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Series 1500 Phantom statistics
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The Vetter Series 1500 Phantom Fairing of 1968-71
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I had thought that the owners of the new Japanese Honda and Yamaha 250-305s would be my customers. After all, these were really great motorcycles and there were no fairings for them. In reality, it was the owners of the biggest motorcycles that wanted my fairings. In 1968, that meant Triumphs and BSAs, followed by the Honda 450 when it was announced. The Series 1000 was a bit too narrow for those bikes. It was the excuse I needed to design another fairing. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Panel from 1969 Vetter advertising brochure | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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To start with, I wedged a Series 1000 apart a couple of inches at the knees with a plywood spreader. Then I grafted the new gullwing windshield from my new Series 500 half fairing onto the front. This made it a little wider at the handlebars and at the knees. |
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| All subsequent fairings (until the Windjammer series ) used this gullwing windshield. They were all called "Phantom" Fairings.
The first Phantom fairings all used 1/8" thick windshields. And they were all compound curves (meaning bowed in both directions). They looked best but the compound curve was hard to form and was prone to bending backwards under speed. Some early Phantoms used struts to hold the windshield up. The AMA Phantom has struts. Very soon we changed over to simple curved windshields 3/16" thick which solved all problems. I learned a lot about windshields with the Series 1500. |
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| 1968 Coast to Coast Record Run | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In late 1968, I got a call from Corky Rich of Champion Cycle Center, Chicago asking us to donate a couple of fairings to him and his buddy, Eric Mareus so they could attempt a coast - to - coast record run on their Triumphs. We fit them up on Dec 23 and they took off. All I ever heard was that they got stopped by snow somewhere. They sure looked good tho.
I'm always a sucker for a contest. |
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| Craig and Eric check out the Record Run Triumphs with their Vetter fairings | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| This original Series 1500 fairing is now in the permanent collection at the Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum at Pickerington, Ohio. It may be that this is the only "New" Series 1500 fairing in the world! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Updated Mar 3, 2006 More to come | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
