Siamese Harley Built In Wichita Falls

February 6, 2009
Fort Collins, CO

I found the following article while doing a routine check for articles or photos that might surface of Dad's early riding days and the time he spent working at the Harley-Davidson shop in Wichita Falls, Texas in the early fifties.

I confirmed it. Dad was working at the Cycle Shop when this baby was built.

Just for the record: I am always on the lookout for photos or articles about Les Myers's Wichita Cycle Company and The Kickapoo Kowboys.

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The Siamese Harley

One of the interesting oddities in the Walksler collection is a Harley-Davidson lightweight featuring a twin-cylinder engine built from two siamesed singles. The motorcycle was built by Ace Elliott in 1953 when he was shop foreman and service manager for Les Myers's Wichita Cycle Company in Wichita Falls, Texas. Elliot explains, “We had a Hummer that had been wrecked and another that was repossessed. Every Friday when we got off work, we would go across the street to the Kemp Cave, a bar in the Kemp Hotel, and have a couple of beers.” This explains a lot, because the unusual machine pictured here is precisely the kind of thing you might expect to come from a lot of ingenuity fueled by a little alcohol.

Elliott says that he took one engine, destined to become the front half, and sawed off the gear box with a hack saw. Then he dismantled the two engines and began cutting away portions of the crankcases to make them fit together, fore and aft. The shop had a heavy steel plate deck that was used to straighten frames. Elliott clamped the same-side crankcase halves onto the steel deck, then heated the whole thing up until the cases were hot enough to weld without distorting. He reports, “I didn't know much about aluminum welding, but I talked to a guy who told me a little about it and what kind of alloy the welding rod needed to be made of. I mixed my own compound, melted it, then poured it into a crack in the cement floor to make my own welding rods.” Elliott would carefully weld on the cases, cover his work with a sheet of insulation, let the whole steel table slowly cool overnight, then begin to grind, file, and clean up his work the next day. This process was repeated again and again until the siamesed crankcases were finished and in proper alignment. Elliott recalls, “It took from November through March, and I did not even go to Daytona that year because I was working on this thing.”

Anyone who has owned one of the little post-war Harley lightweights will recall how easy it was to make them run backward. Elliott utilized this feature by mating the cranks and timing the engines so the back cylinder runs normally and the front cylinder runs backward. He also found a simple solution for installing the lengthened twin in the Hummer chassis by simply cutting through the bottom of the frame, stretching it open five inches to make room for the long twin engine, and welding in sections of tubing. The upper backbone of the frame was not cut, stretched, or altered in any way. How did the project work after a half-year of intensive development? With obvious satisfaction, Elliott says, “It ran like a 250 Yamaha!”

Source: Ed Youngblood’s Motohistory
http://www.motohistory.net/news2005/news-sept05.html

Harley Hummer Information
Harley Hummer http://www.harleyhummer.com/