Piecing together historic wartime motorbike
RUSSELL Kinsey is well known as the long-serving Prime News cameraman in Dubbo and across the western region but during the past 12 years, in what little spare time he can find between covering the region’s news events, he’s been in his shed rebuilding a rare German motorbike that saw plenty of service in World War II.
He rode it in to the recent Dubbo Cars and Coffee and the 1943 BMW 750cc, complete with eight forward speeds, two reverses and a sidecar and trailer, attracted plenty of interest.
“They were made from 19411944 then the German government told BMW to stop playing with motorbikes and get stuck into to building their aircraft engines and concentrate on that,” Mr Kinsey told
“It’s taken me about 12 years collecting parts from all around the world and making parts and getting to this stage where I can drive it. It’s a very complicated machine, it would have cost the German government a lot of money to build each of these things.
“I know of about 12 or 13 of these bikes in eastern Australia. We go and have rallies and BMWS and Zundapp’s turn up – the Zundapp is another German motorcycle manufacturer and they built a similar machine to this, horizontally-opposed,” he said.
The motorcycle itself is a miracle of German engineering, but like many machines to come out of the German factories in that era, it was overengineered and complex and costly to build. At that time, the Russians and Americans were churning out simple, robust and far less costly tanks, planes and motorbikes, reasoning that quantity is king when these machines could be destroyed in battle after little use.
“This is a two-wheel-drive machine, differential lock, high and low range, extremely complicated gearbox... It’s taken me a long time to sort the gearbox out, they need a lot of TLC (Tender Loving Care),” Mr Kinsey said.
“It was a big job trying to source the parts, that was the problem. Luckily I’ve got some friends in Germany and they were always keeping their eyes out for bits and pieces,” he said.