The Dnepr Papers
THE DNEPR PAPERS
In which Jimmie Lee and the boys take on the might of Russian motorcycling
BUBBA RAY BURDICK
WADE ROBERTS
THE CALL TO ARMS
IF YOU ASK ME, WE BEEN WORRYING TOO MUCH ABOUT THE wrong darn things.
I’m saying forget about the Bomb, who has it and who don’t and who’s trying to make one out of a broken Philco 12-inch black-and-white. Forget about Fidel and forget about the Chinese hordes. Ditto Central America, the Mid-East and all those other tacky little spots where they don’t have IHoPs. Those rusty fishing trawlers with all the new CB antennas from the Radio Shack you see when you crank up the Evinrude and take the Chris-Craft out in the bay? Put ’em out of your mind.
Everybody’s yipping and yapping and yammering about this stuff. Them boys up in Washington, the ones with the mental batteries that won’t hold a good charge, they been going on for years about how we’re behind in this or that. Balance of power, they call it. Fine and dandy. As long as we don’t lose sight of what made the Free World great. I’m talking the balance of horsepower here.
I ain’t no PhD, but it seems to me that we’ve gotten things a little mixed up. We’ve got us a pretty good idea of how we stack up against the Commies when it comes to nuclear subs, but what about their interstates? While we’ve been busy counting up warheads, what if the other side has perfected that additive that turns tap water into high-octane? Or the thousand-mile-per-gallon four-barrel carb? Curb-feelers that don’t rust? Who knows what them sneaky devils have been up to?
I’m saying that the Free World runs the risk of losing our road superiority unless we’re careful. Do you want to surrender the blacktop? I don’t mind telling you I’m worried bad.
Me and the boys at Jimmie Lee’s Bait Camp and AllNite Towing Service, well, we’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. It didn’t look like the fellers up on the Potomac River were in any big hurry to do anything, so that’s why we come up with our our think tank down here on Road Kill Creek.
Right off, we realized that we had us a bigger chaw than we could chew. There were only four of us and a limited amount of quarters for the jukebox (you can’t have a think tank without the benefit of Hank Jr.), so we set out to narrow our focus some. Larry Bob had heard somewhere that Russia didn’t have no drive-in theaters, so that took care of the car question. If they had decent cars, we figured, they’d take ’em to the drive-in on Saturday nights.
That left us with the motorcycle race. And I mean to tell you, that one worried me the most. None of us had ever heard tell of any Russkie bike. If they were that hush-hush, God knows what kind of two-wheel iron those sumbitches had. Made me shudder.
It took us a lot of time (five or six days, not counting time off for a few games of eight-ball and some trips out back to convene with Mother Nature), a lot of expense (maybe $30 in quarters for the Seeburg), a bunch of research (eight, maybe 10 phone calls, including a couple of long-distance), and mucho cerveza (not included in the expenses, since Jimmie Lee donated it on account of this being a matter of national security).
We went to the well and, I’m proud to say, we came back with the water. We rounded us up a real Russkie state-of-the art scoot and went mano-a-mano with the Kremlin’s earthbound MiG. This here’s our report. Copyright, Jimmie Lee’s Bait Camp and Think Tank. Top secret. Void where prohibited. Local taxes may apply.
OUR REPORT
IT WAS LARRY BOB WHO GOT THE FIRST NIBBLE. WE WERE using the creek bottom's Civil Defense telephone chain to try to send out diplomatic feelers to the other side, when ol' Larry Bob had himself a thought. His on-again, off-again girlfriend, Wanda June, had gone off one semester to the junior college and might have some invaluable contacts. Wanda June wasn’t too keen on the idea, since she and Larry Bob had just had another falling out, something to do with him forgetting the monthly dance at the VFW post and spending the evening armed with a case of Pabst and patrolling the back roads for enemy paratroopers. But Larry Bob’s got this golden tongue, and after a little sweet-talkin’, Wanda June agreed to go undercover and do some snooping at the J.C.
