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Posted on 09/22/2012 9:41:03 PM PDT by djone
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motorcycle ping!.....
That is cool!
Can’t see how the chain tensioner works. Looks odd like there is no spring. Maybe you set it before you rode.
My Father told me stories about going to the State Fair and watching these riders going up and down the wooden walls.
Board racing was still being done in the 1960’s.
put Bleriot_1920
Board Track Racers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y54KVJzuXEE
Early (1910) L.A. & Beverly Hills, Motor Racing Board Tracks (Slides AND Video)..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9jYg32g8No
I saw them at the Dinwiddie (Virginia) county fair in about 1962 or ‘63. They rode inside a wooden track that was about the size of a big rooftop water tank. Made from many vertical staves. Spectators stood on a catwalk platform around the top rim. The bottom four or five feet of the “tank” was angled at 45° to give them a transition from horizontal to vertical driving. recollection is that the tank was about 30 feet across, but it could have been less. They had to go around about once every three or four seconds.
The whole thing swayed back and forth when the riders were “unbalanced.” Most of the time they rode “balanced,” with either two on opposite sides, or three spaced at 120°.
They rode very noisy two-cycle motorcycles; I can’t tell more than that because I was only seven or eight when I saw them.
The track was maybe 25 feet deep, and they rode in a weaving Lissajous pattern for a grand finale.
tensioner here?
Very artistic, minimalist, has near “modern” industrial design look.
Abernathy kids here
Andre Grapperon (LOC)
“Board racing was still being done in the 1960’s”
I’m not so sure about that. If there was still a board track around in the 60’s is was a novelty.
By the mid-‘20s, the sport began to lose its appeal. Perhaps the novelty wore off; certainly the carnage was appalling. Newspapers began referring to motordromes as “murderdromes,” and local governments closed some tracks. Race officials and the motorcycle manufacturers that sponsored racing teams tried to implement measures to slow down the bikes, but that went nowhere. By the early 1930s, board-track motorcycle racing had become a footnote in motorsport history, and Van Order’s career as a photographer was over.
Jim Flynn (LOC
Jim Flynn (LOC
hendee manfacturing
M.C.
The county fair motorcycle “wall of death” daredevil exhibitions were a whole different animal than “board track” racing.
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