with it. Plus , at this point, we can't afford any mistakes," Downstairs in the main high bay area, the frames are fabricated from stock 4130 tubing. Bending is done on a preset hydraulic bender; edge trim is in dies wi th very d one carefully-co n tro lled gaps, resulting in a "beveled and skived" edge that perfectly matches the mating part. Frame parts are hand-loaded into welding jigs and joined in one of five welding bays along one wall. MIG (Metal Inert Gas) welding is used to form the heavier joints where filler metal is needed; TIG (Tungsten Inert Gas) process is used fo r thin sections with no gap, or where high heat flux is needed for proper penetration to join a thin section to a thicker part (example: where gussetting meets the steering head). Frames are etched, primed , painted , then raised to 650 degrees in th e same oven that bakes the paint, and normalized (air cooled) to stres s-relieve the welded joints. Etching, priming, painting and baking/normalizing are one integrated process run o n an overhead conveyor loop. Of the other components of the dirt bike, the seat/tail section is a steel stamping done by a jo bber on Powerdyne-developed tooling; the forks