Damned if the old girl didn’t come through. Turns out one of Wanda June’s old boyfriends had one of those touring bikes outfitted like a Winnebago and was always riding it to these big picnics around the country. He told her he’d seen a Russkie bike, a sidecar setup, at one of those hoe-downs a while back.
Good Lord, I thought, they’ve infiltrated.
Problem was, this gent just couldn’t recall much about the Sov-cycle. ’Bout all he could remember was that the
boy who owned it hailed from Denver.
Back at headquarters, we got right on the bait camp hotline. Finally, we got through to a feller name of Burt Richmond in the Mile-High City. Yep, said Richmond, he had one of them hammer-and-sickle cycles with the sidecar. Matter of fact, he was in the business of bringing ’em over here. And sure, seeing as how we were on an official mission, we could come on over to Denver to have a looksee if we wanted.
We piled right in Jimmie Lee’s pickup and took off on our fact-finding mission, after a quick pit-stop to fill the cooler. In no time flat we rendezvoused with Richmond. And with the best the other side could muster.
“Here it is,” said Richmond.
“Hmm,” said Sonny Joe. “Looks kinda like a BMW I saw the other night on the Late, Late Show.”
PAUSE FOR ACADEMIC HISTORY LESSON
IF YOU STUDY YOUR BETTER WWII MOVIES, ’SPECIALLY the ones starring the Duke, you’ll see the Germans chasing the Russians toward the North Pole. If you squint your eyes, you’ll see some of the Krauts on BM Ws (not the cars, but R12s, the bikes-and-sidecar rigs).
Now, the Germans were whuppin’ the Russians something bad. Then America got mad and jumped in. The Duke opened a second front in France and started giving the Germans hell from the other end, so Adolph had to send for some of his guys who were camped outside Stalingrad.
Now, the Russians were great admirers of the Duke. They decided they wanted to meet the Big Guy, oh, somewhere around Berlin, so they up and headed south. That came as a big surprise to the Germans, who decided the Commissar’s beer was no good, so why not run back down to Munich for a quick six-pack of Lowenbrau? This resuited in what is known as the Great German Retreat.
“Lotsa weird foreign markings we couldn’t read even standing on our heads.”
The Germans couldn’t fill up their BMWs for the return commute, since the Russians had stopped taking their credit cards. So a lot of the bikes ran out of gas, and the Germans had to leave a bunch of them along the highway. The Russians came along and towed everything to the pound. When the Germans didn’t show up to pay the storage charges within 30 days, the Russians retitled the whole shootin' match, took everything to the Sovhio station, filled up, charged it (Josef had a Gold Card), and hit the road again.
During the drive south, the Russians took a real shine to the German sidecar rigs, and they sure were ticked when the Duke and NATO took the slice of Europe that included the BMW plant. So before they pulled back and organized the purges, Ivan’s team stopped by the plant. While everybody else was looking the other way and planning the United Nations, the Russians shoplifted a few things.
THE DNEPR (NO, THIS ISN'T A MISTAKE)
"BLESS YOU," SAID SONNY JOE, MOVING TO ONE side. “No,” said Richmond. “I said ‘Dnepr.’ What you’re looking at is a Dnepr.” Actually, what he said was closer to Duh-neeper. In Russia, apparently, vowels are about as rare as microwave ovens that can brown. Because of the vowel shortage, they conserve what few they have, which results in spellings like Dnepr.
“Whatever,” grumped Sonny Joe. “Still looks like a BMW rig to me.”
For good reason. The Russians are as good as your average Manhattan car-stripper when it comes to taking something apart and then putting it back together. You’ve heard about them taking apart a Sylvania 60-watter, copying it, and claiming to have invented the light bulb?
Turns out that when they got home from the war, the Russians had carted off enough of the BMW plant to invent the BMW combo. Twice. They built two factories, each turning out the same bike-and-sidecar rig, but under two different names. A plant in the Ural Mountains commenced to making the Ural, explained Richmond. The other plant, near Kiev, made the . . .
“Kiev!” Sonny Joe blurted out. He had a grin like a coon dog does when it finds a stump in the Sahara.
“Dnepr,” corrected Richmond, “after the river near Kiev.”
