A tale of two Chouts

The Ultimate Indian Motocycle Hybrid, the marriage of a vintage Scout frame with a Chief engine!


The Alchemist

The essence of motocycle, picture a rigid framed vintage roadracer, leaf sprung fork, single pan saddle, hand gearchange, foot clutch, left hand throttle and the biggest production Indian engine of the time shoehorned into the best handling Indian frame of All time! A true hotrod, the looks of a stripped down wall bike on steroids!


Saturday, 2 October 2010

The Frame

The frame is from a 1929ish 101 Scout, bought from Conneticut in the USA via ebay. It has had a hard life, bent bottom rails like it has been dropped at some point or had something heavy stacked on top of it, there are also some old repairs which have not been carried out successfully, so this morning I took the frame in to Richi Foss ( Foss Fabrication and Welding) in Inverness to get the frame restored to good order ready for the alterations to be carried out to fit the Chief  powerplant into the cradle.




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2 comments:

  1. Charlie1019 October 2010 at 18:36

    I have yet to see an unrestored 101 frame that isnt banged up at the bottom rails, looks like the rear footboard lug(s) always take a huge hit at some time. It takes some force to bend those tubes. At one time I thought maybe it was like that from the factory to tweak the footboard angle a bit less steep, a bit more user friendly perhaps, and I still dont know if thats the case. It sure looks like you have your work cut out with that frame, in one of the pictures it looks like one or more tubes has been water filled and then frosen. Internal rust can be a safety issue in that case. A couple of sources with profound knowledge of repairing and restoring 101 frames and perhaps give measures and supply material would be George Yarocki and Randy Walker in the USA, and the Dane, Moen of Indian Parts Europe, and Juergen Hecker in Germany that once reproduced these frame castings and made frames. Im sure you already knew all this but for someone it can be of help that perhaps find a so called hopeless heap of Indian garbage in the future and read this. There is no such thing as unsalveable garbage, all is restorable.

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  2. Steve Plowman10 October 2010 at 00:02

    New tube has been ordered, the plan is to retube the damaged sections (in reality that means most of them!) An engineers drawing of the 101 frame would be very useful to check sizes as the work is done.
    I am in contact withe Moen at IPE, who is in turn in contact with Jeurgen Hecker, it is most likely that I will uses a Hecker repo fork on the Chout.
    Thanks for your comments, Steve

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