A Pair of Colts

I’ll bet with that title you’re thinking I’m going to write about a couple of guns.

Nope.  The subject is Colts, but these are Colts that were manufactured by the Mustang Motor Products Corporation.  And the few of us who know what that means would just call the company “Mustang.”

The idea popped into my mind with one of those Facebook photos on my feed.  You know, it’s one of the things Facebook does when they’re not spying on you…they suggest you repost a photo you posted in the past.  They did, and that beautiful turquoise 1956 Colt you see above popped up on my Facebook account. I had posted it 6 or 7 years ago.  Mark remembered.

Mustang is the company that made the hottest mini-motorcycles back in the 1950s.  There were a lot of companies making small motorcycles in America back then, and then they all disappeared by the early 1960s.  Mustang hung on into the 1960s, but they were done in by all those nice people you met on Hondas.  And when Mustang went out of business, a young Ford exec named Lee Iacocca swept in to grab the Mustang name. A lot of folks thought that was weird in 1962.  What was Ford going to do with a name like Mustang?  What were they thinking?

There were actually two Mustang Colts.  The first was the very first bike Mustang made in the late 1940s.  It was a tiny little bike with a tiny little Greeves two-stroke motor, and that’s what did it in the first Colt.  In those post-war years, Greeves needed every engine they could make for their own bikes in merry old England, and they cut Mustang off.  Undeterred, Mustang bought the Busy Bee engine company in the US and they redesigned a new Mustang around the larger Busy Bee 322cc flathead 4-stroke single.   The Busy Bee engine was actually used to power cement mixers before that, but Mustang wanted Busy Bee engines for their motorcycles, unaware of and uncaring about any future impact to Joe Gresh’s future concrete endeavors.

Mustang revived the Colt moniker for the ’56 model (the one you see in the photo at the top of this blog and in the photo below), but it didn’t sell well and the folks who made Mustangs in California didn’t like the bike.   The Mustang was a premium product, and the idea of a cheapened Mustang (no transmission, a centrifugal clutch, and no telescopic forks) didn’t set well with the customer base or the folks in the Mustang factory.

You might be wondering how I know the folks in the Mustang factory didn’t like the ’56 Colt.  I heard it straight from the late Jim Cavanaugh, who was an advisor to CSC Motorcycles and the Production Superintendent at the original Mustang Motor Products Corporation.

Steve Seidner revived the Mustang concept with his line of CSC 150 and CSC 250 motorcycles.  They were awesome.  I rode mine along with a few of my friends (including Baja John) to Cabo San Lucas and back.    Many of the CSC bikes were highly customized, including this 250 Steve thought was going to be his personal bike:

So, back to the original Colt Mustangs…I think both Colts are stunning motorcycles.  What do you think?

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Want to read about our trip to Cabo and back and CSC 150 motorcycles?   It’s right here.   And would you like to read the article Jim Cavanaugh and I wrote for Motorcycle Classics magazine on the original Mustangs?   You can get to that one here.