R32: Taproot of Bmw's Family Tree
R32: TAPROOT OF BMW'S FAMILY TREE
Just another old crock that’s too valuable, and too maintenance-intensive, to ride? Take another look. This is the BMW R32. It is more than a motorcycle. It is an internal-combustion cornerstone of one of today’s most significant and influential companies, and in its own way it is a two-wheeled bookmark in the volume of 20thcentury time.
The R32 is also the bootstrap that helped BMW lift itself from the chaos of post-WWI Germany. It was designed by Max Friz, an engineer hired in 1917—the year of the Russian Revolution, the year the U.S. entered the war, the year John F. Kennedy was born and the year Buffalo Bill Cody died-to help build aircraft engines for Germany’s warplanes.
The end of the war in 1918 brought the Treaty of Versailles, which forbade the construction of most German aircraft. So Friz was asked to produce a motorcycle. He moved a drawing board and a stove into the guest room of his house at Riesenfeldstrasse 34, near BMW’s Munich factory, and in December, 1922, after about four weeks of work, emerged with the engineering drawings for the R32, a bike which carried some of the same design parameters as the new R1100RS.
Neither the opposed-Twin motor nor the shaft drive were new concepts, but it was left to Friz to mount the Boxermotor longitudinally in a double-loop frame so that a driveshaft could run directly from the engine’s transmission output shaft to the rear wheel’s bevel drive.
In spite of difficult economic circumstances that gripped all of Europe, it didn’t take BMW long to turn Friz’s drawings into metal. In 1923, the R32 was introduced at the Paris Motor Show. It developed 8.5 horsepower at 3300 rpm from its 486cc engine, which drove through a three-speed, hand-shift transmission to haul the 265-pound machine to about 60 miles per hour. The buying public, worried about the bike’s relatively low power output, about the vulnerability of its cylinders, and about power loss from the shaft drive, was unconvinced. Still, by the time it was superseded in 1926, about 3100 R32s had been built.
Now, according to Evan Bell, owner of Irv Seaver BMW in Orange, California, about 10 running examples remain. Bell owns two of them. One is a 1923 model and is the 41st machine off the production line. The other is a 1924 model, about 600 units into the total production count. He says of the R32, “I’ve ridden a lot of old bikes you’re glad to get off of, but this is very ridable. It always starts with one or two kicks, and it runs good.”
But Bell says the R32 is more important for the tradition it represents than for its performance. And he says the 1993 R1100RS is equally important for the continuity it mirrors: “It’s the concept BMW started. BMW has survived by building a motorcycle of this basic concept, and now they’re updating it. I’d say that original concept was a pretty good idea, pretty good basic engineering.”
Jon F. Thompson
