Footboard extensions

[motor-officer]

I am posting this here as I have no idea what make of motorcycle they go on. Can anybody shed some light? They appear to be made of bronze or brass. They are approx. 4 1/2" by 6". They are heavy and appear well made. Any help would bePICT0068.jpg appreciated. Thank you.PICT0067.jpg

[Jerry Wieland]

I have never seen anything like those. Depending on the width between the holes they could fit on most any vintage bike. I doubt they are OEM for any bike but probably early aftermarket or possibly a one-off. n Jerry

[Steve Slocombe]

They are held on with countersunk screws, like the Harley ones, and as Jerry says they could be early aftermarket. What is the pitch between the screw holes?

[exeric]

I'm with Jerry; I've never seen footbaoard extensions like that. They look like a high quality product, and better than others I have seen. I'm surprised there are no markings.

[Rubone]

I believe those are old Ballack (sp?) & Co items.

[RichO]

I'm with you Robbie. I believe I seen them in one of his cataloges along with his eagle shield gas caps and winged eagles for the front fender. Those out of aluminum of coarse.

[exeric]

Ballak is probably a good guess. I've always wondered about the disposition of all that Schwinn motorcycle stuff after Ignaz pulled the plug in 1931. After skimming through the "American Excelsior" I didn't follow the Ballak connection, but I do recall that the inventory went to an Excelsior employee. I'll take a better look this week. As for when Ballak came into the picture, I don't know, and I don't know how much he had manufactured to supplement his inventory. I recall talking to Jimmy Metiff who wound up with the Triangle pile which I gather was the Ballak pile. Apparently, Triangle, or Jimmy, and Easy Russ bought out a lot of dealers, and wholesalers because they had parts for many different makes, and lots of aftermarket stuff. RichO probably knows a lot more about the chronology of this complex picture. This would make a darn good story in itself if someone could put it into timeframe.

[motor-officer]

Thanks for all the interest and possible explanations. They are definitely well made items. The center to center distance between the mounting holes is approx. 4 1/4". I have a good friend (89 years young) who used to buy motorcycle items from Ballack's in St. Louis. Some years ago I tried to find the old Ballack's building. It has been torn down and replaced with a convention center.

[Steve Slocombe]

The Harley rectangular footboards are just under 4" across, so these items would fit them with clearance for the clamp screws. I'd echo Eric's call for a timeline and description of what happened to the Henderson/Excelsior spares after 1931.

[Rubone]

Steve Shackman had a bunch of it, he may know.

[exeric]

Also Harbor Vintage, Tom Faber, Dean Sallman, and as mentioned Easy Russ, and Jimmy Metiff. I also wonder how much went to Europe because Henderson, and Excelsior had a strong presence there in the early days. . . . I guess I just need to read my copy of "American Excelsior", and the supplement I got a few weeks ago

[RichO]

When I was restoring a bunch of Super X's in the late 80's and early 90's I was on my game when it came to the answers to these questions and I had that info at hand but there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then. What I do recall is most of Ingnaz's stuff went to Triangle and Ballack. Ballack's business went south when St. Louis redeveloped that area where the Arch stands today. Dean Salsman and his partner along with Easy Russ, and the two guys who started the Henderson repair business along the Mississippi River I believe bought most of it from Triangle. When Schwinn's bicycle business when south in 1992 a lot of stuff went to auction. Mainly blueprints, important company records, you name it. The factory on Cortland built in 1914 was torn down soon after. I visited the company archives and the original Cortland factory just before that all happened. What a shame. Rich P.S. The collector, I forget his name now but he was on the American Pickers once and the AMA got a lot of the good stuff from that auction. The AMA is close to bankruptcy from what I've heard and was trying to sell off the museum stuff so I wonder where that Excelsior stuff is today?

[bernhardt]

Most of has been sold on ebay and is in other peoples garages and basements.

Here is an article on Triangle, published on a Heinkel Tourist website. Apparently, in addition to having some of the great Chicago Henderson and X parts hoard, they sold scooters:

