Earliest four?

Arose out of a conversation at an autojumble recently....

Earliest production road four-cylinder bike? Not the Honda CB750,
obviously, because Nimbus, Henderson and (I think) Indian also made them
at one time or another.

But which was the earliest? Anyone know?

Earliest triple would be interesting as well....

 

I had an Ariel in 1965 and it was ageing then.

 

(The Older Gentleman) wrote in

A (very) little research gives: the four-cylinder FN Standard out of
Belgium which came out in 1904.

The following webpage mentions it in passing as the first production
four cylinder: http://www.motorcyclemuseum.org/classics/bike.asp?id=93

And this page has an illustration of the FN:
http://www.cybermotorcycle.com/gallery/fn/FN standard model Belgium 1904 Dover Publications.htm
(http://tinyurl.com/yad3e7)

 

Triumph had an early four cyl produced in 1899 designed by Col. Capel Holden

maybe?

 

The Older Gentleman schreef:

ME THINK!! AFAIK
The Henderson 58.

Designed in 1904 by Paul Kelecom (Belgian) of the FN-factory
(Fabrique Nationale de armes de guerre). Translated:
National factory of war arms.*

Prototype built in 1910 by William G. Henderson,
emigrant from Glasgow to the US.
First series sold in 1912.

Cilinders were in a square. It had intake valves in the head (a
novelty), exhaust valves were on the side.
-- It seems HD was a tad late with valves in the head--

54 cubic inches, starter was (like the auto-starter) a
crank, it had a single gear (first gear only) and a car-type
clutch (which was a novelty too).
Produced in Detroit (where else!), and in 1912 the
first production (1000 bikes) was sold out immediately,
because they were cheap (325 US$ ).

Of course it was modified over the years (3-shift gear box,
and brand too, I'll talk about that later).
The latest development of the Henderson 58 is known
as Indian Square Four (last produced 1942).
Of course air cooled.
Cooling the rear cilinders was the biggest problem. (Not
described in my source, but something my dad used to
complain about).

Alan Bedell set the record speed in 1918: LA-NY in 7 days
16 hours, breaking the four year old record of
an Indian (not a square four, that model came later).
by 4 days.
Brand was bought by Ignatz Schwinn in 1918 (Schwinn
owned the Excelsior company). Excelsior started to
design an upgrade (1300 cc), Henderson immediately
reacted by designing a 1250 cc (produced in 1920),
branded 'Ace', priced at 375 US$ per unit.
The first upgraded 1300cc (by Schwinn/Excelsior)
was produced in 1923, and branded Henderson
DeLuxe.
Mr Henderson died in 1923 (ran over by a car while pulling
off of a gas station). His Ace company was continued
by the chief designer of Excelsior who was a close
friend of Henderson, Arthur Lemon. So Lemon
left Excelsior and went to Ace.
Ace got financial problems, and was sold to Indian.

So the square four was further produced by Indian
and I know that one as the Indian Square Four.
Production stopped in 1942.

I have a beatiful picture of the Indian.

Source (Dutch)
Motor Klassiekers, by Grant Leonard.
ISBN 90-72718-19-4

As for the trike: Me think the first (what they now
call) automobile was a trike. Me think they added
a fourth weel to a car only much later.
AFAIK the engine only drove one of the wheels
via a chain. But I have no books about cars, (guess
why) and this idea is not based on anything other
than 'Me think.

Want a jpeg/tiff of the Indian?

* FN later produced bikes as well. My father owned
one around 1953 or so.


Rob.

 

oldgeezer schreef:

While I was typing the above, others contributed too.
Okay, I lost. Henderson probably was the 1st square four.

Rob.

 

oldgeezer wrote:

Um, I was thinking of three cylinders, actually, rather than three
wheels.

 

I misread that at first, but did anyone ever make and engine with square
cylinders??

Ian Singer

--


=========================================================================
See my homepage at http://www.iansinger.com
hosted on http://www.1and1.com/?k_id=10623894
All genealogy is stored in TMG from http://www.whollygenes.com
Charts and searching using TNG from http://www.tngsitebuilding.com
I am near Toronto Canada, can I tell where you are from your reply?
=========================================================================

 

Hmm, Bobbed front fender and a Drive shaft too.
Bg

 

Sure. Bert Greeves began building his own fugly square cylinder Greeves
engines in the late 1960's, replacing the Villiers round cylinder
engine. The square cylinder Greeves so fugly, I wanted one, just to say
that I had the motorcycling equivalent of an English bulldog...

But "square" was the shape of the cooling fins, not the cylinder bore,
which is probably what you meant by "square".

