EMC PROTOTYPE 500
Split-single strokers are rare enough on British roads. Alan Cathcart rides a unique machine, one built in Britain for those British roads!
Split-single strokers are rare enough on British roads. Alan Cathcart rides a unique machine, one built in Britain for those British roads!
Love him or loathe him (and there were plenty who did each), Dr. Josef Ehrlich was a true original. Volatile but inventive, constantly coming up with new ideas and innovative designs right up until his death in September 2003 at the age of 88, the sprightly, dapper engineer universally known as ‘Dr. Joe’ was involved with motorcycles all his life, ever since the early 1930s when, in between earning his Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering in Austria, he competed in sand track and road races on a 250 Puch two-stroke and a ohv 500 Sunbeam.
Like so many people forming part of that vast tide of refugees from political and religious oppression which has poured into Great Britain over the past century, Joe Ehrlich was an ultra-Brit, passionately committed to keeping the Union Jack flying. Born in Vienna during the First World War, he left in 1936 after the Nazi takeover of Austria brought inevitable persecution and the likelihood of a one-way trip to a concentration camp for those of Jewish extraction such as himself. ‘I didn’t like it there anymore,’ he once told me, with masterly understatement. ‘So I took up an offer to come to Britain to design a diesel engine, and I enjoyed it so much I stayed.’
Once in Britain, Dr. Joe served his adopted country during WW2 by working on several unusual projects, including an unmanned flying bomb powered by a reed-valve 2-stroke engine that the Air Ministry rejected as being contrary to the Geneva Agreement – yet, six months later the Nazis began launching their similar V-1! Not quite cricket, old chap…
Ehrlich also designed a machine gun and various auxiliary engines, but his greatest invention was a little airborne car that he drove up the steps of the War Ministry in Whitehall to demonstrate its abilities. Designed for use by paratroopers, it came too late to enter production before the war ended.
In 1946 Ehrlich decided to set up as a motorcycle manufacturer under the EMC / Ehrlich Motor Company label, firstly in a tiny factory at Twyford Abbey Road on the Park Royal industrial estate in West London, close by the Guinness brewery. In due course he moved to larger premises in Isleworth beside the art deco Firestone tyre factory, then to Southall.
‘I’d always wanted to make my own bikes, and I could see that in post-war Britain there’d be a huge boom in two-wheeled sales, and I was right,’ he told me. ‘So I began production of a split-single 2-stroke 350cc road bike in April 1947, using my own engine. But I got too big in a short time for the likes of the other manufacturers, so they cut off my parts supply and I had to shut down – I had machines stuck without dynamos or clutches, just sitting there eating up capital. I started up again for a while, importing 125cc and 250cc Puch engines from Austria to fit in my frames, and we made about 1200 bikes all told, before Austin made me a good offer, and I went to work in the car industry. Eventually I was on the team headed by Alex Issigonis that designed the Mini.’
While struggling unsuccessfully to develop his bike business (which was eventually wound up in March 1953), Ehrlich had also produced both 250cc and 350cc water- cooled split-single EMC road racers of a supercharged ladepumpe design like the pre-war DKWs which clearly inspired them – if not more. In the hands of Les Archer the 250cc version won the prestigious 1947 Hutchinson 100 held at an early British postwar race meeting at Dunholme, before both bikes fell victim to the FIM’s 1950 ban on supercharging. In 1952 the first normally aspirated Puch-engined EMC racers appeared in the 125cc class with some success, with
works rider F.H. Burman finishing 6th in the Ultra-Lightweight TT, teammate Noel Mavrogordato 9th and customer entries 11th and 12th – though John Surtees crashed Dr. Joe’s works EMC on his 1953 Isle of Man TT debut, when the forks collapsed at speed, leaving him with a broken wrist!
The Mini car was launched in 1959, whereupon Ehrlich left BMC (as Austin had now become) to work for the De Havilland aircraft company, heading up its Small Engines Division.
‘One day at a De Havilland board meeting in 1960 the chairman turned to me and said, “Joe, you might just as well do it out in the open – we all know what you’re up to!” recalled Ehrlich. ‘ ‘It’ was developing my first rotary-valve 125GP racing machine, which I’d built in a corner of the factory. De Havilland’s came up with enough backing to enable me to build a team of bikes and go racing. We never won a world championship Grand Prix, but we came very close with Mike Hailwood, Rex Avery (a De Havilland employee), Derek Minter and Phil Read riding for me, before I packed up in 1964 – we just couldn’t keep up with the Japanese on the budget we were working on.
