Who watches the Military parades in China and thinks ' COOL ! they have wide whitewall tires on their Army trucks !....... ' I wonder if anyone else ever notices these things .
China Nate, I lived in China for 5 years and never saw a military truck with wide white walls. All the trucks I saw looked like they came straight from the 40"s. You must be seeing their "show trucks" for the media!!! (or maybe North Korea?) China has some really neat bikes though. They have the dies for a 1938 BMW with a side car that they still use. When I lived in Bejing in 2001 and 2002 you could buy one for $900.
Thanks , Steve Yes , the trucks look like 1940's design and they're the ones that carry the missles they love to show off ~ I've been watching them in newsreels since the 1970's and they've always had big old white wall tires . The BMW knockoff is a Chian Jiang and the tooling was given to The People's Repulic Of Slavery -OOPS- I mean China , in 1951 by The Kremlin as a gesture of freindship ~ Russia stole the BMW factory in Spandau during WWII (along with the rest of this manufacturing district inbcluding Opel truck plants etc.) and took it home and have been manufacturing BMW copies ever since . When they began selling them in Europe etc. in the 1960's they made up a B.S. story about having purchased two BMW's in 1939 (a flathead and an OHV) and reverse engineered them ~ students of history all know better . I have two of them and for an obsolete design built by drunken communists on a Firday , it's actually a pretty darn good Moto and I ride it more than any of my other bikes...
You're Welcome It is said that History is written by the winners..... When I were a laddie , I had the incredibly good fortune to be freinds of Alan Hurley and Fred Foster . both were serious history buffs by the time they were 8 or so . they taught me that history is alive and is fascinating to boot , not that soporific crap they " taught " us in public school .
Chiken wings Nate, the other great vehicle that is used all over southern China is a thing called a Tola Ji. It has a one cylinder diesel hanging off the front over two wheels. Looks like a very large version of the cycle bar grass cutter my old man had when I was a kid in the 50's. Lots of them have model T type roofs over the driver. There must be 10 million of these things over there and they move everything with them. I kept telling SWMBO that I was going to bring one home. Could have had a new one for around $500. Love your history on the bike, I walked passed one every day but never saw who owned it. Didn't know they were imported here.
Tola Ji That sounds pretty interesting . I think you should bring one home... I saw a Chiang Jiang in Guatemala City back in 1989 or so . There's been several attempts to set up distributor ships of them in the U.S. but the almost total lack of Q.C. kills it every time . The best ones are ex P.L.A. and there's quite a bit of surplus parts beginning to surface now , once has to be careful as much of it is surplus because it got rusty in poor storage.... The real deal P.L.A. parts almost always have a little paper inside the package with a bit of Chairman Mao's poetry.... BTW : the bit about Russia ripping off all the factories in East berlin ? they loaded them all onto box cars and there they sat well into the 1950's for lack of sufficient trained personnel to set them up again.... typical communist stupid mistake . all mannr of good things they needed and too much squabbling over the details of who was to get ther honors , prevented any real progress with most of it . Those here old enough to remember America's opinions of Japanese products well into the early 1970's ~ just watch , China's going to do the same thing .
I've spent 2 days on the internet and came up dry! I know exactly what you're talking about Nate. And, yeah, I too, always thought it was cool! I hoped that I could find a picture on the net showing the spotless stainless steel rims on those big wheels and the whitewall tires on those 2 ton trucks with the missiles, but all I could find was a gazillion infantry men marching in perfect step. And, you definitely pegged it when you said "History is written by the winners!" If we could only learn from history! Editorial over! Long live the inline 6 banger!
