Jawa 353 with Velorex 560

Chart of Screws for Jawa 353 / Velorex 560 rigs: Rig Screws_german

In 1997, on a sunny afternoon in Dresden, an old man saw me riding on my Simson Star. He asked me, if I would like to have his Motorcycle, which he hadn’t been using for decades.  I followed him to his garage. There she stood – an 1961 CZ 175, in original condition. Around her was built a shelf, which we had to dismount before getting the bike. The man had bought the bike in his youth, but when he got his car (a Trabant, what else) he had stopped using the CZ. I took the bike, promising the old man to come back when I had finished restoring the bike. Unfortunately, he died a few years later, long before I had the time AND the money to get her into life again.

In November of 2011, I finally had the time and money (and the experience) to start the restoration. I had no definite end date, and so it took half the winter to renew the wheels with new rims and bearings and stainless steel spokes and to center the wheels.In early spring of 2012, Agata and me first spoke about wedding. A lot of stuff had to be organized for that binational wedding, for the german and the polish marriage, for church and register office. Whilst talking about all the things we wanted to do, an idea formed in my mind: Me, driving Agata from church to the party. In an old sidecar bike. A collegue from work had shown me photos from his wedding, where he had borrowed such a bike from a friend. I was curious if I could get the CZ ready until the wedding date? But still, I had no sidecar.

Easter morning 2012 found me on the highway on a 800 km ride to buy an old Velorex sidecar. The Velorex 560 was the original sidecar for the Jawa/CZ motorcycles of that time and fits optically perfect to any 60s motorbike. I came home at sunset and hid the sidecar at my mothers home, not telling Agata anything about it. But a few days later, she told me about a phone call with her best friend. Her friend had asked her how she imagined to drive to the wedding. Spontaneously, she had replied, that she best could imagine to ride in a sidecar! I couldn’t believe. SHE couldn’t believe when I showed her the sidecar. So it was settled. And I began to count the months – less than 14 months to the wedding!

   

Spring came. One evening I sat in a pub with my friends and told them about the restoration. A man came to our table and gave me his mobile phone. On it were some pictures of a 250 ccm Jawa from 1956. He had overheard our conversation and asked, if I wouldn’t want to buy his bike. Already before, I had started to doubt if the CZ 175 was the right bike for tugging a sidecar – the engine did not have enough power and there still was a whole lot of work to do before the bike was able to run again. I decided to give the Jawa a try. On a rainy spring saturday, I first saw her . I immediately fell in love with that bike: The 60s design, the smell, and THIS SOUND! I sat on it and turned a few rounds. I was astonished of how good the brakes were on a bike of this age. It felt good to ride this bike, and turning the throttle made it scream and jump forward. This was no museum object, this was biking at its best!

Examining the bike, I found out that there had been a restoration a few years ago. That was why the bike was in a good condition technically, however the painting had been carried out non-professional, and the shirr (those rubber strings dividing the sheets from each other) had been forgotten about.

   

There were a few minuses more – the carburator was not the original one, the same to the front lamp and the exhaust pipes – which were new, but because they didn’t fit to the engine, somebody had used a hammer to bend them. But the frame was the original Jawa for pulling a Velorex sidecar, although the bike had never seen one. That settled it and I bought the bike.

The first work was to fit the sidecar to the bike. I had expected it to fit perfectly from the start. Well, I was mistaken. I had to start from scratch because nothing fitted as it should. Thank god, I was not the first to do so and in the internet I found a lot of help. Also, the cabling had to be connected and a second holder for the sidecar brake link had to be welded under the right footrest.

   

Agata, on the meantime, removed all of the ugly stickers from the sidecar. Unfortunately, she also had to remove some of the paint.

   

       

At that time, we spent most of the time to organize legal stuff for the wedding. That’s why it took until late summer, until I drove the rig to DEKRA (German Motor Vehicle Inspection Association) to legalize it. The guy there did ask no questions, just inspected the connections and finally gave his OK. I hadn’t expected it to go so smooth and driving home through the Dresden night streets, I was really happy.

From then on, I took the bike everywhere I went. I needed to train driving it! Getting used to the upside down gear shift (typical for Jawa bikes) had been easy, learning to lean in the „wrong“ direction when doing a turn was not. Two times, on my way to work, I finished the ride in the ditch. At lunch break, I told my collegue from work about that. He took the bike and drove around the company building – on two wheels! Coming back, he mentioned how easy it was to ride the Jawa. I understood that it simply needed a bit of self esteem. And then it worked. After a few weeks, I even realized how easy it was to do the wheelie – it was, as always, just a question of having guts to do it.

Summer was gone, and it was time to get to work again. The bike, although technically in good condition, lacked some style. The sidecar was black (with parts of the paint missing) and the bike red, most of the chrome parts had been sprayed silver, and where the metal sheets touched each other, there were ugly marks left. After a short discussion with my fiancee, it was decided to make the whole bike black. I had learned that the bikes had been for sale in western countries in black color, while the standard color had been red. Although I had never heard of a Velorex/Jawa combination in black color, I wanted to have it this way. Makes your bike unique, does it?

The original idea was simply: just dismantling all of the bigger sheets, giving them to the paint shop, painting the frame by myself (because I didn’t want to dismantle the whole bike) and bolting together the whole thing. In the end, it didn’t work out as easy as I expected. When dismantling the front fork, I found the main screws simply dangling from the end of the fork springs. The thread was gone, and simply by chance the screws were still in place.