Sonny Joe got all glum and sulked for a bit. Then he jumped like he’d gotten the business end of a cattle prod and took to flailing his arms. “This here thing’s from Kiev?” he shouted. “I seen the newsbreaks during the LateLate! Melt-down! Great God Awmighty, I’m mutatin’ as I talk!”
No need for concern, Richmond calmed him. His
Dnepr rig was a ’78, well pre-melt-down. That soothed Sonny Joe some.
A thought came to Larry Bob. “But that’s nine years old,” he said. “You promised us state-of-the-art.”
“It is,” said Richmond.
“But it looks like a ’39 BMW,” said Larry Bob.
“That’s the way they still make ’em,” said Richmond.
While we were digesting that, Jimmie Lee, who has one sharp set of eyes (which is why we let him drive after we’ve been out all night carousing), noticed something amiss. “Say,” he said to Richmond. “You’ve been talking about Dneprs when that there gas tank says ‘Neval’ clear as hell.”
Seems the Dneprs make a comfort stop on their way to the Free World. Kind of like how bananas that start out in some guy’s backyard in Honduras end up in the Safeway with a Del Monte sticker.
Okay, pay attention. In Mother Russia, Dnepr and Ural sidecar combos come in four versions. There are two choices for powerplant: a 650cc pushrod engine or a 750cc flathead (most of the 750s, though, go to the Soviet military or to the local Smokies). Buyers get a choice of drivetrains: a rig with a driven third wheel, or without. Oh, and they do get a choice of colors: The Urals are green, the Dneprs are black. That, basically, sums up the Russian motorcycle line for the past, oh, 30 years. That’s what you call your seller’s market.
“Nifty left turns. Right turns like the kind 16-wheelers make.”
The export model is the 650 Dnepr (called the MT-10 without the driven third wheel, the MT-12 with the differential and extra-wheel drive). For a short time in the early Seventies, the Soviets tried selling Dneprs themselves outside the mother country under the brand-name Cossack. They might as well have called it the Bolshevik. You can imagine how well the Cossack went over: slight image problem.
That would’ve been all she wrote, except that the sun never sets on Limey ingenuity. Some Brits signed the fleecing Russkies to an exclusive contract and got the rights to market the combo under their company name. Thus, the
Dnepr begat the Cossack, which begat the Neval, which actually begat some sales.
The Russians shipped the rigs to the British Empire like Sears ships its bicycles to the American suburbs: in pieces, to be screwed together by the buyer. This meant separate engines, drive trains, frames, fenders, steel sidecar bodies and so forth. The parts were married in Britain. The process avoided a lot of embarrassing trade questions, since the finished product could carry a sticker that said “Assembled in Great Britain,” instead of “Hecho in CCCP.”
It also gave the Neval folks the opportunity to perform a
few refinements—quality control in Kiev being what it is— while they were wrenching things up. Would you trust your life to Russian tires? Hello, Dunlop and Avon. Ever wonder how bad the Sovs are with electrics? So bad that the Brits swapped it out for Lucas (that sound you hear is a collective giggle from Triumph and BSA riders) and Bosch. The rest of the list: Akront wheels from Spain. Veglia instruments from Italy. SU carbs, Lodge plugs, Jaguar (no kidding) valve springs from England. Levers and hand controls from France. Yuasa batteries from Japan. New rings, seals and assorted nuts and bolts. Before long, you could get your Dnepr in a second color (red, appropriately enough), with a choice of alloy or wire wheels, and even with a fiberglass sport fairing in place of the old Wehrmacht perch (although then you gotta give up the nifty machine-gunner’s folding windshield).
Masquerading under the Neval badge, a few hundred Dneprs could be found on Liz’s little island by the end of the decade. France fell next, followed by the rest of Europe. Then Canada.
That’s where this Richmond feller comes in. Richmond is a semi-retired industrial decorator, developer and car/ motorcycle buff (we’re talking about a man here who claims to have owned 31 Morgans, folks* and whose current collection of 37 bikes runs from a 1919 Enfield sidecar rig to a big Interceptor, with a lot of eccentric American, German, Italian and English machines in between). In 1978, Richmond heard tell of the Dnepr/Cossack/ Neval.
