Tas Spitz - this is insanity.

"Berang" (berang)
11/14/2015 at 18:59 • Filed to: bicycle, motorcycle, moped

What would you do to save gas in the 1970s? How about mount a 23cc outboard motor to your bicycle? Yeah? Well then, Tanaka Kogyo had just the thing for you...

After WWII, cycling in the U.S. as an adult activity was dead. We won the war. Our people had money, non-exploded infrastructure, cars, and lots and lots of oil to burn. But by the late 1960s some things were changing. People were becoming more health conscious, traffic was becoming worse, and people began to question the damage 1960s vehicles were doing to the air. Bicycle sales began to increase slowly every year in the 1960s. Then in the early 1970s - the gas crisis hit - and bicycle sales exploded in the U.S. Bicycles were everywhere! Factories couldn’t meet demand, everybody wanted one!

But there’s a problem with bicycles, particularly if you’re a lazy sod who hasn’t used his lungs for anything other than inhaling cigarette smoke for the past 20 years - like a good deal of 1960s Americans - and that problem is that bikes require pedaling. Yeah, you have to put some effort into it to get something in return - a very strange concept to many people. But if you had some money you could pay to have most of that pedaling removed from your bike.

Enter the Tanaka Kogyo Company’s Tas Spitz bicycle motor. Available in 1.2 or 0.8 horsepower variants. This tiny 23cc 2-stroke motor bolted to the front fork of a standard bicycle and drove the front wheel by means of a rubber roller. If everything was perfectly in tune, the planets aligned, and God himself was smiling upon you - you could get as much as 300mpg out of this thing! Understandably, OPEC was very concerned about this technological development. Or not. Because a bicycle with a 23cc motor mounted on the front wheel is not very practical, or comfortable, or safe. But it is a lot of fun.

I bought this motor with the intent of mounting it on an old tandem bicycle, but I wanted to fit it to another bike just to see what was working and what was broken. Good compression, good spark, - stuck throttle. I’ll have to pull the carb apart and see if I can locate a replacement throttle cable. On the bike, the engine doesn’t inspire confidence. It weighs 11 pounds and its right out in front of you. It feels shaky and the extra mass on the forks gives the steering a rubbery, dull feeling. Plus if the throttle worked, the coaster brake on this bike would be powerless to stop the thing. I have to wonder how many people met their ends on motor equipped bicycles in the 1970s.

Here’s the cockpit view. On the right handlebar, a throttle lever and a kill button. Below them, jutting out from the motor is the “raising lever” which is used to engage or disengage the drive roller from the wheel. There is no clutch besides this thing, and it’s at about knee level when you’re sitting on the bike; Engaging the drive while the bike is in motion (and it has to be in motion) makes dealing with an old motorcycle “suicide shifter” seem like child’s play by comparison. When you come to a stop you must either disengage the drive with the raising lever, or you use the kill button.

The oddest thing about it is despite how crude it is in operation, the mechanism itself is needlessly complicated. Tanaka developed these bike motors out of a miniature trolling motor. The prop shaft and housing was cut down and the propeller was replaced with a rubber roller. Additionally the engine uses a diaphragm fuel pump operated by crankcase pressure. All this makes for a fairly heavy unit, about 11 to 13 pounds hanging onto the front fork. The advertising claim was that one could choose to pedal or use the motor, but with an extra 13lbs. tagging around for every ride, the obvious choice was to motor everywhere.

What happened to the Tas Spitz bike motors? By the late 1970s the moped boom had started. You could buy a moped for barely more than the cost of a bicycle and motor, and you got an assembled machine that was faster, quieter, more comfortable and safer. !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , but the bike motors have long since ceased production.