This was the first entry on a chart I made for checking which screws I had to buy. And while I was on it, I decided to replace all of the screws with stainless steel ones. See the Chart here -> Stainless_Steel_Screws_german

The next chart was for all the parts I had to replace. It started with all of the rubber parts, but it soon grew quite big! I went on screwing off the metal sheets, soon realizing that if you dismount all of the parts from a motorbike that can be seen from outside, you end up with … nothing.

     

I started to dismount all of the lesser parts to collect all the parts which needed chrome-plating. When I was on the rear dampers, I found them lacking a proper thread – just as were the front fork springs before. This time, it was not that easy. I bought some screws with 12.9 hardness and started to „tinker“ proper parts out of them. In the end, those will be definitely the most durable parts of the whole bike.

 

I found a guy who chrome-plated some of  the parts after the end of his working day – it took months to get them back, but the chromium plating was quite thick. Because it took so long, I gave the rest of the parts to a galvanization shop. I got back the parts after one week, but when I mounted them, the chromium plating started to crack already.

Winter came, and all that was left of the bike was a frame with a few cables dangling from it. That was the hardest moment – believing that this and the rest of the parts already packed in boxes would fit together again some day to form a motorcycle. What to do? Take a deep breath, boy, go to work, don’t think about it. The most encouraging was that Agata all the time believed in me. Whatever people said (for example mommy who asked me if I really planned to finish the bike before the wedding), she never doubted that I would achieve this goal.

First I cleaned the frame thouroughly, then I applied rust converter. Over it I did prime coating and then black top coat. I decided for RAl 9017 – although not being an original Jawa color, it made it possible to let the parts paint from different paint shops – and by myself. The parts which were original in silver, got a silver paint from hammerite – they were few and not very big.

       

I did so with all the small parts I wanted to do by myself to reduce the costs for painting. The bigger parts went to a paint shop near Agatas parent’s home. The guy there was not happy to do this parts because he was used to paint cars. Because I did not trust him to prepare the parts accordingly, I bought myself a small sandblast gun and in January I blasted all of the  parts by myself as good as I could.

In february, step by step all the parts I had bought and the parts I had given away for chrome-plating and painting arrived. Among all of the minor problems, the biggest problem was to find a gas tank. The original one was in too poor condition to let it have chrome plated, so I had to find a substitute. After some asking friends and collegues I found somebody who had one. It looked exactly like mine, only that it was located some 70 kms away. At the day when I arrived at the place, the owner of the bike garage was on a trade fair in Dresden! I saw the gas tank laying on a work bench in his garage, unable to reach it. I had to go back without it, but thank god they sent it by post 2 weeks later.

Winter lasted long in 2012/2013, and temperatures didn’t rise above -5 °C, when I started to reassemble the bike in Poland on March 18th of 2013. When I finished the assembling on that day, the thermometer showed -22°C. But I was really happy – finally a first success!

  

Now it payed out that when disassembling, I had taken pictures of every screw I unscrewed. Thanks to digital photography, I now had a full-colored, 80 pages thick instruction of how to reassemble the bike! Funny how often not the things were important, which were on the foreground of the pictures, but those small details in the background, which I hadn’t taken care of when I did the photo.

In the meantime in a small village in Germany… I started to disassemble the sidecar. It already had the right color, just repainting some of the parts – this is what I had in mind. But when I saw the frame, it was clear that I also had to clean it and repaint. Winter still lasted, I had no more money to give the sidecar to a paint shop, so I decided to build a selfmade spray booth in one of the cellars of my mothers home. I found an old electro oven and some plastic sheets, and soon I had the place to repaint the sidecar parts – body and frame. It came out better than I expected – at least the color was evenly distributed over all of the parts.

           

Spring came – or rather, it didn’t come. Although it was frosty, the sun shone on the weekends, when I reassembled the bike. The small place where I worked, quickly warmed up because there was no wind, sometimes it was even above zero. And so the dogs and cats came around to enjoy the warm rays, and I always had some company. One thing that I lacked in those days was time. There was the wedding in Germany, and a lots of things to organize for the wedding in Poland, and only so few weekends…

     

On the weekend after the german wedding, I borrowed a van from a friend and carried the sidecar to Poland. At this weekend – the first without snow – I managed to get the motorbike to life again! But before that was a lot of losing nerves. Because the gas tank, on which also was located the ignition lock, simply wouldn’t fit on the bike. I tried a thousand times, scratched the new paint with screwing and unscrewing the tank and the ignition lock and all of those cables,but it simply had a diffferent shape from the original one. In the end, I decided to build adaptors when coming home. At least, the tank would fit enough to try out the bike.

11 o’clock in the evening, I started the engine. My polish family thought, that something had exploded, and came out of their home. What they saw, was a bobbing forehead lamp (because the headlamp wasn’t installed yet) and some sparks coming from the centre stand which came loose while I was riding the main street of the village up and down.

       

Yeah, she was alive again. And loud. And stinking. And very, very beautiful.

Two weekends later, I finished work. Besides minor problems of non fitting screws, everything had worked out fine.

           

It had taken more than one year to finish the ride for our wedding, and I finished it in the nick of time – only five days were left until the wedding.

   

A lot of work, some money spent. But when I started the engine on that very day, to drive my wife from the church and on the track to our future life, seeing her smile sitting in the sidecar, I felt that all had been worth for this one moment.

       

   

PS: If anyone needs help in such a project, all of the documents are still there. Just ask.