Second Motorcycle

In the summer after my third year at UT Austin (sidebar: I went to UT for four years, following two years of junior college. Can you spell "wrong major"?) I decided I needed a motorcycle, and found a likely candidate in the local classified ads. (This was 1965 - classifieds like Craigslist were printed on paper then!) It was a 1957 Zundapp 250 Super Saber (I think) that had been stripped down to the bare essentials. That is, no front fender, no working ignition, a burned piston, and torn seat cover. However, it had been bored out to about 300 cc and the seller threw in a magneto off some other kind of motor. $45 bucks.

My buddy Gene helped me tow it back to the coop where I lived, and I set to work. We fabricated a mounting plate and little chain drive setup for the magneto, recovered the seat, and replaced the piston - with a Volvo car piston, following a tip the seller had given me. I made a head gasket from an aluminum beer can (which, as it turned out, was a big mistake.) Oh, and I recovered the seat, spray painted the tank and frame and adapted a new rear sprocket.

After a few weeks of fairly intensive work, it came time to fire it up... and by golly, it ran! In fact, it was really pretty quick for that size motor. No muffler (of course), as loud and abrasive as only a two stroke single can be. I ran it up and down the street in front of the coop a few times, then set off towards the countryside. About 5 miles from home, as I was cruising along the highway, it suddenly stopped running. No compression. When I pulled the head, there was a big hole melted in the top of the piston.

I couldn't afford another new piston, so I took that one to a welding shop and had it welded up. Much hand labor later, spent filing and smoothing the globbly aluminum weld, I reassembled it and got it running again. A short ride later... same thing. A nice hole in the middle of the piston.

The bike sat around in the basement of the coop for a few months. By this time, I had a job as a motorcycle mechanic, and I towed the Zundapp down to the shop and stored it with all the other derelict motorcycles in the back room. When I left Austin, I forgot to collect it (just married, you know...). A couple of years later, I stopped by the shop, but the bike was gone.

Years later (like, last year), I finally realized that the beer can head gasket I made was too thin, which raised the compression ratio to some astronomic value. This made terrific power, but when the piston got hot, the pressure was just too much and blew a hole in the weakened metal. Wish I had known that then!

This is a picture of a 1956 Super Saber, with all of its parts. If you removed the front fender, it would look a lot like mine.