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Motorcycle Road & Racing Chassis

This Bakker machine is designed around the Honda CBX 1000 six-cylinder engine.

twin, and the Barracuda is a complete motorcycle designed to accept big V-twins, such as the Suzuki TL1000, Honda VTR or Ducati. The well-known Grizzly can be supplied with any four-cylinder engine, including the Suzuki GSX-R and Honda CBR. Then there’s the supermono racer, which will take Rotax, Yamaha, Honda or any other big single-cylinder engine. The Hawk is based on Honda’s Hawk, the 650cc engine expanded to 700cc and tuned to produce twice the horsepower.

Over the years, the Bakker works has produced many one-

off or small production runs of machines for special needs, a prime example of this being an off-road or enduro machine built around the BMW GS flat-twin. It weighs 30kg less than BMW’s factory bike.

The diversity of Bakker’s range and the innovation behind his work is clear – not only that, but he has put these advanced machines into production, and maybe that is the true achievement.

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Motorcycle Road & Racing Chassis

Man and machine: Dave Degens with his personal Dresda Triumph during 1991. Both saw a full season on the track.

twin-cylinder engines. Dresda was supplied a complete bike, from which the engine was removed and fitted into the Dresda frame. It was during this project that Dave Degens’ forward thinking showed itself once more, when he incorporated monoshock rear suspension, quite an advanced feature for the early 1970s.

The Yamaha project would also demonstrate that Dave Degens’ skills extended to engines. The Yamaha twin suffered a persistent internal problem; Degens established the cause and carried out modifications to eliminate it. This work led to a contract for Dresda to follow the fault right through, including visiting the Porsche test centre where development on the engine was being carried out. He oversaw the various modifications, and also developed a further mod to rectify a fault that caused the cam chain to destroy its tensioner.

Whilst at the test centre, Dave became aware that an engine under test was not running correctly, and discovered that

the throttle slides were fitted incorrectly. Much to everyone’s amazement, he corrected the throttle setup, and the engine achieved its expected power output.

With a successful development frame for Yamaha and the engine work, Dave Degens and Dresda Autos had shown their potential to this important manufacturer. Of course, much of the motorcycling public already knew the worth of Dresda’s work, having seen that almost any engine would benefit from being fitted into a Dresda frame: Triumph, Norton, BSA, Suzuki, Honda, and Kawasaki units have been used.

In addition to its impressive frames, still being built, Dresda Autos also markets its own swingarm kit, and have always offered a comprehensive modification service. It will modify a frame to take an alternative engine, or convert a dual shock system to monoshock, and carry out other special frame modifcations, such as adding extra tubes to enhance stiffness.

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Harris Performance Products

A complete Harris Magnum 5 with a twin-

sided swingarm

Another Magnum 5, this one with a single-sided swingarm.

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Motorcycle Road & Racing Chassis

A further advance was made by Ron Williams when he

produced this carbon fibre composite chassis. The use

of this totally different technology

demonstrates the innovative thinking

behind the company.

Maxton has not restricted its work

purely to two-wheeled machines, as this sheet-aluminium

sidecar chassis shows.

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Motorcycle Road & Racing Chassis

As well as fulfilling the Norton contract, Spondon Engineering also designed and built a series of machines for a Far Eastern customer, and while these production runs were being carried out, the one-offs and specials carried on, as they always had.

At the beginning of 1992 Spondon produced a unique frame to house the Harley Davidson 883 Sportster engine. The swingarm pivot was on the gearbox centre line, and the rear shock was mounted horizontally, on the left-hand side of the engine. The Spondon Harley was well received, and the company built eighteen of them. Later that year it built a retro Kawasaki Z1000 frame to take standard bodywork. The frame itself was fabricated from alloy tube and incorporated modern wheels and tyres. Ten were built for customers from South Africa, Japan and the USA.

Between the various designs brought out by Spondon, the company

continued to service the motorcycle world by the supply of parts, many made in-house, and the supply of replacement frames for almost any motorcycle.

By 1995 Spondon had another design in product ion, th is one taking the popular Honda FireBlade engine. It did well for Spondon too, and, while its production volumes weren’t quite up

to those of Honda, 25 machines was a respectable batch, many of them exported, including three to Moscow. Two years later, the company reverted to its old-style cantilver rear suspension system for a frame to take the Honda CBX six-cylinder engine, because Bob Stevenson felt that the cantilever still worked

The Spondon-framed Yamaha TDM 850 twin, first built during late 1989.

Early in 1992 Spondon produced the machine shown here, with

Harley-Davidson’s 883 Sportster engine.