Megola
The Megola was a German motorcycle from the 1920s with a five-cylinder - rotary engine in front. Around 2000 pieces were produced between around 1921 and 1925.
history
Deutsche Megola-Werke GmbH was founded in Munich specifically for the production of the Megola . The name Megola came from the last names of the financiers and designers: Hans Meixner, Fritz Gockerell (here written with G ) and Otto Landgraf.
technology
The engine was designed as a three-cylinder counter-rotating engine by Fritz Cockerell at Rapp-Motorenwerke in Munich , first as a two-stroke engine , then in 1919 as a four-stroke engine named Pax . In a counter-rotating engine, the housing and the crankshaft rotate in opposite directions; in a simple rotating engine, the crankshaft is stationary.
The Rapp-Motorenwerke were merged with the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke to form BMW in 1916 . In 1920 it became a five-cylinder engine, which shortly afterwards switched from the rear wheel to the front wheel in the prototype of the Megola. In the rear wheel, the motor was still turning against the direction of rotation of the wheel and the crankshaft together with the wheel. The planetary gear set in between ensured that the power could also be used for propulsion. In the later series model, the engine housing and the cylinders were firmly connected to the wheel, the crankshaft acted on the crankcase via a planetary gear with a fixed planet carrier and a ratio of 1: 6. So the crankshaft ran backwards at five times the wheel speed. Parts of the engine also protruded from between the spokes of the front wheel. According to the manufacturer, the engine had a displacement of 640 cm³ (bore: 52 mm; stroke: 60 mm) and achieved a maximum of 6.5 HP (4.8 kW) and 7.5 HP (5.5 kW) at 2500 rpm 3000 rpm and 9.5 PS (7 kW) at 3600 rpm.
The chassis of the Megola was just as unconventional and consisted of self-supporting, curved and riveted steel sheets. The driver sat on a comfortable “armchair” with a backrest or - in the case of the sports versions - on a normal motorcycle saddle of the time. Around 2000 machines were built as touring and sports models. The touring model had a rear suspension with leaf springs.
However, the Megola is less convenient in city traffic: it has neither a manual gearbox nor a clutch, so the Megola has to be pushed or jacked up after every stop and the front wheel “kicked”. On the racetrack, however, the Megola was in its element: Toni Bauhofer relegated the BMW works team to their places in 1924 and won the title in the over 500 cm³ class of the first German motorcycle road championship on the Megola .
Technology contemporary history
The 1920s were an iconographic time in Germany as a result of the lost war and the ban on aircraft construction, because the otherwise unemployed, avant-garde former aircraft designers were looking for other, but obvious, fields of activity such as automobile and motorcycle construction. For the first time, aerodynamically influenced concepts also emerged in vehicle construction. At that time there were therefore an enormous number of creative concepts in these technical fields.
In the same context of Munich engine production, another unusual motorcycle concept was developed shortly after the Megola, which, in contrast to the Megola, has survived to this day: the longitudinal two - cylinder boxer engine of the BMW motorcycles (crankshaft axis).
In 1998 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum included the Megola in the temporary exhibition "the art of the motorcycle".
See also
- Front wheel drive
- Killinger & Freund motorcycle
- Radial engine
- Vélosolex
- Front-wheel drive two-wheeler
literature
- Erwin Tragatsch : All Motorcycles - 1894 to 1981; a history of types, 2500 brands from 30 countries. Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 1976, ISBN 3-87943-410-7 .
- Matthias Murko: motorcycle legends. Nuremberg two-wheel history. Tümmels, Nuremberg 1994, ISBN 3-921590-27-2 .
Web links
- Information (French text, many pictures) ( Memento from December 20, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- Megola racing machine (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ From PAX and MEGO to MEGOLA. In: Fritz Gockerell. Michael Schick, accessed January 25, 2020 .
- ^ Fritz Gockerell: Megola technique. In: Fritz Gockerell. Michael Schick, accessed January 25, 2020 .