Triangle was an old line Chicago motorcycle dealership that had started out selling American motorcycles in the 1920's and 1930's. The shop was owned by Pete ("Triangle Pete") and Maize Zellany, and their son Francis Marshfield Zellany (more commonly known as "Marsh"). "Triangle Pete," whose mount of choice was a 1941 Indian Four, was a legendary figure among Chicago motorcyclists for two generations. In the 1930's, Triangle set up a subsidiary firm known as Chicago Motorcycle Service (CMS), which became one of the first and largest manufacturers and wholesalers of Harley-Davidson aftermarket parts and accessories. But by the late 1940's, the glory days of American motorcycles were over and Triangle entered into a long slow decline. Its wholesale division was reduced to selling the parts and accessories stock for American motorcycles that it had accumulated during the 1930's and a large stock of Harley-Davidson war surplus parts and engines that it had acquired just after the end of the Second World War (for 20 years, Triangle's ads offering new war surplus Harley 45 engines for $79.50 were a permanent fixture of American motorcycle magazines). Triangle's response to this decline took on two strikingly different forms. Like Foreign Motorcycles Corporation (with whom it had a long business relationship), Triangle became a dealer for various obscure European brands such as Horex, TWN, Jawa, Puch, DKW, Maico, Pannonia, Dannuvia, and, of course, Heinkel. Tom Phillips, a former Triangle mechanic, has told me that he felt they handled oddball makes mainly to maintain their status as an authorized dealership rather than a repair shop, which made it much easier to obtain parts, accessories, and other supplies from the manufacturers. Having a letterhead listing the various makes they represented gave them much more credibility and clout. The other direction the firm took was to specialize in Harley-Davidson modifications (which the factory disdained). Since choppers were definitely not mainstream in these pre-Easy Rider days, most of Triangle's clientele was drawn directly from Chicago's many outlaw motorcycle gangs. Triangle was not your average scooter shop! By the time Triangle became the Midwest Heinkel distributor, "Triangle Pete" was aging and in ill-health. Most of the management of the firm had passed to Maize and Marsh.. But Marsh, a hard-core alcoholic, had the rather unfortunate habit of spending much of his time in a nearby tavern. Small and wiry--the very antithesis of the macho biker--Marsh was notorious for coming back to the shop in drunken rages and waving his Lugar pistol at customers. Great entertainment, to be sure, but less than wonderful customer relations--particularly in an era when Honda was just beginning its "You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda' campaign. Like many others of the era, Marsh looked with greedy eyes on the enormous profits being made on scooters and hoped to cash in on it with Heinkels (at one point Marsh was angling for national distribution rights for Puch scooters and fantasized about selling 10,000 a year). But by the early 1960's the firm, in complete disarray, was only a pale shadow of what it had been during the heyday of "Triangle Pete", and had almost no capacity to mount a serious marketing effort for Heinkel.

[bernhardt]

More:

Triangle also continued as another marginalized motorcycle dealership until it went out of business in the 1980's. During the 1970's, a trip to Triangle was like a trip through a time warp to the 1930's. The shop, located in a decrepit nineteenth century building with creaking wooden floors, was often in total disarray and filled wall to wall with vintage accessories, parts, and exotic machines in every corner. Yet it was a feast of wonderful eclecticism, resembling a cross between a motorcycle museum and a junkyard. Parts and accessories of every description were to be found, from exotic Indian feathered accessories to 1920's American motorcycle parts. Marsh, sober and in a good mood, once pulled out two boxes to show me. One contained hundreds of Heinkel stick pins; the other was filled with Heinkel owner's manuals. Owing to Marsh's drinking, the shop's outlaw clientele, and chaotic organization, Triangle had no chance to obtain a lucrative Japanese motorcycle franchise and thus prosperity passed it by. This was an era when Japanese motorcycle franchises routinely turned "grease monkeys" into millionaires. Throughout the 1970's, Triangle maintained several storage facilities filled with vintage European and American motorcycles and scooters (at a time when vintage machines had virtually no value). The storeroom across the street was almost too much to believe. To start with, the door was propped open with a Pope motorcycle engine. The dimly lit room was filled wall to wall with motorcycles and scooters. Among them were several Indian Chiefs, with and without sidecars, a couple of Indian Fours, a military shaft drive Indian, a Henderson, a Horex, and numerous Jawas, Victorias, Maicos, TWNs, NSUs, and Zundapps. Many of the European makes were unsold new machines. The storeroom was astonishing even on my first visit in 1967. I suspect today it would send off a collector or enthusiast with a heart attack. Next to a batch of Zundapp Bellas and a TWN Contessa, sat a beautiful low mileage, virtually mint condition, two tone gray Heinkel A2 selling for $400 (at a time when Heinkels could not be given away). The scooter remained unsold from 1966 until 1974. A Zundapp remained on the floor for a full 22 years before being sold. Marsh continued to insist to potential customers that the Heinkel and other makes were still being manufactured. Triangle also owned several nearby tenament buildings containing several hundred 55 gallon fiber drums filled with various motorcycle parts. Like many alcoholics, Marsh had serious paranoid tendencies and chose to be as secretive as possible about the parts. The barrels was numbered and Marsh drew a map showing what was kept in each barrel (his associates called it the Long John Silver Map). Marsh kept the map on him at all times until one day, during one of his drunken rages, he flushed it down the toilet! I went to Triangle with a non-enthusiast in the early 1970's and he found the place as fascinating as I did.

[bernhardt]

During the shop's last years, Marsh spent more time in the tavern than in the shop and the business was run largely in a drunken stupor. Triangle's problems were further exacerbated by Marsh's legendary dishonesty. Repairs were seldom done properly and customer's machines were routinely pillaged for parts. Tom Phillips, the former Triangle mechanic, notes that when rebuilding Harley-Davidson generators, Marsh would turn the bearings around to have the shiny side show instead of replacing them, although he had a barrel containing thousands of the bearings (enough to last for a hundred years ). Given the nature of much of his clientele, it was not too surprising that Marsh--despite the pistol he carried with at all times--frequently found himself being beaten up. One Chicago motorcyclist recalls seeing a burly Indian owner at a swap meet slamming Marsh against the wall demanding his speedometer back. In 1983 Marsh was killed--not surprisingly--in a drunken driving accident. Triangle's famous hoard of motorcycles and parts--including "Triangle Pete's" beloved Indian Four-- was auctioned off at bargain basement prices.