“You’ll pull 65 mph max if you’re lucky and angled toward China.”
There was this Canadian, the story went, who had brought one to the U.S. of A. when he relocated here because the TV programs are better or something. Richmond tracked the guy down in Boulder, Colorado, and made him a cash offer. That’s how Richmond came to be the owner of a barely broken-in ’39 BMW R61 rig. Or a hardly used ’78 Dnepr. Or a Cossack or Neval. German or Russian or British. Take your pick.
Richmond rode the thing for a while before he had this doozy of a notion. “I thought everyone should have one,” he said. The other sidecar rigs he saw were like the off-
spring of a triple-crown winner and a donkey: road bikes with sidecars coat-hangered on as an afterthought. The Neval, though, had been designed by all those Deutschspeaking boys 50 years ago as a true combo. Nowadays, it’s the only bike made that comes out of the factory with all that extra stuff on the starboard side. “I had great visions this would revolutionize middle-class transportation,” said Richmond. “Momma could even use it to go to the grocery store and pick up the dry-cleaning.”
In 1980, he convinced the Brits to give him the U.S. market. That was the easy part. It took three years of backand-forth with the fedecrats before Richmond had the
rubber-stamp collection he needed to make everything bueno. He cranked up his own Denver-based company, Sidecar Imports Ltd. (telefono: [303] 831-0100; addresso:
1065 Lafayette Ave., Denver, CO 80218), and opened the garage doors.
So far, Richmond has sold 80-some-odd Neváis (counting both MT-10s and MT-12s) for prices averaging $ 5000. He’s sold another 20 or so military-style sidecars ($1750 each) as aftermarket add-ons for other bikes.
As far as revolutions go, so far this one is a little shy of the one the Russians threw in 1918.
“Some things,” said Richmond, “take time.”
“Remember the domino theory,” said Larry Bob, who plays a great game of bones.
JIMMIE LEE’S THINK TANK VS. THE RUSSIAN BRUTE
THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE IS THAT THIS IS ONE BIG Russian mother. I don’t know what it is in Russian pounds, but on our all-American scale, it weighs in at about 700 big ones, dry.
Second thing you notice is that it looks sturdier than Arnold Schwarzenegger. All these tubes as big as L.A. sewer-pipes, massive castings that would feel right at home in the innards of the USS Nimitz, enough steel to bulletproof all of Beirut. Rough, but strong,like some mean hombre of an Ivan got up one morning all hung-over, swigged a quart of the czar’s-hair, walked to the back yard, shoveled up a half-ton of ore, pissanted it over to a highschool bonfire, got it good and hot, and whupped it good with a ball-peen until it would run.
“Burt Richmond has sold 80-some-odd Neváis for prices averaging $5000.”
This is one of those no-frills, what-you-see-is-what-youget bikes. Everything is kind of hanging out there. Generator, coil, distributor, air cleaner, all kinds of things. While you gotta be an MIT-grad, Master’s or better, to change the oil on some of those Japanese bikes, your fifth-grader with an Erector set tool-kit could do a complete top-end in 15 minutes flat on the Dnepr/Neval.
Jeep-strength shocks everywhere, including on the sidecar. Drum brakes. Kick-start only (this is, remember, 1939; besides, they’re probably hoarding all their electric motors for Weed-Eaters). Complete tool kit, with tire pump and grease gun, located behind the sidecar seat, where there’s also room to smuggle a small child aged 4 or less. A 4.8-gallon fuel tank, good for about 190 miles of pillaging. A five-speed transmission, ’cept one of the speeds is reverse (which comes in damn handy, by the way, with this sumo-sized machine), and shaft drive. Lotsa weird foreign markings we couldn’t read even standing on our heads.
A dual-seat is available, but Richmond’s bike has the standard solo saddle and pillion. (“Uh,” said Richmond, “Russian soldiers don’t like to have to put their arms around each other when they ride.”) For you nit-pickers, he has painted his a non-stock white. Since most of his riding is on routes that are listed in Rand-McNally, Richmond has the MT-10, without the limited-slip differential, extra driveshaft and driven third wheel. (If there’s a frozen tundra in your neck of the woods, or if you want to cross a few sovereign borders, you might want to take a hint from the German and Soviet armies and check out the MT-12.)
