Maico 490

[opfermanmotors]

http://www.vmxmag.com.au/03_news_events/vmx_Maico_490.html

[SachsGS]

I was told that Lorenz Merkle junior passed away a few years ago. I also wonder what the Maisch brothers are up to these days?

[opfermanmotors]

They both died in the 90s as far as I know. 

[JohnN]

They both died in the 90s as far as I know. 

I'm not so sure about that....

Not sure how old the photo at the link below is, but it was not in the 1990's...

http://www.maico.wulfsportinternational.com/gallery_disp.php?subaction=showfull&id=1195931595&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&

[opfermanmotors]

Those are the sons, the brothers were Otto and Wilhelm Maisch who started Maico in 1928.  Otto died in the early 1990s and I spoke with Wilhelm's grandson and he referenced he was no longer around.  Wilhelm Jr., Peter and Hans, the sons of Wilhelm, I would say are probably all still around.

So I guess it refers to "which" brothers, the sons of Wilhelm or the original Maico brothers

[SachsGS]

I should have been a little more specific in my question about the Maisch brothers, I meant the sons.

[SachsGS]

I should also mention that Wulfsport makes some very impressive riding gear, their jersys and enduro jackets are the best I have ever used.

[Paul P]

Ronnie Smith from US MAico sponsored me for 4 years in the 90's with Wulfsport gear for the AMA pro-hillclimb series. I was on TV a lot with that gear on. I still have all the gear including a new pair of boots. The Enduro jacket, shirts, boots are all top notch stuff.
  Intersting info on the Zabel, Maico, and Maisch brothers. I remember Hans holeshoting the very first Unadilla 250 GP in 78 and leading for a while. He looked like he was 8 feet tall on his bike.
                                             Paul

[SachsGS]

The Wulfsport shirts impressed me in particular, you could be drenched in sweat from a tight woods section and after a minute or two on a fire road the shirt (jersy) would be perfectly dry. Some other manufacturer's products I've used felt like soaking wet towels for the entire day after the first hard section.

I'm not sure if we will ever again see the day a manufacturer's son is racing their motorcycles at a world level.Jaak van Velthoven was another "economy sized" GP rider.

[opfermanmotors]

You know, back in 2006 I actually had contacted off-road.com and they were interested at the time for me to write some articles for them.  I hadn't been riding though at that time and hadn't been on a bike in a long time so I was going to write some older stuff.  I was in the process of moving at the time and so that just got brushed under the rug and never happened.

So to bring things current, I wrote that above article and so I tried to contact many magazines to get it in.  Most magazines do not have an "in" to accept writings it seems at least not in the dirtbike space.  Many magazines probably aren't interested either, however my inquiries were general and didn't specify the topic.  The response I got was essentially none, with the exception of VMX above which didnt have room in the issues but wanted to put it on their site. 

Anyhow, to make a long story short I was also thinking about how in this day and age who really buys printed magazines anyway? Most content is easier to read and going to be found online.  So I thought I would just make my own.   My current website however really isn't setup for it and I didn't want to re-vamp it.  It is more of a personal site and information archive than it is for current news or articles.  Plus, none of the content is stored in a database and none of the pages auto generate.

So I thought I would just make my own where I can throw some content and I wanted to detact the name from myself or any other proprietary thing (now I did name it based on the region I am in, b/c that is easier content for me and likely will have more region related stuff)  http://www.tillamooksingletrackmagazine.com  I'm still in the process of getting content and the layout but thats pretty much it.  It's just going to be a place where I can throw some articles, it doesn't matter to me if it goes anywhere or not, infact the domain name was free anyway I found I had a free domain name sitting around so I just used it on this.  I'm going to use it to keep track of events, links and things.  Anyhow, if anyone has trail riding stories or anything I can post them.  If you visit the page, check out the game, I plan to make more as well. 

Anyhow, if you do visit the new site let me know what you think.

[JohnN]

Hey opfermanmotors,

Great article on VMX! Very enjoyable and informative.

I checked out your new site (TSTM) Very nicely done! Thank you for all the links from your site to this one, it is greatly appreciated!

If you'd like I could publish one or two of your articles on the main page, with links back to this new site. It may help to build some traffic to your site.

You gotta love Wordpress!! It's so easy to maintain a site built with it. I like the template you used and the little graphic touches. Very well done!!

[opfermanmotors]

Thanks!

Actually I wrote the site in notepad   Ya, that template I found is great, I can't design a layout for anything so I found that layout which is pretty nice and then just wrote a bunch of PHP to automatically generate that layout and all the content from MySQL based on article dates.  Now I can just add things to the database and all the pages just update.  Much easier.  Once I get more articles I may expand the layout and randomly select older articles to display.

Sure thing!  You can post any of the articles here that you like, including the Maico 490 history one!