KRAUSER | 1980-mid 80s | Germany :
The man behind the marque came to motorcycle building through racing and accessories rather than the other way round. Michael Krauser, known as Mike Krauser, was a highly successful sidecar racer for the works BMW team, and won the German championship four consecutive times starting in 1955. Over the years he was involved in road racing across sidecars and the 80cc, 250cc and 350cc classes as a constructor, rider and sponsor, did a great deal of work with BMW machinery, and developed four-valve heads for the boxer engines before pursuing his dream of a complete motorcycle of his own. After winning a string of trophies he moved into making bolt-on hard luggage for BMWs and then into high-performance aftermarket parts for the boxer engines, the four-valve heads among them, before starting to build his own machines with BMW running gear and computer-designed frames under the MKM 1000 name.
The motorcycle itself rested on bought-in BMW mechanicals wrapped in Krauser’s own structure and bodywork. By the late 1970s Krauser had both the capital and decades of BMW connections, and chose to use the engine, drivetrain, suspension, brakes and electrics of the BMW R100RS, with the real distinction lying in the frame. Introduced in 1980, the MKM 1000 used a newly developed tubular space frame made up of 52 straight and four slightly bent chrome-molybdenum steel tubes, and Krauser, already established as a fairing and luggage supplier, provided its characteristic bodywork. Accounts differ on who drew up that frame. One holds that it was based on Peter Zettelmaier’s diploma thesis, while another credits the engineering firm HPN, founded by Alfred Halbfeld, Klaus Pepperl and Michael Nehe, with helping create a structure that shed more than a third of the original BMW frame’s weight, lowered the forks, increased rake and trail, and raised the engine. Period journalists nicknamed the result the birdcage, and the frame weighed about 11.6 kilograms, roughly six kilograms less than the BMW item.
The four-valve heads were a separate and somewhat misunderstood part of the package. A collector who has studied the marque stresses that the appeal of the MKM 1000 was the frame first, the fibreglass bodywork second and the four-valve heads third, and that the standard bike was not actually any faster than a stock R100RS. Krauser’s performance four-valve head kit was developed to lift the 980cc boxer from 70 to 82 horsepower and raised compression from 8.2 to 10.2 to one, but it was sold as a race part that needed finishing rather than a bolt-on, with kits including Mahle pistons and rings reported in a 1982 account as due in early 1983 at about 1,100 dollars.
Exclusivity, not volume, defined the venture. The complete MKM 1000 carried a price of around 14,000 dollars, which made it scarce, with about 237 examples built. Other accounts put the figure at roughly 200, and note that only 13 were imported to the United States in 1982, with second-generation cars appearing by 1983. Alongside the road bike, Krauser’s competition and accessory work continued, and his sidecar ambitions extended to a project of their own. The Krauser Domani sidecar project did not initially reach the production stage, although several dozen were built, and machines could also be bought as kits to be completed with the buyer’s own BMW parts.
