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Hammerschmidt
Bobber While I was waiting for the prize giving on the Sunday afternoon at the CCE show in Mainz, I took the opportunity to photograph a couple of feature bikes, not show bikes though, bikes owned by people that had just turned up for the day and so most definitely ridden bikes. I’d be lying through my teeth if I suggested there wasn’t a language problem, but I handed both owners a magazine and waved my camera at their machines and they got the drift.
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Doing the
photos was the easy bit though, filling in spec sheets was another matter
entirely. 
I
got some information through physically pointing at motorcycle bits with
the lady owner of a very tidy road going, chiefly Zodiac, custom Evo and
she also promised to sort out a proper fax. However I didn’t do so
well with this Pan-Shovel you see featured here. Though a very kind Scottish
lady helped, there wasn’t really very much to tell anyway, it turned
out the guy hadn’t had the machine all that long and besides the
bike was more or less standard Harley parts through and through. It would
have been interesting to know which Harley parts were stock and which
weren’t, but I couldn’t make much headway there and besides,
his club were waiting to ride back to Frankfurt, and I was holding them
all up. So the bike doesn’t quite warrant a full feature despite
the fact it is totally, utterly, gobsmackingly, gorgeous.
The
owner of the Pan-Shovel is an affable chap called Hans-Jurgen. He’s
owned the bike for only a couple of years and told me that the engine
had been fairly recently built by ‘Hammerschmidt’, which after
some time I realised was Hans-Jurgen’s second name. He was pretty
adamant the Pan-Shovel was a 1955 model, so I’m taking a complete
guess here and surmising that the bike is a special. Harley-Davidson were
not producing Shovelheads in 1955 so my guess is that the bottom end,
the Pan bit, was indeed manufactured in 1955, there were definitely Pans
about then. And the later, some say superior, Shovel heads were grafted
onto the motor some time after 1966 - 
when
the first 1200cc Shovels appeared, complete with a Generator or Pan bottom
end - a not uncommon modification ... so, um, I hope I’m right.
Hans-Jurgen himself designed and constructed the primary cover, though the belt is essentially open, and he was also responsible for the straight through exhaust pipes. He puts the colour down as black, mentions the rake is standard and the handlebars are ÔDragbar’ but everything else, absolutely everything he’s sure, is Harley-Davidson. And that’s it, that’s all I have on Hans’ beautiful Pan-Shovel - so rather than make stuff up I’ll leave you in peace to look at the pictures of his bike.