Firing ’er up is a cinch. Tickle the carbs (remember that?), close the choke lever on the left intake manifold, retard the spark lever (déjà vu, II) on the left handlebar, insert the massive key into the headlamp and switch on, then let loose on the kickstart lever. Coupla hops usually does it. Advance the spark and hit the road, Boris.
I’d think twice, though, about pulling into the path of a fireballing Peterbilt. Ain’t a lot of power here. ’Bout 40 horses is on the generous side, which ain’t much for a beast this size. Call full-speed-ahead to the engine room and you’ll pull 65 mph max if you’re lucky and angled toward China. Cruising speed is more like 50-55 mph, which’ll make your local state trooper and the highway safety folks proud. (You think we got it bad; the national speed limit in the USSR, according to Richmond, works out to 36 mph. That’s why they got all them 120-year-old guys; they’ve been riding 80 years to the Stop-n-Go for a pack of smokes.)
But, say an M1 tank bogs down in the next county during National Guard maneuvers: You can make yourself a quick twenty by pulling it out of the mud. There’s enough torque here—from git-go first all the way through fourth—
to pull us all back to the Age of Woodstock, if anyone wanted to go.
Handling is what you’d expect from a sidecar rig. Nifty left turns. Right turns like the kind that 16-wheelers make. And if you go into one of those tight right-handers without ballast in the sidecar (like a passenger or a full keg), you’ll swear that Rasputin has got hold of the right side and is trying to tip you over to meet him. Just takes getting used to, like your first plug of chewing tobacco. Carrying capacity is in the vicinity of 600 pounds, roughly the cargo of Whoppers and Doritos and Pabst (remember to allow for driver) that you’d need for a weekend of network baseball. Damned practical.
According to Richmond, the Russians have bought some 600,000-plus of these things. Could 600,000 Russians be wrong?
“And they don’t even have no baseball,” said Sonny Joe, ever the philosopher.
OUR IMPRESSIONS
LARRY BOB: “FUN TO RIDE. PEOPLE WAVE. WOMEN giggle. I could put my pit bull in it, if I wanted to. Haul lumber or gravel. Go to a drive-in.”
Jimmie Lee: “An everyday convenience, ’specially if you was poaching deer out-of-season and saw the game warden coming. Lash that buck down, hit a narrow trail and you’re out of there, pronto. Hypothetically speaking, of course.”
“Tubes as big as L.A. sewer pi castings that would feel at h innards of the USS Nimitz.”
Sonny Joe: “An instant collectible. How many other things can you buy and have an off-the-shelf antique? I have a cousin who’s still hanging on to a six-pack of Billy Beer, thinking someone’s gonna give him enough money for it to retire on.”
Me: “Hate to say it, but maybe them Russkies got something here. Simple, sturdy, fun, handy. Not quite the thing you’d want to go Superbike racing with, or enter in the Baja, but, well, hell, it’s damn handy in between. Quite the conversation piece around town, too, especially at the VFW—like to give half them old boys heart failure.”
CONCLUSIONS, OBSERVATIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS
WE STILL OWN THE HIGHWAYS. HANDLING and performance still count the most. Sorry, Ivan. Better luck next time. But they’re crowding us. And this thing does have its place. There’s room for the Dnepr/Neval in a
world of Japanese tire-melters, just as sure as there’s room for 45-rpm singles amongst compact discs. In other words: Can you get Dion and the Belmonts on a CD? Can you take the wife and kid camping aboard your canyon-racer?
Observation: What happens if the Soviets lay in a nice little V-Four? DOHC? Four valves-per? An aluminum frame? Fiberglass body and sidecar? Other new-wave pieces here and there? I mean, the Russkies’ bikes are statesubsidized. What happens if they borrow from their spacestation program?
Recommendation: Increased government spending for offensive motorcycles. And vigilance. Eternal vigilance.
