COLLECTOR: DEAN MASON
An American guy with a passion for that distinctive combination of British frame and German engine – the Rickman Zundapp
An American with a love for Anglo-german Rickman Zundapps
Dean ‘Turk’ Mason is a 59-year-old mechanical engineer from Central New York. He’s been immersed in the world of motorcycles since his early teenage years, growing up and riding around the rural farmland and forests of the Catskill Mountains of New York State. Then, in the early 1970s, he got his first glimpse of a Rickman and it was love at first sight.
That love affair has endured to this day, despite the time constraints of family and career, and the romance has led Dean to restoring six Rickman Zundapp 125s in his workshop, with painstaking attention to detail and increasing acclaim from the tight-knit international community of Rickman enthusiasts. It also has inspired the build of a unique project bike based on a modified Rickman Montesa 250 frame fitted with a Ducati 450 desmo motor, currently work in progress.
“It’s about nostalgia and the uniqueness of them,” says Dean, by way of explaining the attraction of the Rickmanzundapp combination. “The motor was ahead of its time. They use a very unique transmission with stationary gears (rotating only) and direct-drive primary. In 1972, few bikes had direct drive because it was very expensive to make, especially helically cut. I have a lot of sentimental attachments to the Zundapps; I think they’re really good bikes.”
‘ZUNDAPP ENGINES WERE WAY AHEAD OF THEIR TIME – THEY WERE LIGHTER AND TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED. THEY WERE EXOTIC’
Dean rode home-made minibikes in his early youth, but his first ‘proper’ bike was a 1969 Bultaco 175 Campera that he rode with friends in the countryside surrounding his rural home. His brother’s friend had left the seriously thrashed Bultaco sitting in their barn after it died – and when he inquired about the bike, the friend said if Dean got it running, it was his. That was all a 14-year-old needed to hear, and he spent his life savings of $150 getting the old Bultaco running. Then everything changed when his cousin bought a new 1972 Rickman 125 MX from a dealer in Cooperstown, New York. The cousin raced it for one season before selling it and graduating to a 1973 Yamaha 250 MX, which he competed on quite successfully for several years. That blue Rickman with a 125cc Zundapp engine fired Dean’s interest. “These bikes cost 50% more, because they were hand-built with nickel-plated, brazed, chrome-moly steel frames,” says Dean. “They were lighter and stronger. If you look at a 125cc Japanese motor from 1972, it looks bulbous compared to a Zundapp – they had large finning to keep the motor cool. Zundapp motors were way ahead of their time – they were lighter and technologically advanced. They were exotic. If you wanted the cat’s ass in motocross, you bought a Rickman if you could afford it.”
That bike was sold twice in Dean’s home town, falling into the hands of his best friend, Rudi Groppe, whose mother and father were also motorcycle enthusiasts. Groppe would ride his mother’s Honda XL125, while Dean rode the Rickman. “That was my first real experience on a motocross bike, and I couldn’t get enough of it,” he says.
The Groppe family moved to California when Dean was in 10th grade, but the Rickman stayed in town when Groppe sold it to another friend, Boscoe Northrop. He rode the Rickman into the ground and the motor started making disconcerting mechanical noises. Realising the motor was shot, Northrop bought a well-used Bultaco Matador to replace it, but he really wanted a road bike.
It so happened that Dean had already bought his first road bike, a 1969 Triumph TR6C, and then upgraded to a 1972 Norton Commando Combat for $600 in 1977. He ended up selling the Triumph to Northrop for $400, plus the remains of the well-worn Rickman, which went into Dean’s family barn until he had the means to repair it. Determined to rebuild the worn motor, he attempted to dismantle the engine, but his inexperience resulted in a cracked crankcase when he attempted to split the cases. With parts for a worn-out Zundapp motor virtually unobtainable in the USA at that time, he packed the parts into boxes and left the frame in the barn.
The next Rickman to come Dean’s way was a fortunate find, virtually in his back yard. Around 1983, early in his career as an engineer, he noticed a dilapidated motorcycle sitting on a milk delivery crate on the roadside near his office – it was a Rickman, probably a 125 MX, in rough condition. The young owner explained that the bike ran but wouldn’t change gear and he offered to sell it to Dean as it was for $50. Done deal.
