Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

And where there was no craft, there was outright black magic. Gross "bent" the class rules a bit by fashioning his motor-mount plates out of aluminum and then painting them so that they were disguised. The fork links on the narrowed forks were also made of aluminum and painted. The frame was retubed out of chrome-moly, though it still used stock Indian castings, to cut weight. To look at it, you can't tell the difference. The chassis was made lighter still when Gross meticulously drilled holes in it, plugged them with aluminum, filed down the works and then painted over it all The move was blatantly illegal, but nothing new. Several competitors had done the same thing, using tape to cover their holes, but every now and then a "nosy" tech inspector would come along with a screwdriver and poke at the frames to check for cheaters. With the aluminum plugs in place, Gross never got caught, and therefore, as the old adage implies, he never cheated. When all was said and done, Gross had pared the machine to 255 pounds - 45 fewer than a regular big-base Scout racer. That did the trick. In the capable hands of Indian Wrecking Crew rider Bobby Hill, the four-cammer handily claimed the National title in 1951, blasting the already-aging Harley-Davidson WR into the weeds. In 1952, Hill, Gross and the cammer returned to Springfield and won again, turning back the Milwaukee factory and its new foot-shift KR racers. Just to prove that a regular big-base was no slouch either, Tuman won Springfield in '53 aboard a machine he still owns to this day. Unfortunately, that was the year that the Indian factory folded. Even so, thanks to Gross' handi- (Left) The vertically mounted Edlson-Splitdorf magneto handled the firing chores. work, the aging Indians proved to be competitive for mother two years. Then they were gone. Gone, but not forgotten. For Iowan Paul George and his son Kelly, the Gross legacy lives on as they possess one of only five four-cam specials known to. have been built during the period. tt is one of two known to exist today according to Kelly George. Whether this particular machine is the bike that Hill used to win at Spring- . field is the subject of some debate. Tuman claims that the trail to the actual Bobby Hill four-cammer goes cold somewhere in Montana, but if the heritage of the George machine is in doubt, its lineage cannot be. The Georges picked up the machine from Gross' widow Ann in 1988, some two years after he had passed away. George recalls that the machine was basically all there. "The motor was in the basement, and the chassis was in the shed behiI]d his house," George says. "I've been around Indians a long time. When I first picked it up, I thought, 'Man, what have we got here?" George says that it took a year and an undisclosed amount of money to return the machine to glory. "I put my heart into this project," George says. "That paint is the exact same number that DuPont used in the '30s for that Indian red. It's still in the books. Even the tires are the original ones that Gross had on the wheels. The only non-original things that I put on there were the exhaust pipes, the spokes and nipples, the seat springs and number plates. I've got original aluminum fork links on the bike, but they're polished. There wasn't much that was shiny on his bikes other than the paint and maybe the shifter. The wheels were chromed steel, but there wasn't any other flashy stuff on his bikes. They were all painted." Among the original items is a bit of blasphemy: There is a Harley part on the bike. It's a KR seat, but it, too, is original. That must have been the way Hill liked it. His half-mile bike, another machine· that is in the George stable, has an identical KR seat and pillion pad on it. George also said that the original purchase of the machine included several ultra-rare factory parts, some of which were never even used. "He (Gross) had different cam setups for different tracks," George says. "I had abou t 30 different cam sets to choose from. His Springfield motor was milder than his Milwaukee motor. Those Milwaukee cams are pretty radical. I figure that was just because it was Harley's terri tory. It was their race track. I've got the Springfield setup in it. With that it'll turn about 7,200 rpm. Our other big bases are good for about 6,500-6,800, and that's turning 'em pretty tight. They (four-cammers) didn't work that well for half-miles, though. They were mile bikes. They could do about 118-120 mph. They beat the foot-shift Harley factory bikes for two years. The KRs came out in '52, but they couldn't handle the Scout. The KRs started to catch up in '53, but Tuman still won Springfield." "It's the best bike I've ever built," George says fondly of the macl1ine. "It's impressive, it's rare. A lot of people think it's just another big-base, but that cam cover gives. it away. You never see those. There is not a more exotic Indian out there. The four-cam is the thing." Thanks to Paul and Kelly George, this one will remain to be seen for many years to come. Dick Gross' legacy lives o~ ~

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