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In The 1970’s, When You Built Bike Ramps From Scraps, We Were All Evel Knie


In The 1970’s, When You Built Bike Ramps From Scraps, We Were All Evel Knie
If you were a kid and got a bicycle, you were probably trying to figure out how to get airborne with your two wheeled transport. If you grew up before the 1980’s when bikes were being designed to actually jump well, you were probably doing these jumps that were downright dangerous after leaving the ground.
If you grew up in the 1970’s and saw Evel Knievel Jumping his Harley Davidsons over buses, cars, trucks, and even a giant fountain the parking lot of Ceaser’s Palace in Las Vegas, you were trying immulate his crazy feats. Evel’s Harleys were no better designed for flight as my Huffy Thunderroad, but we did it anyways. We were even designing and building launch ramps and jumps out anything we could get our hands on. I have gone dumpster diving for scrap lumber many times to build bigger and bigger ramps for my Huffy.
That brings us to this home movie filmed in 1970. It’s a kid on what looks to be a 26 inch Schwinn bicycle sporting a helmet attempting to jump a pair of Fords ala Evel himself. The ramps are sitting up against the roofs of these Galaxies have me wondering what adult allowed this to happen. He even has quite the crowd from his neighborhood waiting, watching, and probably wondering if he will end up crashed, broken, and twisted into a pretzel after he lands. Didn’t some of us watch Evel Knievel jump just to see if he would crash?
This kid copies Evel’s act by making a practice run or two at the ramp before he actually makes the jump. Watch the video to see if this kids is successful.

 


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4 thoughts on “In The 1970’s, When You Built Bike Ramps From Scraps, We Were All Evel Knie

  1. Piston Pete

    That was awesome!
    My pal Gary Allen and I spent an afternoon jumping a few rows of watermelon we were growing for profit (doing that made it count) and on the way home my bike wouldn’t steer; turns out all that fun had bent the fork stem. I was fine going straight but immediately bound up when I tried to turn. No sweat, I always had spare parts and parts bikes so I canned the fork and wheel off a 26” and put it on that 20” I’d mangled. It worked but it felt like I was riding uphill so I got another 20” and swapped the fork.
    Wow, the shit ya remember, I always had the fastest bike around (until Tommy Simpson got a ten speed and figured out how to speed shift it) and could ride a wheelie into the sunset. The transition into cars was much more difficult, suffice to say we couldn’t have grown enough watermelons..

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