that storey on shovel.us, nice pics off the side car, im sure that sidecar fender must be worth a pretty penny
you ever plan to paint it OG colours? i really dig the brown that the factory painted them in
I guess you're talkin' to me, Mark. "Are you talkin' to me? You talking to me? Well, you must be talkin' to me, I'm the only one here!" (with apologies to Travis Bickel,
Taxi Driver, 1976)
What you see on Ol'Tex
is OG, or US Army "Olive Gloss." It was copied from a paint chip provided to me by the guys who worked at the workshop of Patton Museum at Fort Knox years ago. They were the restorers of this:
(photo by the author)
That's the 1939 Cadillac limousine Gen. George S. Patton was riding in when he had his fatal collision with an army mess truck in Austria, December 20, 1945. It's all repaired and on display.
The reason that's significant is that
it's the same color as the 86 or so UL Harleys and sidecars, and some Indians, that were painted Olive Gloss and issued to the 1st and the 13th Cavalry Regiments "(motorized)" at Fort Knox before WWII. That was the first attempt to get the American Cavalry off its horses and get modern. On holidays, like "Decoration Day" (May 30, now called Memorial Day) and the Fourth of July, the shiny army sidecars, all dressed up and still with a few chrome-plated parts displayed, used to parade in Louisville, Ky., about 30 miles from Fort Knox.
The cavalry's traditional function, for thousands of years, has been to serve as the scouts, the eyes and the ears, of a land army. World War I proved once-and-for-all that machinegun bullets and horseflesh did not mix, so in the 1930s, in response to what they saw the Nazis building over in Europe, the US Army experimented with using available technology: plain civilian 74 sidecars, as off-road and through the woods cavalry scouting vehicles. It was a learning experience from the start to end. They were designated 3-man combat vehicles: a Private for the driver, another Private on a "tandem seat" on the back (another solo seat, with a grab handle and footrests, on a couple of coil springs underneath), whose main function seemed to be to pull the combination out of the mud when it got stuck, and a Corporal or Sergeant in the sidecar with the maps, the "Vehicle Commander."
They prepared to go to war in these things; Springfield bolt actions in their old horse scabbards were slung on each side of the sidecar body, and two of their old horse equip. saddlebags were secured on the back deck, for their lunch, ostensibly.
I knew people who lived in Hardin County, around Fort Knox, when I was stationed there in the early-80's that recalled to me seeing long lines of sidecars, led by officers on solo 45s and followed by civilian trucks painted the same colors (Deuce-and-a-halfs and all the rest weren't developed until WWII) going down the country roads in convoy and suddenly doing a right flank across the field & into the woods next to the road. They must've beaten the pee out of the rigid-frame Harleys, not to mention the crewmen, just to see what they could take.
The final report, written in 1941, criticized the combinations for too little ground clearance, one wheel, open chain drive (filled with grit), spoke wheels (that worked loose and broke) and a whole list of other things; they still had the civilian side skirts on the fenders, making it hard to clear mud that caked up in them.
Development was planned from "lessons learned" from the sidecars to replace them as a next step with specially-built 3-man trikes, that addressed the shortcomings that had been discovered at Fort Knox. Both Indian and Harley built prototypes. Harley built 16 "TA" ("tricycle-army?") military trikes. Many of them are still around. One or two are even in the
Wheels Through Time museum in Maggie Valley, North Carolina.
(photo: Wheels Through Time Museum)
(Official Harley-Davidson photo)
The 1940 Harley model "TA" was a 68 cubic inch Knucklehead (combination of 61 EL and 74 FL parts):
Shaft driven, with a u-joint sticking out the back of the stock H-D Big Twin transmission. Sixteen were built
Fortunately, as it turned out for the Allies, that was the end of the line for the "cavalry tricycles." In 1941 the Jeep was invented, in response to a completely different government specification, and anybody could drive a four-wheel-drive Jeep! General Patton even called the Jeep one of the American inventions that "won the war," and it was far superior to the sidecars that the Germans stuck with. It was a leap-forward in technology, in comparison to sidecars, when for the same purposes.
Oh, yeah, to get back to your post, the "brown" that some Harleys were painted was an olive green, much like almost all the 1920s Harleys were painted, and which was the standard "export" Harley color in the '30s. This is an original paint '36EL that was exported to Holland before WWII, won a medal in the 1937 ISDT, then was taken apart and hidden from the Nazis through the war. It wasn't reassembled until about 1998:
I hope I've answered your questions, Mark! Oh, yes, that sidecar fender is a repro, to which I attached an original "hog snout" fairing for the 1934-38 original "Beehive" taillight. Yes, don't get me started. The original name for the small, round, conical taillight ,'34 to 38, was "Beehive" (notice that it looks like one, turned on its side). The 1939-46 was called by the factory the "Streamline" taillight. It got all balled up because of an
Easyriders article that got it wrong back in the '70s.
