In a deal with a Sachs executive, Sam purchased the W-2000 for his personal collection, keeping it many years before selling it to Jess. Not just any Hercules, Sam’s Hercules W-2000 was specially prepared and purportedly had been displayed at Sachs’ North America headquarters. While visiting Jess, Ron was allowed to ride a 1976 Hercules W-2000 that once belonged to Sam. In August 2008, Ron visited Jess in Tullahoma, Tenn., with his RE-5, and the pair tuned Ron’s Suzuki. in Ohio, staying in business for 40 years before selling the shop to Jess in 2009. A former Sachs employee, Sam sold and serviced Hercules W-2000s when they were new through Rotary Recycle U.S.A. That’s when he met Jess Stockwell, a rotary enthusiast and protégé of the late Sam Costanzo, who was considered THE authority on rotary motorcycles. His fascination with rotary power still intact, Ron began researching the RE-5, and eventually bought a 1975 model simply because of its unusual engine. On a CX500 Internet forum, a post about a Suzuki RE-5 piqued his interest - he hadn’t realized the Japanese maker had made a rotary-powered motorcycle. Instead, he bought a 1981 Honda CBX, but he didn’t stop there and added a Honda CX500 Turbo to his stable. “If I was going to get a second bike, I wanted something different.”īack home, Ron tried to find information about the Hercules rotary, hoping to find one for sale. “The Hercules was so different from anything I’d ever seen before,” Ron says. Running into the rotary: the Hercules W-2000ĭuring that trip Ron also visited the Deutsches Museum in Munich, where he saw a Hercules W-2000 rotary-powered motorcycle. They rented motorcycles, and rode from Switzerland to Italy to attend the Milan Motorcycle Show. Many were gravitating toward Harley-Davidson Fat Boys, but Ron thought those were common bikes - why not look for something unusual? This was around the time Ron and some motorcycling friends traveled to Europe, in September 2001, just after the airports reopened following 9/11. He joined a local Gold Wing group, and soon some of his fellow riders were choosing second motorcycles. Ron did some touring, and the CX kept him occupied until he discovered the Gold Wing. He kept his first bike, a 1974 Yamaha TX500, just a few short months before buying a friend’s Honda CX500 because it had saddlebags. Hook, line and sinker, Ron bit hard, and quickly grasped the attraction of two-wheeled power. In 1980, I bought a bike of my own to find out what the attraction was.” If a dog ran out in front of you, you’d go down. “As a paramedic, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to ride a bike,” Ron explains. Oddly, it wasn’t until he became an emergency medical technician that he even thought to swing a leg over a motorcycle. He wasn’t a piston-crazed high school student, studying the latest motorcycle magazines to scope out the rides, and he didn’t hang around the bikes in the parking lot at lunch time. When Ron Schavrien got into motorcycling, he approached it from a different perspective than most people.
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