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Thursday, August 18, 2011

It would seem to me that an explaination is in order regarding the masthead of this notebook.  The bicycle head badge is from a very small bicycle firm trading under the name Overland.  The conccern apparently built cycles in the mid-west of America in the early 1900s.  I tired to find either an old add or a surviving example but failed.  I may have not looked in all the right places.  While the firm is long gone, one of their head badges survived.  Overland cycles will carry on, at least, on the head tube of one more two wheeled cycle.  However the difference will be the new Overland will be powered by a motor and not by cranks.   And as a clue to what the power unit will be, the timing side cover of a J.A.P. engine is included in the masthead.

J.A.P. was a British engine builder from the beginning and in the glory days of British cycling.  J.A.P. engines actually had a presence in motorcycling world wide.  John A. Prestwich & Co. built engines ranging from small two strokes to large displacement V-twins.  They supplied engines to the Rolls Royce of motorcycles Brough-Superior and the small obscure French firm of Dollar Motorcycles.   

If anything this notebook will be used to record my attempt to create a fiction of a J.A.P. powered Overland Motorcycle; MADE in U.S.A.  To make that fiction real in the form of a running motorcycle.  And since it’s my notebook I may diverge from time to time and leave pages blank or rethink and tear pages out.

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