‘When I had six-speed gearboxes, they had eight; when I built an eight-speed, they produced one with 10 or 12 ratios. When I had a single, they raced twins; when I made a twin they already had fours. So I decided enough was enough – with the budget I had then, it was impossible to compete against them effectively.’
However, none other than Mike Hailwood rode an EMC to fifth place in the 1962 125GP world championship in between winning the 500cc world title in his first year riding for MV Agusta, beating all the Suzuki and MZ factory riders in doing so, bested only by the four-rider Honda team. And Mike also defeated that year’s World champion, his former teammate Luigi Taveri on his factory Honda, to win the non-championship Saar GP in Germany on the British bike.
What about the oft-expressed view that those 125 EMCs that finished on several GP rostrums, and often beat the works Suzukis that came to dominate the class, were just East German MZs wearing EMC tank badges? ‘Well, partly it’s true,’ the Doc admitted, ‘because while I was at BMC I’d worked closely with MZ chief engineer WaIter Kaaden in my spare time, In fact, I helped them win the Italian GP at Monza in 1959, which was their first big breakthrough, and afterwards they thanked me publicly at the celebration dinner. I helped MZ, and they helped me – my first 125 engine was built on an MZ crankcase which they gave me, because they didn’t want to build the water-cooled bike I insisted was necessary. It never raced with the MZ bottom end because the power I was getting was too much for that, so I had to make my own – but even when we were racing against each other, we always had first-class relations.’
After dropping out of bike racing again, Dr. Joe went to work for US outboard engine manufacturers Evinrude and Johnson, helping them to a string of World Powerboat titles. At the same time he got involved in Formula 3 car racing, while working for British Leyland as a consultant, and developing the range of diamond tool patents through his own separate company whose royalties underpinned the eventual EMC motorcycle GP comeback.
For the next ten years from 1969 onwards Ehrlich went car racing with varying degrees of success, with future Formula 1 world champion Jody Scheckter driving for him in 1971. But in 1981 Dr. Joe returned to the bike world, linking with the British Waddon GP team to race in 250 GPs with the Rotax tandem-twin rotary-valve engine which he tuned to good effect, with Irishman Con Law winning the Isle of Man 250 TT on an Ehrlichtuned Waddon, before the team fell apart, wracked by internal dissension.
This encouraged Ehrlich to revive the EMC name by building his own bikes for 1983, just as he was finishing off a successful project for British Leyland to design and develop a threecylinder car engine that yielded 110mph and 60mpg, fitted to an Austin Allegro saloon. At the same time, his 14-year flirtation with F3 car racing with Ehrlich-tuned Ford and Toyota engines came to an end. Time to return fulltime to his first love of bikes.
‘ Things got difficult at Waddon’s, and there were financial problems too, so I baled out in October 1982,’ Dr. Joe told me. ‘I sold off all my car racing equipment to raise funds and clear space at my Bletchley works, worked night and day with a couple of people for two months to build a pair of new bikes, and had them ready for the Racing Bike Show in December – a 125 single and a 250 twin, both with Rotax engines I tuned myself. The first time the 250 turned a wheel in anger was at Daytona in March 1983, when Con finished third out of 120 entries on his first visit there.’ Proof this was no fluke came in June on the Isle of Man, when Con Law scorched to a record-breaking Junior TT victory at 108.09mph on sponsor Jim Millar’s EMC. This success set the seal on Ehrlich’s return to bike racing, and gave him heart to search for those elusive sponsors for a full-scale GP return.
But while Aussie Graeme McGregor won the 1984 Lightweight TT on an EMC, Joe Ehrlich had to dig into his own pocket to fund the occasional GP appearances that year of EMC’s works rider, Andy Watts – though he must have thought it worthwhile when Watts led the first lap of the British GP at Silverstone, and finished a close second to winner Christian Sarron. This eventually led to Pepsi Cola funding a full season with Donnie McLeod in 1987 with a new Harris-framed EMC, powered by an Ehrlich-tuned Rotax tandem-twin motor.
‘Dr. Joe provided a better engine than the Armstrong I’d raced before,’ said McLeod, ‘and I got on well with him, even though he was certainly different from anyone else in the GP paddock. He gave me a plaque with his motto on it, which read “I’m only stubborn when I don’t get my own way!” That summed him up – but he certainly knew how to tune engines.’
