KRAMER | Early 1970s-1984 | Germany :
The Kramer marque grew out of a motorcycle business in Laubus-Eschbach, in the Taunus hills of Hesse, that had been founded by Fritz Kramer’s father. Fritz Kramer ran the firm as a Maico dealer and served as chairman of the MSC Laubus-Eschbach motor sport club, which gave him close ties to the motocross world. His standing in the sport reached beyond the workshop. In September 1976 the OMK appointed him team chief of the German squad at the Motocross des Nations at St. Anthonis in the Netherlands, where the team of Willi Bauer, Rolf Dieffenbach, Herbert Schmitz and Adolf Weil finished third overall behind Belgium and the host Dutch.
The bikes themselves began as modifications of other makers’ machines. Through the early 1970s Kramer focussed om Maico motorcycles, work that culminated in a new rear swingarm with a cantilever shock arrangement. At first this was fitted to rebuilt Maico chassis’, and then to completely new chassis assembled from the remaining Maico parts during 1975 and 1976. Roughly 50 to 80 of these Kramer-Maico machines were built. A further 15 Kramer-Maico were then made with an entirely Kramer frame, but these first in-house chassis were sourced from France and proved anything but durable, since the brazed frames could not easily be repaired after a hard weekend’s racing, and the volume of complaints nearly ended the whole idea. The split from Maico was as much commercial as technical. The relationship soured because the factory at Pfäffingen came to see Kramer as a competitor rather than a source of development feedback, and by then many components on the Kramer-Maicos no longer came from Maico anyway.
The independent Kramer marque proper started in 1977. With the running gear already in hand, Kramer entered the ranks of manufacturers once Rotax was persuaded to supply engines. The frames for the Rotax-powered models were now built in-house from chromoly steel, and after the French-frame failures Fritz Kramer offered a six-month guarantee against frame breakage other than through crashes, a warranty he regarded as unique among competition motorcycles. The range used Rotax two-stroke units across a wide spread of capacities, from 125 up to the rare 485 fitted to the 500 class, and included rotary-valve and reed-valve designs across the cross and enduro lines.
The commercial story was strongly tied to export, and France in particular. Period press recorded that 116 machines left the workshop beneath the Gasthaus Jägerhof in the first year of 1977, of which 85 were exported to France. Output rose to 260 motorcycles in 1978, by which point 30 machines a month could be produced, and a target of 500 units was set for 1979, again destined mainly for France along with Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Tank supply tracked this international footprint, moving from hand-made aluminium tanks brought in from Britain in 1977 and 1978, to a laminated fibreglass tank produced for 1979, and from late 1979 to an Acerbis plastic tank made in Italy. Among the riders associated with the marque in the late 1970s and early 1980s were Rolf Dieffenbach, Hans Kinigadner, Uli Körber and Søren B. Mortensen.
On the matter of the company’s end, the most detailed records correct the often-repeated claim of a 1980 closure. According to the trade press, around 1,000 Kramer sport motorcycles were built between the end of 1976 and autumn 1981, although Fritz Kramer himself put the total nearer 2,000, and chassis numbers on 1981 models confirm that production exceeded a thousand. From September 1981 the operation continued under Peter Heuser, building up to roughly 700 further machines, until the definitive end in 1984. The remnants of the company were auctioned in 1984 and passed largely to Reinhard Hallat, later the Rotax importer for Germany, who continued to build Kramer machines to order for some years afterwards.
The name also carried on abroad. A separate venture was set up in Italy by Fritz Kramer, first named Kramer Italia and from 1982 known as Kram-It, producing almost exclusively offroad and enduro models. In the 1980s that company moved to Gazzaniga in the province of Bergamo, used Minarelli and Rotax engines of 50 to 300cc, and created the HRD brand, standing for Happy Red Devils, a line of 125cc road machines.
