Bikes with aeroplane engines!

| Friday May 17, 2013 00:00

When it comes to being free spirited, no one comes close to doing it better than bikers. They are a fearless lot who seem to live by a simple mantra of living now and dying later. A bike on its own is a curious thing, even the most underpowered ones.

They are also fast; bonkers fast! You have small bikes that are normally ridden around town by pizza delivery men and those are just timid little things, then you have the superbikes that you normally will spot by their riders leaning over the aforementioned fuel tank with butts in the air screaming past everyone and weaving all over traffic as if the rider is trying to fend off a persistent wasp or dodge an invisible cruise missile seen only by him or her.

You then have the choppers; the cruisers that are more laid back and less frantic. These are more settled and have a squatting stance to them, the rider sits very low on a cushion that is barely the size of a  saucer, legs stretched out in front and arms as wide as an earnest embrace, the kind that grandmothers like giving to long lost grand kids. You lean back slouched; almost like the kind of posture that one would adopt while sitting home bored and flicking through the telly channels.

Now these kind of bikes usually have a throbbing sound to them, almost like a helicopter; a chopping note that is very distinctive to them. You cannot mistake it for anything else out there. To complete the look; you need to be sporting more than one tattoo, a beard of sorts, leather and jeans and a pair of Oakley's sunglasses. To them this is akin to having your windows rolled down on a lazy Sunday drive listening to your tunes, no fuss.  But now a man from Germany has gone ahead and fitted an engine straight from an aeroplane on his bike! Frank Ohle says the project takes only 18 months from inception to complete lunacy.

'The rear fender is the oil tank and the fuel tank is in the box under the seat area. The first thing that had to be done is work out how the drive shaft needs to be engineered to transfer the drive train to the rear of the engine.

To do this all the accessories needed to be removed and some serious disassembly was required to access the crank shaft,' says Ohle. He has made his project available online for anyone who is interested in having something similar done for him or her. It is not clear where he gets the airplane engines from or just how fast this thing is.

But as it stands, this is basically an individual with an explosive aeroplane engine strapped to a pair of bicycle tires. This is a bit like putting a car engine into your lawnmower or using it to run the ceiling fan. It is certainly ambitious and interesting. He calls it the Rotec R3,600 Powered 'Red Baron' and the name on its own is enough to make you want to take flight. But his is not the only of the kind.

John Levey says he didn't go to aircraft mechanics to learn building motorcycles, yet that is exactly what his brother-in-law Mike Wherle, a reputed old school bike builder from the 70s and his partners Tim Deml and Chet Thomas now do. The project, much like most such projects is reputed to have started just as a talk between three friends in a bar with drawings on a napkin. Apparently Levey still has the initial drawings that Wherle whipped up, complete with beer stains on them. In building it, they first had to overcome the issue of finding the right engine because 'most of the radial engines I had seen were simply too big.

Then I came across an Australian sourced Rotec R2,800 and after deciding the motor would work for what we envisioned, I wanted to mount it crossways but my brother-in-law changed his mind saying 'we are not building an airplane, so it has to be this way (inline)' and that advice was instrumental in the build. With the engine's cylinders placed inline with the wheels, the drive system is simpler than coming off the back of the motor and having to turn the direction of rotation two or three times in order to transfer power to the rear wheel.

'It also puts riders in a normal, comfortable riding position without having their feet right behind the motor, and it allowed JRL Cycles to use the forward controls.'  The spec sheet sounds normal enough though; 2800cc, 110 horsepower and a 6-speed gearbox with overdrive ratio. He claims the bike is as smooth as the best out there and some.

But the one bike that gets the cake is the simply mad Y2K. It is made by an outfit called Marine Turbo Technologies (MTT) who specialise in taking jet engines that have reached the end of their prescribed life and rework them for either boats, fire pumps to these ludicrous superbikes. But when MTT president Ted McIntyre decided to add motorbikes to their portfolio he appointed Christian Travert; former bike racer and customised bike builder to head up the project. 'It can use anything from normal pump gas to tequila or even Chanel perfume,' said Travert.

'But diesel burns most efficiently, so that's what makes most power.' Travert also designed and built the chassis, which was similar in layout to that of a normal superbike - but much larger and stronger as he puts it. So how does this all translate to speed? Well, it's a helicopter turbine engine with a two speed automatic gearbox and it apparently can do 365 km/hr.

It really is awesome but has also come under some seriously heavy criticism levelled against it. Classic Bike magazine editor Hugo Wilson said that the bike 'had as much relevance to motor cycling as a fish,' while Racer and author Mat Oxley went further, calling the superbike 'an exercise in technological masturbation.'