{"id":7172,"date":"2020-01-06T08:11:55","date_gmt":"2020-01-06T16:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=7172"},"modified":"2020-01-06T08:38:59","modified_gmt":"2020-01-06T16:38:59","slug":"a-pair-of-colts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2020\/01\/06\/a-pair-of-colts\/","title":{"rendered":"A Pair of Colts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The 1956 Mustang Colt. I had posted this on Facebook several years ago and forgot about it. Mr. Zuckerberg jogged my memory.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I’ll bet with that title you’re thinking I’m going to write about a couple of guns.<\/p>\n

Nope.\u00a0 The subject is Colts, but these are Colts that were manufactured by the Mustang Motor Products Corporation.\u00a0 And the few of us who know what that means would just call the company “Mustang.”<\/p>\n

The idea popped into my mind with one of those Facebook photos on my feed.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Mark remembered.<\/p>\n

Mustang is the company that made the hottest mini-motorcycles back in the 1950s.\u00a0 There were a lot of companies making small motorcycles in America back then, and then they all disappeared by the early 1960s.\u00a0 Mustang hung on into the 1960s, but they were done in by all those nice people you met on Hondas.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 What was Ford going to do with a name like Mustang?\u00a0 What were they thinking?<\/p>\n

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The very first iteration of the Mustang…the 1946 Greeves-powered Colt.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There were actually two Mustang Colts.\u00a0 The first was the very first bike Mustang made in the late 1940s.\u00a0 It was a tiny little bike with a tiny little Greeves two-stroke motor, and that’s what did it in the first Colt.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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. \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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Another view of the ’46 Mustang Colt. It’s stunning, isn’t it?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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. \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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The ’56 Colt again. I love the colors and the look.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You might be wondering how I know the folks in the Mustang factory didn’t like the ’56 Colt.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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A young Jim Cavanaugh in front of the Mustang factory.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Another view of Jim and his crew back in the day…Jim is on the left in the second row.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Jim Cavanaugh a few years before he passed away.\u00a0 Jim is on a custom CSC 150 Mustang replica, his personal bike.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Steve Seidner revived the Mustang concept with his line of CSC 150 and CSC 250 motorcycles.\u00a0 They were awesome.\u00a0 I rode mine along with a few of my friends (including Baja John) to Cabo San Lucas and back. \u00a0\u00a0 Many of the CSC bikes were highly customized, including this 250 Steve thought was going to be his personal bike:<\/p>\n

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CSC called this one the P-51.\u00a0 It fit the motorcycle’s aviation motif and Mustang lineage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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World War nose art on the P-51’s fuel tank. This motorcycle was going to be Steve Seidner’s bike, but when we put this photo on the CSC blog a guy called within minutes and made Steve an offer he couldn’t refuse. The CSC Mustangs went for high dollars.\u00a0 Folks would point out you could buy a Harley for that kind of money, but they just didn’t get it.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So, back to the original Colt Mustangs…I think both Colts are stunning motorcycles.\u00a0 What do you think?<\/p>\n

\n

Want to read about our trip to Cabo and back and CSC 150 motorcycles? \u00a0 It’s right here<\/a>. \u00a0 And would you like to read the article Jim Cavanaugh and I wrote for Motorcycle Classics<\/em> magazine on the original Mustangs? \u00a0 You can get to that one here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll bet with that title you’re thinking I’m going to write about a couple of guns. Nope.\u00a0 The subject is Colts, but these are Colts that were manufactured by the Mustang Motor Products Corporation.\u00a0 And the few of us who know what that means would just call the company “Mustang.” The idea popped into my … Continue reading “A Pair of Colts”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[96,89,140],"tags":[1018],"class_list":["post-7172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feel-good-stuff","category-motorcycle-adventure-ride","category-vintage-motorcycle","tag-mustang-motorcycles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7172"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7191,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7172\/revisions\/7191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}