@Bing, I think your musings are a Gateway Drug to me, they often send me on trips down memory lane…
Back in the early '50s, we used old car tire tubes for Slingshot bands. As we go to our tweens, we discovered that hobby shops sold rubber band material by the foot (for wind-up model airplanes and such) and we soon had “Magnum Slingshots…”
We also cut car inner tubes into strips and glued them to replace the Rubber Rim Strips that our spoked bicycle wheels used and later our motorcycle wheels. The inner tubes were much thicker than the Rubber Rim Strips that the dealers sold and since we cut them wider that the factory Rim Strips, our homemade Rim Strips never tore at the valve stem hole…
And those of us from the Northern Frontier (Upstate New York) that ran our motorcycles in the winter time (I had a Bultaco Pursang 250cc) and raced on the iced lakes installed screw/studs into our tires… To keep the stud/screw hardware from ripping through the inner tube, we cut down car inner tubes and glued them into the tire to protect the inflated inner tubes.
And we used a lot, a whole lot Talcum Power, some from our little siblings baby powder and I know some of us used out mother’s Face Powder (it made out tire smell nice…)
In the following video, it shows how we studded our tires, he uses foam and old fire hose to protect his inner tube, we used several layers of old inner tubes
This video is filmed in is Lake George, NY, one of the places I raced, just south of my home on the Schroon River…
And as a side note, the Bultaco 250cc Pursang was the same bike Peter Fonda rode out into the desert to buy the drugs in the movie Easy Rider. Dennis Hopper rode a Norton P11 Ranger when they bought the drugs…
However, not matter how iconic Peter Fonda’s “Captain America” 1962 Chopped FLH was; it was never as beautiful as Dennis Hopper’s “Billy Bike,” a Chopped 1960 Hydra-Glide.
PS: there are a ton of stories about what years the frames were, what years the engines were, and in all cases, all versions are somewhat correct. There were three of each bike built from “auctioned police bike,” all very similar, but none perfect replicates, the spare bikes were stolen at gun pint and sold off for parts…