Isn't "square cylinder" an oxymoron, anyway?

I can imagine a machine shop "mule" engine built with front and rear
walls that were held together by allen bolts so a mad inventor could
play around with cylinder volumes and ratios of width to length.

And, production square piston engines could probably be built, but they
would present a problem with piston rings (how do you seal the corners,
where the front, rear, and side rings meet?) and combustion chamber
shape and getting the flame front to propagate smoothly from the spark
plug(s) to the corners of the cylinder.

And, the corners would represent wasted space in the combustion chamber
if you're going to use poppet valves. Maybe put a tiny spark plug in
each corner?

But what do you do with a worn or damaged "cylinder" to rebore it, run
it through some sort of metal planer, instead of using the traditional
round boring bar?

In the mid-1970's Honda was faced with the FIM's rule limiting 500cc GP
engines to four cylinders.

The FIM had instituted the rule after Moto Guzzi showed up with a
ridiculously complex 500cc V-8 and Honda had a 297cc inline-6 that it
was running as a 500cc because class rules allowed that.

The Brits felt that simple single-cylinder engines, like the venerable
Norton Manx engine were just fine for GP engines, and, hadn't the
single-cylinder engine done yeoman service for 70 years? Who needed an
engine that would rev up to 10,000 RPM.

Honda was working on high RPM engines that would rev up to 25,000 RPM.
How could the Brits compete with *that* technology, during an economic
crisis?

Horsepower is based upon the amount of air that an engine can process
in a given time period, and that airflow must be controlled by some
valve system.

Since the standard valve sytem is the traditional poppet valve, and
only so many poppet valves can be crowded into a round combustion
chamber, Honda opted to use eight valves per cylinder and the cylinder
bores of a 32-valve V-8 were siamesed into four oval-shaped cylinders
with the desired 32 valves.

Each oval shaped piston had two connecting rods, and the piston rings
were also oval-shaped.

The oval was shaped more like an "0" laying on its side than "O". The
front and rear walls of the "0" were straight, the ends were round.
That layout is more easily rebored by a machine.

 

Don't be silly. Nobody was racing Manx Nortons in the mid-1970s. Brit
race bikes were the Bonneville (for some), the Commando (for others)
and the Trident (for anyone who wanted to win, which the Trident did).
Then there were oddities like the Cosworth Norton. Guzzi's V8 was also
a masterpiece. Complex it might have been, but it was the fastest thing
on the track at the time. Such a shame that Guzzi abandoned it.

I remember when the NR500 race bike was being campaigned. Takazumi
Katayama is a name that springs to mind. One problem they had was
starting it - it really needed to be bump-started at something silly
like 5000rpm becfore it would fire.

The original concept had things like a liquid nitrogen cooling system!
Never put into practice, unfortunately. I have a vague memory that the
NR pioneered slipper clutches as well....

 

also not the aerial square 4,

 

I've only seen two Hendersons and one Indian four, but
all three were inline straight fours.

Just spotted a real beauty today at Cal BMW in the bay area.
Only other one I'd ever seen, also a straight four was several
decades ago at Imperial Cycle in Buffalo, N.Y.

Got some pictures of a square four Henderson ?
I think they were all inline.

 

And a valet with a roll of paper towels to clean the oil drops from the track.

 

The local Kawasaki dealer was racing a Manx in club events, but he
wouldn't let me ride it.

 

Club events. Right. And now they ride them in classic races. People
race MZs in club events.... But nobody puts them up against Honda
faux-V8s.

 

Everybody wants to be a racer, but nobody wants to spend million$ on
racing, except
Soichiro Honda and Count Agusta and their ilk.

Racers want to race man versus man, not man versus factory budget,
that's why you see
spec classes where racers aren't allowed to change anything inside the
engine.

And, what the heck is an "autojumble"? Is that like a destruction derby
for old British junk cars or what?

 

if you was as smart as y'all think you is, you'd know it is British for
swap-meet.

 

What, the Brits still load their junk into boxes and haul it around?
They haven't heard of eBay and selling a pig in a poke to an electronic
sucker?

 

What has this got to do with your assertion that people were racing Manx
Nortons against the Honda NR500?

The Manx Norton was from a different era of racing.

"Norton 500 Manx, Norton 500 Manx, Production - 1946-1953 (long-stroke),
1953-1962 (short-stroke); Engine - double overhead-cam, single-cylinder
four-stroke ..."

www.motorbike-search-engine.co.uk/ classic_bikes/norton_classic.html -
19k

It's what you call a swap meet.