One of the recent gem's to come out of the Harley-Davidson museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was the Penster prototype trike, but the museum is like a gift that keeps on giving, with several other rare and unusual pieces emerging from the US motorcycle makers annals.
Would you believe Harley-Davidson used to build rocket engines for the U.S. military? Or how about the 'motor bob' from 1913 (second image), quite possibly one of the first powered snow mobiles ever made.
And then there was the very strange Harley-Davidson Servicar (third image), to which a hobby horse was attached for a 1950s American Legion parade.
But back to the rockets...
One of the world's most famous motorcycle makers was building liquid-fuelled rocket engines for three decades between the mid 1960s and 1990s, primarily for the U.S. Navy.
Clearly the humble V-twin wasn't enough to satiate Harley Davidson engineers back in the '60s, and the company began building rudimentary rocket propulsion systems, namely the LR-64 rocket engine.
According to museum documents, Harley-Davidson built more than 5000 LR-64 rocket propulsion systems after scoring contracts to supply the U.S. Navy, contracts that spanned from the mid '60s to the '90s.
The rocket engines were used by the military in target drones, simple vessels designed for target practice. So in essence the rocket engines were built to be destroyed.
But not all of them wound up being shot out of the sky by tactical weaponary - at least a couple of them were stowed away for safe keeping and are now being exhibited as part of the 'Collection X' at the Harley-Davidson museum in Wisconsin.
All the rocket engines were built at the company's York plant in Pennsylvania, and highlight an interesting chapter in the company's history. It's unlikely we'll see a rocket-powered Harley-Davidson any time soon, but it makes you wonder... Did a couple of powertrain engineers consider shoe-horning a compact version of the rocket engine into a motorcycle?
We would like to think so.
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