1966 Marusho Magnum "Banzai"

I bought this partially disassembled when i was in college in Atlanta. A friend and I rebuilt it to ride around town. The transmission needed some adjusting, so the guy I bought it from offered to reassemble it at his workplace. We drove over and it was a pizza place. He disassembled and reassembled the whole transmission right on the big wooden pizza table in the backroom!

Not many were sold in the US, so the American shop manual was run off on a mimeograph machine, and the photos were black and white photos glued onto the pages. The translation was obviously someone who spoke English with a real heavy accent. dictating to a typist There was a section on "Ramp renewal". Turns out it was 'lamp (bulb) replacement'. Someone was dictating 'lamp' as 'ramp'! There were a lot of passages like that one that took a while to figure out.

It was a great cruiser-big torque and a great throaty rumble. The big chrome pipes and fenders plus black gas tank and headlamp made it look really cool.

Even though it looked like a BMW replica, the pistons and rings were not the same size as BMW, so rebuilding was eventually a problem, and that was what hastened my decision to sell the bike. I sold it in California in 1972.