Getting Hands-On with That Mythical Beast
Alright, let’s talk about this BMW R7 from ’34. People see pictures, you know, the sleek art deco thing, and think, “Cool old bike.” They figure it’s like working on any other old Beemer from back then. Let me tell you, it’s not even close. Not by a long shot.
First off, getting your hands on one? Forget about it mostly. This wasn’t a production bike they cranked out. It was a one-off prototype, a design study. So when this project landed in my lap, it wasn’t like finding a dusty R5 in a barn. This was different. It came about through a weird series of events, honestly. A collector I knew, well, he knew a guy, who had this… situation. Long story short, I ended up being the guy tasked with putting the pieces back together. And ‘pieces’ is putting it mildly.
You think parts are hard to find for regular vintage bikes? Try finding anything for a machine that technically never existed for the public. There’s no parts catalogue sitting on a shelf. You can’t just order a specific bracket or lever. Everything felt like a custom job, or trying to figure out what the original engineers were even thinking.
Not Your Usual Restoration Game
Working on it was like archaeology mixed with guesswork. You’d look at the frame, the engine, the crazy enclosed bodywork. Nothing quite matched up with the usual BMW stuff I was used to. The telescopic forks were experimental then, the engine had differences, the way the whole thing was packaged was unique. It felt like the engineers were just trying stuff out, throwing ideas at the wall.
- Finding correct fasteners? A nightmare.
- Figuring out how the body panels originally aligned? Hours of staring and careful bending.
- Getting the unique engine bits sorted? Needed custom machining based on grainy photos and diagrams.
It wasn’t a smooth process like: disassemble, clean, replace, reassemble. Oh no. It was more like: take this bit off, scratch head for a week, find an old photo, realize something’s missing entirely, try to fabricate it, realize the photo was wrong, try again. You end up talking to obscure historians, digging through archives if you’re lucky, just piecing together clues.
Why do I know all this fiddly detail? Because I was stuck in the middle of it. It wasn’t a quick flip or a standard job. This thing consumed months. There were days I just wanted to push it into a corner and forget about it. It felt like BMW themselves tried to forget about it for decades! You get why, though. Trying to mass-produce something this complex back then? Would’ve been a massive headache, probably bankrupted them.
So yeah, the R7. Looks amazing in photos. But getting it to that point? It wasn’t just bolting parts together. It was a whole different kind of challenge, a deep dive into a weird corner of motorcycle history that almost never was. Definitely not your weekend project bike.
