Dnepr Motorcycles
 

Little Bear Discovers Ukranian Iron

A couple of years ago, I was up at Starklite Cycles looking at some old Chiefs (this was before I bought my '46), and chewing the fat with Bob Stark and a couple of his mechanics. The fat-chewing over Indians got side-tracked, however, because a guy Bob knows, who lives nearby, had come over with his Chang-Jiang sidecar rig. It looked like an old BMW. Flat-head, side-valve. Heavy. Everything on it looked like it was 1.25-to-1 scale. I got talking to the guy and he explained that it was a kit bike. Came in parts and that he had assembled it. Also, that it weighed more than his car. I have to admit, it was a really interesting idea: a new 'old' bike. And you got to put it together yourself.

A couple of years went by, but I never forgot about the Chang Jiang. Then a guy in Huntington Beach got in touch with me. He was selling a Ural sidecar rig. Had something like 10,000 miles on it and he was moving on to something better. A crotch-rocket. It got me thinking about the Chang-Jiang again. I started snooping around on the internet and came across another kind of bike, in some ways similar to the Chang-Jiang, but quite a bit more recent technology. At least it was an OHV. The thing was called a Dnepr, and had been marketed in England for several years under the names Neval and Cossack. I found an entire discussion forum, complete with 185 members who owned the things. Found out that the kits cost $2399 from Toronto. Hell, in todays prices, you could buy one of those kits and if the thing blew up on you and ended up in the dumpster, you wouldn't be out so much that you'd grieve long over it. I bought one.

How the Ukrainians got the Dnepr plant is an interesting story and I'll give you the salient points here. Since the 1970s, the Soviets made their civilian motorcycles in Irbit (Siberia) and their military motorcycles in Kiev. With the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Kiev found itself as the capital of the newly independent Ukraine. In the middle of it was this sprawling factory with tens of thousands of disassembled motorcycles. Booty! No one worked there. What to do? Sell the things off as kits to crazy Westerners! What to call them? Well, the plant was located on the Dnepr River. What about Dnepr? You've heard of the Irbit motorcycles, as well. Irbit is still part of Russia, and they sell those to crazy Westerners, too. They are now called Urals.

Now, sending a cashiers check for $2999 ($600 having been added for air freight) to a guy named Yuri in Toronto is not something that gives you a warm fuzzy feeling. Canadians talk and look like us, but when I worked for a company down in San Diego some years ago, I found out that legal-wise Canada really IS a foreign country. If you get screwed on a business deal, you pretty much stay screwed unless you can get the attention of the Queen's court and the American Consulate. Fat chance. It doesn't happen. So, anyway, I bid my cashier's check a fond farewell, and along with it, the approximately 900 DiGiorno pizzas it would have bought. I was determined to think of it as a total loss and be surprised as hell if anything actually showed up.

Five days later, pallets of Ukrainian iron showed up at Forward Air, and would I come remove it, the phone call asked. I went down to Mission Gorge where the Forward Air warehouse is with a great old GMC pickup truck. There amongst the medical equipment, crates and boxes of expensive looking stuff and two Ducatis, was two pallets of metal, a frame and a side car body. All wrapped in tons of plastic sheeting that had ripped and torn in places with black sheet metal and cosmoline showing through. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds of it.

I got it home and started foraging through the internet for wiring diagrams, exploded diagrams, and tidbits of conventional wisdom that might help me to put the thing together. There was hoardes of it. Reams of stuff. Most of it was in Russian, but some of it was in German, a language I also don't speak. So, the serious work started using Altavista's Babelfish translator. Instructions tended to read like: "From dispensating with cam gear without first cover removed part having this one." And, "Carburetor zlotnik keyed to upward draft channel retaining fastenment engaging fuel activator." Okay, I thought, I can live with that. At least most of the figures were in color.

Putting the damned thing together wasn't actually all that difficult, once you threw away all the paperwork and started actually conversing with the guys on the Dnepr forum. You learned things like, "Throw away the hand-wound Russian coil and condensor and replace them with Harley stuff". And, "The timed breather, that runs off the cam gear is a time bomb, remove the front cover, then open the engine and remove the thing. Use it for an ash-tray. Put a PCV valve in the hose running from the crankcase to the air filter. The guys in the Kiev factory don't know about PCV valves yet, that's why the timed breather is there in the first place." It turns out that the little steel pin that turns the timed breather has sheared off on quite a few Dneprs and found its way into really important stuff. Often this results in the motor locking up at 55 or 60 mph and lots of pucker stories. And so on.

