Saturday, 18 August 2012

Friday bike

Sometimes you find something interesting on the Web, and when you search further you find all sorts of unexpected goodies.
I found the picture below and thought 'that's this week's Friday bike', but when I searched further.....




Yes, that's a V 12 built from two Honda CBX 100 engines! Only information I had was that it was built by Andreas Georgeades, so Googling that brought up details of an extraordinary character.
Andreas was born in Greece, but grew up in South Africa where he became a successful racer in the early 60s. Winner of a bronze replica at the Isle of Man TT, he competed in the European Championship for some years before moving to Canada. There he continued racing, and built a race bike using a 600cc 4 cylinder Honda car engine. The engine was watercooled, but he converted it to aircooling by cutting the waterjacket off and adding fins! This was before Honda had released the CB750, so he probably had the only privately owned Honda 4 at the time.
He's obviously a man who wants 'more', and has (so far) built 3 Ferrari powered bikes.
Gulp!

 A remarkable man - successful racer, incredibly talented engineer, and probably a bit mad! Articles on him: here, here, here, and here.
I also found a video of the V12 going - just listen to that sound!




1 comment:

  1. Ran into the youtubes of that bike awhile back while trying to find more info on Allen Millyards Kawa V-8. Very interesting post. Hadn't seen much of his earlier bikes. It would be nice to see some close up of the modified Honda 600 engined bike. Amazing man.

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