1958 BMW R60 Road trip to "Kitty Hawk" South - Africa

1958 BMW R60 Road trip

Selfie of myself and the BMW

Photo of my BMW's a 1958 R60 in front and 1963 R69S at the back

What do you do when you are on leave from your work but not on vacation? This is the case for my wife and I this year due to circumstances that I won't bore you with.

There is however a lot of things you can do at home or in the vicinity of your home town.

I love classic bikes and cars, and happen to have a 1958 BMW R60. This particular bike happened to run very smoothly, but recently started to act up. I thus decided to fix the bike's bug.

This entailed building the one carburetor over onto another one. After completing this, I cleaned both carburetors thoroughly. After fitting them again, I set the idling and air mixtures and balanced the two carburetors. (This is to ensure that both work the same, share the load evenly between the two)

Note how smoothly the bike runs and that it only neede 1 kick to start. Easy staring is important.

After the bike was fixed it had to be tested. What better way to test a bike than to go on a breakfast run? The next morning I duly started the bike up and headed out for an approximate 80 km return trip, which included a breakfast stop at a small aerodrome, named "Kitty Hawk" (I hope the name rings a bell)

Here I had a very delicious breakfast of my favorite breakfast food, namely good old bacon and eggs.

Below is a gyro-copter taking off.

At the areodrome, I watched the activities, there were two guys in small 2 seater planes giving people rides and even two gyro-copters taking off. You almost sit on the runway, as you can see from the video and photos.

Sorry about the video being on it's side, I don't know how to turn it upright!!

The bike performed very well for a 58 year old bike. I did most of the run at an approximate speed of 100 km/h (60 miles per hour). There is nothing better than cruising through the country side, with the fresh air in your hair!! This is the difference between an old classic and a new bike, the classic has no fearing to protect you from the wind, you feel the elements around you, amazing. With these classics you also never know when something will go wrong, but in this case the entire trip was uneventful.

This was a really nice experience, there is nothing between yourself and the planes, thus you can see all activities clearly and happening close to you.

All photos and videos are my own.

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed reading the post.