Water Cooled Indian

Water Cooled Indian V-Twin Board Track Racer

Well, that's what it looks like. Google, for once, knew nothing. The label on the jigsaw puzzle calls it a fake.

Excelsior Board Track Racer, Part 2

How I made a motorcycle from an old Black and White photo // Paul Brodie's Shop
paul brodie
I put up a post about this guy and his project a while back. Ten years later he tells us how he did it.

Welcome to the Murderdrome

Welcome to the Murderdrome | A Brief History of Board Track Racing
Board Track Racing was a big deal 100 years ago. It came up suddenly, flourished for a few years and then quickly disappeared. The bikes were models of simplicity: an engine, frame, wheels, a seat, and go as fast as you can. You still see people trying to make simple motorcycles with everything extraneous stripped away. About the closest you can come now is flat track racers.

Not too long ago a guy went to a great deal of trouble to recreate one of the pre-eminent board track racing machines. It's pretty amazing.

Excelsior Board Track Racer

Scott's email got me started looking at these old motorcycles. There's no end to it. One guy went to the trouble to recreate a complete working replica of an old Excelsior, essentially from scratch (beware: the story goes on for 40 pages). This first video explains a lot about the whole crazy business.



This video was made from film shot during that time period: the earlier 1900's.



What most impressed me about this was the size of these wooden tracks. I always imagined them as short and narrow, just big enough to fit a couple of bikes, but as you can see from the video, they weren't, they were huge. You might think that such a huge track would be enormously expensive, but compared to paving they were really cheap. They did have some problems. They only lasted a couple of years before the weather destroyed them. They were extremely dangerous for the riders because of splinters, not just if they crashed, but even just while riding their machines would kick up splinters. They required constant maintenance, sometimes there were even carpenters working underneath the track to reinforce it as the race was going on up above.

This page has good collection of pictures from the early days.