Vintage BMW bike.

Saw this downtown Grand Rapids earlier this week. The license plate said 1948. Pretty sweet lookin bike. He was cruisin with an early 60s honda something... Anyone know about these old Bmers?

I am no expert, but that looks like a mid-60's R50 or R60 with the turn signals and all. A 48 Bmw would look different than that. A friend of mine has a 64' R60 he bought new in Berlin when he was in the air force, still has it and looks very similar to that one. Very reliable but somewhat underpowered by modern standards.

definitly a mid sixties bike the bmw plant wasn't completely rebuilt after ww11 until about ten years after the war.

According to Wikipedia...

The end of World War II found BMW in ruins. Its plant outside of Munich was destroyed by Allied bombing. The Eisenach facility was not. It was dismantled by the Soviets as reparations and sent back to the Soviet Union where it was reassembled in Irbit to make IMZ-Ural motorcycles as is commonly alleged. The IMZ plant was supplied to the Soviets by BMW under license prior to the commencement of the Great Patriotic War. After the war the terms of Germany's surrender forbade BMW from manufacturing motorcycles. Most of BMW's brightest engineers were taken to the US and the Soviet Union to continue their work on jet engines which BMW produced during the war.

When the ban on the production of motorcycles was lifted in Allied controlled Western Germany, BMW had to start from scratch. There were no plans, blueprints, or schematic drawings because they were all in Eisenach. Company engineers had to use surviving pre-war motorcycles to copy the bikes. The first post-war BMW motorcycle in Western Germany, a 250 cc R24, was produced in 1948. The R24 was based on the pre-war R23, and was the only postwar West German BMW with no rear suspension. In 1949, BMW produced 9,200 units and by 1950 production surpassed 17,000 units.



1948 250 cc BMW R24



1954 500 cc BMW R51/3



1967 BMW R60/2

likes2gofast2009 wrote:

Saw this downtown Grand Rapids earlier this week. The license plate said 1948. Pretty sweet lookin bike. He was cruisin with an early 60s honda something... Anyone know about these old Bmers?

My brother had one like this it was 60s Hi flipped him when he hit the front brakes something came loose and locked the front wheel messed him up He told me that was a common problem on these bikes. I don't know tho..

Why were my pictures moved or deleted?????????????

I removed them they were bothering me..lol

chance wrote:

I removed them they were bothering me..lol

:laugh:

A guy had this 55 yr old BMW in a van at a local meet:

Another shot: