KONIGS ; pre: 70s, only

[bh/]

Looks like I am now all sorted out as far as my 7 FAs go, ranging from a '59 to the reed valve '69. Speaking with RC in FL last nite he has a 1964 copy of 'Boat Racing' ? with a article and drawings for the Rocket pipe. Apparently the UIM back then got upset at the noise,
[Konigs were not legal in APBA, and NOA & CBF certainly did not mind] and they came up with the blanked off megaphone with stinger, which was quieter and faster. Real expansion chambers followed. I will take a copy off that article and maybe get a pair made in FL this winter.

So the FA69 should have a pair of fat expansion chambers,
the '59 and both '63s 'sticky-out' or swept back skinny megs,
and the 'Rocket' pipes on the FA64.
Over these years I see only two obvious differences in the cast iron blocks, ie; the intake manifold studs.
There are 2 types of aluminum head, one with and one w/o
off set spark plugs.
There may be as many as three iterations on the crankcases, with either Amal, Bing or Ehrenfried slide carbs.
I wonder what carb the FA64 had ? The FA69 has the big Konig barrel types.
Ignition can be Bosch & SEM geared mags, or battery/point/coil. Dieter was busy back then....

[Smitty]

Bob Rautenburg was a Konig sub-dealer in Seattle in the early-'60s; I don't know when he started this, but he was getting out of it by '64-'65, IIRC. Bob set a competition record in ARR on a BU Sid-Craft in 1963 (58-something mph), and his brother Dick won AOH, with a BSH Sid-Craft, at the Outboard Nationals on Moses Lake that same year, '63. Both were using what you're calling the rocket pipes.

The guy who might remember more details on earlier A Konigs (and Anzanis) is Lee Sutter.

Those rocket pipes are "real" expansion chambers, with a mild, broad-band suction and a real peaky baffle. By the mid-'70s they were utterly obsolete and useless . . . or so you'd think. But I have a 1976 Yamaha RD400C 2-stroke street bike, the hypo crotch-rocket of its day. Yamaha was second to none in their knowledge of 2-strokes by that time. Yet if you opened up one of the muffled pipes that came stock on that bike, pipes that some of the better amateur roadracers were using (after removing the fiberglass packing), they looked just like those '63 Konig pipes! I've always wondered about that, why Yamaha thought that was the best pipe for the application. The slow-taper megaphone section I can understand, but why the flat baffle? Maybe they thought that having the pipes come on like a light switch made the bike more fun to ride?

[Steve77t]

Brian, I have new two of these pipes that you look for, E mail me or call me if you want to buy them, Steve Steve77T@aol.com

[bh/]

Pic of Mark Suters 1958 HRA as appears in recent AOMC mag.
I doubt Dieter chromed the pipes, but other than that looks OEM.

[Steve77t]

No Konig had some chrome jobs as well, Most did not want to pay extra for this