Other Bikes » Sears Roebuck Allstate motorcycles

With the news that Sears Roebuck is about to go bankrupt and be liquidated, I thought I would post some photos of Allstate motorcycles. In 1963 I was given a 1958 Allstate (manufactured by Puch) 125cc motorcycle by my cousins, who had pretty much destroyed it to such an extent that it was apparently easier to give it to me than to try to sell it to some non-relative sucker. They had bent the rear wheel by riding two-up off a large curb, had removed the cooling fan and muffler baffles and done other things to the bike too horrible to mention. But it did get me down the road at 40 mph, which is all that I cared about, even if that meant bouncing up and down with the movement of the rear wheel (no rear suspension) and having the engine freeze up if it idled at a stop for more than a minute.

Anyway, attached are some motorcycle ads from a late 1950's Sears Roebuck catalog and some other photos of their motorcycles in living color. Personally, I really liked the idea of buying a motorcycle through the Sears' catalog as they provided a lot of information with the vehicle purchase regarding how to set them up and maintain them without needing to visit a dealer. It really taught you how to be a garage mechanic. Plus, Sears always had every part that you needed to maintain, service and repair their motorcycles. All you needed to do is to visit your local catalog store in town and order the part from their complete parts booklet, which came with every bike. The part would arrive and be ready for pickup at the catalog store within a week. Very convenient. Much more so than trying to deal with the old rough British and Harley dealers of the time before the Japanese arrived and brought with them "the nicest people".

Sears really missed the boat when they didn't put their catalog on-line, started selling everything in their catalog via the internet and shipping it to the customer's home. They could have beaten Amazon to the punch by years if their managers didn't have their heads stuck in the sand. They must have been following the British motorcycle industry model of management.

One strange thing that Sears/Allstate did when they imported Puch motorcycles, sometimes they would ask the Puch to make weird modifications to suit what they thought their customers wanted. In particular, they had Puch change the 3-speed foot shift to a scooter-like left handlebar twist mechanism on the 125 Allstate. I guess they thought their customers couldn't use their left foot to operate a gear change lever. So what Puch did was, instead of using a cable system to change gears like was done with Vespa and Lambretta scooters, they did it the hard way and used a series of metal rods and Helm joints to transfer the twisting motion of the handlebar to move the gear lever on the crankcase. I found it fascinating to watch how twisting the handlebar moved all of the various rods and joints down to the crankcase so that the gear lever could be moved to change the transmission gears. At least the gear change system was robust and never broke, which is something that you couldn't say about the scooter cables at the time.

The 250 twingle is a pretty odd duck..

Zitat von Mr. 36654 im Beitrag #3

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The 250 twingle is a pretty odd duck..

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