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Did you ever hear of an Excelsior motorcycle? Me neither, so I did a little research. There were three different companies that manufactured motorcycles branded Excelsior. One was in Great Britain, one in Germany and one in the United States. It’s not surprising that the Excelsior USA company started in the bicycle business. The Chicago company began motorcycle production in 1905 with a single-speed, 21-cubic-inch engine with the final drive to the rear wheel being a leather belt. The top speed was 35 to 40 mph.
Five years later Excelsior introduced a new 61-c.i. (or 1,000-cubic-centimeter), V-twin engine that became known as the “X” series. The Excelsior motorcycles became very popular, and a new state-of-the-art factory was built to keep up with demand. It included a test track on the roof of the building. According to one website, Excelsior was the first motorcycle to be officially timed at a speed of 100 mph. By 1916, Excelsior motorcycles were being used by many police forces and even by the U.S. Army during General Pershing’s campaign in Mexico.
While the motorcycle business was growing, the bicycle business was slowing down. Ignaz Schwinn was looking at other opportunities for his Chicago-based bicycle business. Rather than design and build his own motorcycle, he bought Excelsior in 1911 for $500,000, or about $13 million in today’s dollars.
Excelsior became the third-largest U.S. motorcycle manufacturer behind Harley-Davidson and Indian. Then came the stock market crash of 1929, after which motorcycle sales also crashed. In the summer of 1931, Ignaz Schwinn called a department-heads meeting and announced, “Gentlemen, today we stop.”
Schwinn felt the Depression would continue for some time and maybe even get worse, so even though he had a lot of orders, he decided to close down the motorcycle business and concentrate on the core bicycle business. Motorcycle production for Excelsior ended in September 1931. Mark Harrigan, a Danville resident, owns 23 other motorcycles plus this edition’s 1916 Excelsior that he rides monthly in the Tri-Valley area. He told me its history.
“Fifty-plus years ago, a man living in Alamo who worked for the telephone company saw this motorcycle in the back of a truck on its way to the dump. He was not a rider himself but collected old things, so he rescued it and took it home,” Harrigan said. “It sat in his garage, unridden for 50 years, until he was in his 90s, upon which time he let a few of the neighbor kids who had heard stories of the old motorcycle dig it out, and he gave it to one of them. I administer a Facebook group called ‘Motorcycle Memories’ and through it became aware of the bike and was able to purchase it in December of 2016.”
Harrigan paid $30,000 for this classic. He has a good friend, Mike Lynch, who has a machine shop that restores American motorcycles built in the 1910-1920 era.
“With a great deal of help from him, we had the bike running down the road within 53 days. It is an original unrestored bike with 90 percent of the parts it was built with in Chicago 103 years ago, and it is a blast to ride.”
The bike is rusted and hadn’t been run for maybe as long as 70 years.
“People ask me, ‘When are you going to paint it?’ No, that is the last thing in the world you would ever do.”
As is often said about classic vehicles in this condition, it’s only original once. When new, the bike sold for $265 ($6,226 in today’s dollars) or $295 ($704 extra today) if “electrically equipped” with a headlight and taillight. What’s it worth today? It is a rare one, and Harrigan believes it is worth somewhere between $50,000 and $70,000. This chain-drive bike has a three-speed transmission with the hand gear shift lever on the left side of the gas (and oil) tank.
“The two-cylinder engine estimated at 15 to 20 horsepower was a big jump, as most other motorcycles before this were rated at about 7 horsepower.”
It has only a rear brake, there is nothing on the front wheel. The back brake is really two brakes in one. It has an internal brake inside the drum, which acts as a sort of hill holder, and the main brake is a band brake on the outside of the drum. There is no battery, lights or horn. It uses a magneto to fire the two spark plugs. To start the engine, there is a peddle on the right side of the motorcycle that the rider pushes down as hard as possible with his foot.
It took Harrigan four or five attempts to get the engine started, along some manipulation of various levers and valves, but when it started it was a smooth-running engine. He straddled the machine, waved goodbye and headed down the road.
Have an interesting vehicle? Contact David Krumboltz at MOBopoly@yahoo.com. To view more photos of this and other issues’ vehicles or to read more of Dave’s columns, visit mercurynews.com/author/david-krumboltz.