The Pepsi EMC team’s debut season was a development one, with a series of DNFs and lowly finishes, and just a pair of ninth places in the French and Swedish GPs on the board. But a 1-2 EMC victory by Eddie Laycock and Brian Reid in the Lightweight TT, plus McLeod’s dominance of the endof-season Silverstone and Donington Nationals, augured well for the coming year, and Donnie made The Doc a happy man in 1988. With Pepsi transferring its eponymous sponsorship to the factory Suzuki 500cc team, it rebranded the EMC as a 250GP class presence for its Seven-Up subsidiary. They were rewarded with a series of solid points-scoring finishes by the Scotsman, en route to 12th place in the World Championship as top privateer on the leading Rotax-powered bike – one place ahead of Loris Reggiani’s similarly-powered works Aprilia. But that 1988 season was Dr.Joe’s bike racing swansong, and at the end of the year he gave up his quixotic struggle against the factory teams, with McLeod’s point-scoring 15th place finish in the last GP of the year in Brazil the final appearance of an EMC in Grand Prix racing. It was fashionable for some to dismiss Joe Ehrlich as an eccentric charlatan driven by a combination of unbridled self-esteem and a thirst for publicity.
‘ The Doc reckons he invented the two-stroke engine shortly after dreaming up the wheel,’ said one such detractor, before grudgingly allowing that bike racing needed flamboyant characters like Dr. Joe, with his debonair quirkiness and penchant for a refreshing glass of Moët champagne in the heat of the GP paddock. Such a patronising view denied what was perhaps Joe Ehrlich’s most significant contribution to the world of road racing. Although Suzuki’s PR machine has always claimed the credit for introducing the first major non-tobacco multinational sponsor to GP bike racing in 1988, in fact it was Dr. Joe who’d broken the ice by persuading Pepsi-Cola into motorcycle sport by backing the EMC team one year earlier, in 1987. Credit where credit’s due…
Back in the early days of EMC’s existence in gloomy, depressed, post-war Britain, the first EMC was a twin-piston split-single two-stroke of the type made before WW2 in Austria by Puch (whence presumably Dr. Joe got the inspiration for his design) as well as more notably in racing form only by DKW in Nazi Germany. But in a post-war Britain starved of raw materials, simply getting access to the metals needed to create a motorcycle of any kind was a major challenge, let alone convincing a public weaned on pushrod ohv singles that a split-single two-stroke had any
merit, the only previous British application of such an engine being in the obscure 1920s 1488cc Trojan car. However, Joe Ehrlich was one of life’s survivors for whom the glass was always half-full, and he gradually upped EMC production to ten bikes a week, with several exported to Scandinavia, Australia and South Africa, before the model’s demise came about.
The air-cooled 346cc EMC engine measuring 50 x 88mm featured aluminium crankcases surmounted by a vertical cast iron six-stud cylinder block containing twin bores, containing a pair of long-skirted (111mm rear and 99mm front) Specialloid pistons, each with three rings. These were mounted on an articulated dual conrod assembly running on caged roller crankpin bearings, with the crankshaft carried in ball and roller main bearings.
The engine had a distinctive appearance, with its cylinder block endowed with unusual variable-width square finning, the six larger fins interspersed with smaller ones to provide what Ehrlich referred to as ‘differential cooling’. This theoretically allowed the cylinder liner to slightly deform as it heated up, in order to trap extra oil around the long dual pistons which each carried three circumferential oil grooves for enhanced lubrication, and thus reduced risk of seizure.
This unusual engine was sparked by a BTH magneto chain-driven off the crank, and was mated to a four-speed Burman gearbox with chain primary drive. It was fitted in a twin-loop double-cradle chassis that was unusual for the time in featuring a magnesium-bronze steering head pivot cast integrally with the upper frame backbone, to which the mild steel frame tubes were attached. Initially devoid of rear suspension (a swinging arm version was later available as an optional extra from 1948 on), the EMC took a look into the future by sporting 38mm Dowty Oleomatic telescopic forks from the very first, with Ehrlich’s own design of seven-inch single leading-shoe drum brakes with attractive conical hubs cast in L33 aluminium, together giving a 12lb weight saving over earlier steel ones. Producing 18bhp at 4000rpm and retailing at £198 for the version with rear suspension (plus the punitive Purchase Tax of £57), the EMC 350 was competitively priced against the popular 350cc BSA B31 market leader.