Next, on a hunch (and also curious why the wheel bearings didn't turn in any of the wheels), I disassembled all the hubs. They had been lubricated (I suppose that is the word) with a kind of evil-smelling solid material that resembled a kind of putty. It took days to get all that stuff out and bearing grease in. This led me to suspect that other lubrication might be suspect. I emptied the crankcase. Okay. Just oil. I dropped the oil pan. Hmmm coils of metal shavings. Shards of metal. Thick black mud-like deposit. The transmission was more interesting, however. From it came a two-phase organic mixture. A light copper colored oil with rivulets of thick viscous black stuff in it. Reminded you a little of a lava-lamp. Now to the rear drive. Fish oil, or something that wasn't fish oil, but smelled just like fish oil. This was getting interesting.

After the tedium of repacking all the hubs, cleaning out the crankcase, gearbox and final drive was entertaining. In the meantime, a guy reported that he had just pulled a head on his kit Dnepr and found one of the pistons in backwards. Fortunately, they have arrows stamped on the piston faces so it is easy to tell without having to pull the jugs. I stopped what I was doing and checked the pistons. Both arrows faced forward. Good. I was starting to feel lucky.

The battery has a picture of a Moose on it. If it weren't for the Cyrillic writing, I would have jumped to the conclusion that it was Canadian. What was the Moose doing? On closer examination, the Moose was stomping on a battery and sparks were flying out of it. I wondered for days what this was meant to convey to the Russian mind. Did the battery the Moose was stomping have a picture of a Moose stomping a battery on it? And so on. I put the battery on the shelf, along with the hand-wound coil, condenser, timed breather, plug wires, Russian spark plugs, clutch and brake cables. I didn't mention the cables, but use your imagination.

After about three weeks of cleaning up and replacing scary stuff, I started to bolt the thing together. The greatest accomplishment was getting the bewilderingly heavy engine into the frame. There was a lot of balancing involved, along with several tie-downs that were used to hang the engine (suspended over the mounts from the upper frame member). Hell, you could have hung a Volkswagen from the thing. Russians seem to have no shortage of iron. Everything is made out of it. The engine mounted with very little difficulty and actually aligned with the Cardan shaft to the rear drive. Great. Wiring took another three days, but it was really pleasant work because it was the first thing that wasn't (a) made out of iron, and (b) heavy. Wiring complete, and with a brand new Autozone battery, I dumped some gas into the tank and it came out in a beautiful geometric arc right onto my foot. I had forgotten to connect the fuel line between the tank halves that I had disconnected to get the tank over the frame. Like, tell me you clowns never did that before!

Checked the new NGK spark plugs for fire. Blue. Amazing! Put them back in. Petcock on, kill switch off (or on, however you look at it), key in the ignition. Primed the Russian carburetors (Being superstitious by nature, I had placed the Mikunis I bought as replacements in plain view of the Russian K68 carbs. It was meant as a threat). Kick. Kick. Kick... a boogadah boogadah boogadah boogadah. It's ALIVE!

I called Darlene to show her. She had placed wagers with the kids that the thing would be a horticultural ornament before it ever saw a highway. A-boogadah boogadah boogadah. I let it idle for about 15 minutes, replaced the oil and then went to bed.

Next day, I aligned the sidecar, the toe-in, and the outside lean on the bike and ran the thing around the yard for 10 minutes. Replaced the oil in the crankcase, gearbox and final drive. Took it to work. Took it to work again. And then a few more times. The next weekend I got REALLY ambitious and took it, Darlene in the sidecar, on a big ride to El Cajon, a neighboring city, all by way of backroads. We had just gotten into El Cajon and Darlene yells at me that there was a thick cloud of smoke billowing from the rear end. Panic. No fire extinguisher and I could imaging the sizzling oil seeping out of the seals on the rear drive bursting into flame at any second. Was the rear-end shot? Big repair project in sight? Nah. The rear wheel brake was rubbing just enough to cause enough heat that the hypoid gear oil boiled. Now that's HOT! It took a couple of hours to cool down. Adjusted the brake, drove it back home. Noticed the left pipe was smoking impressively. Turns out that the rocker arm adjusting bolt on the exhaust side was broken. Damned thing ran anyway, even though the valve was not closing completely. Oil was getting in, and was the cause of the contrail I was leaving. Got a new adjusting bolt from Lloyd Lounsbury up in Seattle. Changed all the oils again. Went to work a couple more times with it. Next week is the event we've all been waiting for. It is a California Motor Vehicle inspection required of all home-made stuff. I am anticipating something like a World Wrestling Federation tag-team match. No telling til I get there. We'll see.
 

Michael T. MacDonell --  itsa46chief@earthlink.net

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