The rebuild was a lengthy one, with the gearbox issue ultimately proving to be down to a casting lug that had snapped inside the transmission casing, a fairly common failure in aggressively-used Zundapp engines.
“Some people say the transmissions are fragile,” explains Dean. “But I’ve been riding them for decades and never had a problem. They’re a very tight tolerance motor, too, and hard to set up correctly. It’s the only motor I’ve seen with what’s sometimes referred to as a ‘magneto’ main bearing. The outer race is single-sided, so they come apart very
easily – but you’ve got to get the end-float tolerance just right when you put them together.”
Dean rebuilt the motor with the good crankcase half from his boxes of ’72 MX bits and sourced a good used crank with bearings and new piston from Blood Cycle, an old Triumph-bsa-norton-rickman dealer. With no service manual, he had to rebuild the entire motor using intuition and experience. “Looking back, I doubt I got any of the tolerances correct, but it’s been running great for over 35 years – a testament to the Zundapp motor design,” he says.
Years later, during a full refurbishment of the bike, he found a wiring harness all balled up and taped to the frame. At that point, he realised this was no MX – it was an ISDE (International Six-day Enduro). The frame was polished, and the body parts repaired and painted. A headlight was sourced from his old Campera, along with the other proper fitments, and a complete 1972 ISDE emerged. Dean has restored two more 1972 ISDE 125 Rickmans that arrived in his workshop – they were mostly complete barn finds owned by KTM North America executive and five-time International Six-day Enduro USA Team competitor Robert Pearce, who Dean met by chance at the AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days. “It’s all karma,” explains Dean. “He saw my trailer with a Rickman logo on it, wandered over and ended up offering me one of the two bikes in exchange for restoration of the other.” He agreed to the deal and restored both bikes that next year.
Dean has sold that ISDE twice; the first time to a man who lived about an hour from his home, in a deal in which he acquired two more Rickman Zundapps. He got a red 1973 ISDE and a blue 1972 dual-seat enduro with routed fins – a Rickman fix to accommodate revised Zundapp engines in frames they’d already made for earlier, smallerfinned motors. The guy’s father had bought the enduro for him at a farm auction for $50 when he was 14.
Dean restored the enduro and eventually traded it back to the same guy for the ISDE he’d previously sold to him. “I just couldn’t keep it,” Dean confesses. “He was so sentimental about that enduro and all the memories of his youth growing up on that bike.” Dean recently sold the ISDE for a second time to a new friend in Maine.
As Dean built his career, got married and raised two children, the remains of the blue 1972 Rickman MX sat idle in storage. But it played on his mind – and eight years ago, he embarked on the restoration of this memento of his teen years on two wheels. The original nickel plating on the frame had been ravaged by its years in the family barn, so Dean bought a used frame from a previous Central New York Rickman dealer. The growing availability of Rickman and Zundapp parts on the internet helped him find wheels and all the assorted engine parts he needed. The original fuel tank, seat and side panels were restored and used, too.
For all his restorations, Dean rebuilds the Zundapp engines from scratch, performing all the work himself except for bore and crankshaft work, as he doesn’t have machining tools in his workshop. He also does nearly all his welding and fabrication work. He sends cylinders to Millennium Technologies in Plymouth, Wisconsin, where the bores are replated in nickel silicon carbide (nikasil), as it’s harder and more porous than the original chrome plating of the Zundapp engines and holds oil better. Crankshafts – typical pressed-pin cranks, requiring specialist jigbased alignment – are sent to Labaron Power Sports in Imlay City, Michigan. Dean also overhauls the internals of the Betor forks fitted to most of the 125s – they were also fitted to most Bultacos, and specialist Hugh’s Bultaco is only a two and a half hours from his home in an area he often visits for work.
The red 1973 Rickman MX was found on Craigslist; Dean bought the machine as a non-running rolling chassis with the Zundapp engine, originally thinking he would just use the wheels and some motor parts from the bike for another build. But he ended up rebuilding and restoring the entire bike, discovering in the process that it had been fitted with a reed-valve kit and booster ports to the cylinder and piston. These popular period tune-up parts increased the stock