Although the 350cc version was the only EMC split-single model ever sold to the public, Joe Ehrlich also developed a prototype 500cc version, with a cast aluminium chassis backbone and much more handsome conventional finning to the larger cylinder block, and twin exhausts rather than the 350’s single pipe – to look at, it seems a more refined motor all-round, versus the cruder-looking 350. This unique bike is today on display in – where else, being a one-off rarity? – the Sammy Miller Museum on Britain’s South Coast alongside five other EMC models built down the years. These represent Dr. Joe’s personal collection, which Sammy obtained from him before he passed away. This includes a sectioned split-single engine, as well as the EMC showcase display of its dual-conrod layout, which makes this lightly improbable format more understandable, as well as Ehrlich’s claims that it delivered enhanced control of the transfer and exhaust ports, improved port timing, and better volumetric efficiency.
This was obtained by the forward cylinder having three transfer ports, with two exhaust (three on the single-pipe 350) and two inlet ports in the rear inlet-andexhaust cylinder. By dint of the exhaust ports opening and closing earlier than the transfer ports, this improved mixture distribution as well as exhaust scavenging, compared to conventional single-cylinder two-strokes. The engine’s single 14mm sparkplug was positioned in the front of the common-toboth-bores aluminium cylinder head, over the front piston. So with the rear piston travelling in the bore ahead of its forward partner, it opens the exhaust ports well in advance of the transfer piston opening its ports, hence the optimised scavenging of the exhaust gasses. But then, still leading, it shuts the exhaust port while the transfer is still open, minimising the loss of the fresh inlet charge.
Invented by Italian engineer Adalberto Garelli back in 1913, it’s an engine format whose only main drawback is extra fuel consumption – a key issue in post-war Britain, where each rider was rationed to just two gallons a month of the low octane Pool petrol. EMC tried to claim that its customers could expect superior mileage from their split-singles, whereas reality was quite the opposite. No such worries today, so after tipping a gallon or so of 20:1 premix into the fuel tank, Sammy and his right-hand man Bob Stanley sent me on my way for a spin around the lovely New Forest scenery surrounding the Museum.
Turn the fuel on, flood the single Amal carb, then a couple of easy kicks will send the low compression (7.6:1) engine burbling into life with a distinctive flat drone from
the exhaust. Hop aboard the relatively tall seat, and immediately the EMC feels a substantial and quite welcoming mount, with its relatively long 56in wheelbase delivering a spacious riding position, and the footrests nicely positioned. The quite high handlebar has pulled-back grips, so it’s a relaxed and comfortable stance, with the well-sprung saddle combining with the reasonably effective twin rear shocks – Girlings, Sammy thinks, though they might be Armstrongs – to give quite good ride quality over bumpy country roads by the standards of the era. The Dowty fork is a bit bouncy, though – I think they still had a bit to learn about rebound damping back in 1949 when the bike was apparently built.
However, that fork was the start of a story that’s still being told today, whereas the rather agricultural four-speed Burman gearbox fitted to the EMC was a throwback to pre-war days. Changing gear must be done very slowly and carefully – rush the notchy change and you’ll miss a gear. Bottom gear is very low, with second and third close together before a long gap to top, which is where the EMC’s ultra-flexible two-stroke motor is happy to live most of the time.
The split-single design and the porting chosen by Ehrlich result in an extremely torquey engine that’s a joy to use – too bad about anyone following you, though, given the plumes of smoke that emanate from the pipe a good part of the time! Apparently there’s only a little more power available from this 500cc motor compared to the 350cc bikes which formed the basis of EMC production – one of which is also in the Museum, alongside a 350cc DKWinspired supercharged racer - and Sammy estimates output to be around 20bhp at 3800rpm, against 18bhp at 4000rpm for the 350 roadster. However, there’s surely a lot more torque from the bigger motor, and this coupled with the heavy flywheels is what makes the 500cc EMC so nice to ride. You can thankfully cut down on gear-changing because of this, and in many ways the engine has a level of grunt that’s quite unexpected for a two-stroke of any era.
After feeling the front end starting to slide on me a couple of times I was pretty mistrustful of the very elderly front 20-inch Firestone, whose tread had matured down the ages to a fair resemblance to wood rather than rubber. So I didn’t conduct any investigations of the EMC’s handling, but it felt capable and quite advanced by the standards of the time, with only the front seven-inch SLS brake a little underwhelming – its twin at the rear was excellent, though, so probably the front one just needed setting up better. With minimal engine braking from the two-stroke motor, you’d need good brakes, and EMC would seem to have obliged.
It’s a pity after riding it that the 500cc EMC never reached production, because it seems a significant step up in quality and substance from what Joe Ehrlich’s company had produced hitherto. But by then Joe was already thinking about other things, so today it lives on as a testament to his drive and inventiveness in always looking ahead to the next step in development, as someone never satisfied with the status quo. Promise unfulfilled? Yes – but another step on the path to building a better two-stroke.