The

Peugeot Peugeot (, , ) is a French brand of automobiles owned by Stellantis. The family business that preceded the current Peugeot companies was founded in 1810, with a steel foundry that soon started making hand tools and kitchen equipment, and the ...

500 M (1913-1914) was a French

racing In sport, racing is a competition of speed, in which competitors try to complete a given task in the shortest amount of time. Typically this involves traversing some distance, but it can be any other task involving speed to reach a specific goa ...

motorcycle A motorcycle (motorbike, bike, or trike (if three-wheeled)) is a two or three-wheeled motor vehicle steered by a handlebar. Motorcycle design varies greatly to suit a range of different purposes: long-distance travel, commuting, cruising ...

dual overhead camshaft An overhead camshaft (OHC) engine is a piston engine where the camshaft is located in the cylinder head above the combustion chamber. This contrasts with earlier overhead valve engines (OHV), where the camshaft is located below the combustion cha ...

. It also used a

multi-valve In automotive engineering a multi-valve or multivalve engine is one where each cylinder has more than two valves. A multi-valve engine has better breathing and may be able to operate at higher revolutions per minute (RPM) than a two-valve engine ...

cylinder head In an internal combustion engine, the cylinder head (often abbreviated to simply "head") sits above the cylinders and forms the roof of the combustion chamber. In sidevalve engines, the head is a simple sheet of metal; whereas in more modern ov ...

, with four valves per cylinder.

Development and technology

The Swiss engineer Ernest Henry adapted his incredibly successful Peugeot four-cylinder automobile racing engine (1912) for a racing motorcycle. The 500M used a parallel twin-cylinder engine, with dual overhead camshafts driven by a cascade of gears between the cylinders, with four-valve cylinder heads. The 500M was the most technically advanced motorcycle in the world when introduced. However, the design was ahead of the

metallurgy Metallurgy is a domain of materials science and engineering that studies the physical and chemical behavior of metallic elements, their inter-metallic compounds, and their mixtures, which are known as alloys. Metallurgy encompasses both the sc ...

available at the time, and suffered from cracking between the valve seats. While the engine was incredibly advanced, power transmission was a single speed via direct belt drive. At the rear wheel the Peugeot had a pedal-operated drum brake. Front suspension was a

girder fork A motorcycle fork connects a motorcycle's front wheel and axle to its frame, typically via a yoke, also known as a triple clamp, which consists of an upper yoke joined to a lower yoke via a steering stem, a shaft that runs through the steering ...

Test drives

Peugeot proved the reliability of the motor bike in test runs conducted in 1913. The racing motorcycle reached a world record of over the flying kilometre for its displacement class. The company entered reliable and proven two-cylinder V-engines with simple valve actuation in the 1913 French motorcycle Grand Prix. The machine was raced at various venues, but its full potential was thwarted due to the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

Later redesigns

Peugeot resumed development in 1919 of Henry's original 1913/4 design. Major redesigns were executed by Marcel Grémillon in 1919 who moved the DOHC gear drive to the side of the engine, and a 3-speed gearbox with clutch. Lessman Antonesco altered the design again in 1923, changing the design to a simpler OHC, 2-valve motor with the camshaft driven by shaft-and-bevel. This proved the fastest and most reliable variant of all, but by 1925, Peugeot separated its motorcycling and automotive divisions, and the GP twin project was abandoned.Jardy, Alain (2013). 'Peugeot 500 GP 1914', RAD Magazine, Oct, 2013

2010 reproduction

For the 100th anniversary of the model, an electronics engineer named Jean Boulicot built a reproduction between c. 2000 and 2010 from Henry's original blueprints, using a home

lathe A lathe () is a machine tool that rotates a workpiece about an axis of rotation to perform various operations such as cutting, sanding, knurling, drilling, deformation, facing, and turning, with tools that are applied to the workpiece to c ...

and

milling machine Milling is the process of machining using rotary cutters to remove material by advancing a cutter into a workpiece. This may be done by varying direction on one or several axes, cutter head speed, and pressure. Milling covers a wide variety of d ...

. The reproduction machine was displayed at Salon

Rétromobile Rétromobile is an annual classic auto show held in February in the French city of Paris. First held in 1976, the show is hosted at the Paris expo Porte de Versailles, a convention centre located between the Boulevards of the Marshals and the Bou ...

2010.

References

Notes

Sources

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External links

Picture of 1913 model on Flickr"Peugeot 1913" image
at

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

{{Peugeot Motorcycles of France Motorcycles introduced in the 1910s 500 M Motorcycles powered by straight-twin engines