I bought myself a Russian Ural with sidecar.

My Ural is a motorcycle from 1993 and made by IMZ (Irbitski Mototsikletni Zavod), equipped with a reverse gear and the normal 4 gears. The engine is a boxer 4 stroke 2 cylinder. The design of the Ural is a originally copied from an early BMW motorcylce.

My version of the Ural had the name according the provided documents Ural Imz-8 103 10.

History of the Ural Motorcycle

The Russian firm IMZ was started in 1939, during the pre-war the USSR Defence Ministry needed a motorcycle for their Red Army. The factory took an imported BMW R71 and rebuild this with the Russian specifications. The engineers from from IMZ bought five bikes via Sweden, because Germany was not allowed to sell bikes to Russia and in 1941 the first Ural M-72 was delivered to Stalin.

The Russian Ural bike proved to be good in WWII and so the factory was renovated after the war, where in 1950 a total of 30.000 motorcycles were produced. In 1950 the factory in Ukraine KMZ Dnepr was only for the military Ural motorcycles and the Irbit Motorcycle Works (IMZ) started with the civilian bikes besides the military versions, where the civilian models were called Ural and sold also outside Russia. In 1960 the Ural IMZ factory was converted to produce only non-military civilian motorcycle's. Also a copy of the factory with the assembly line of the Ural was delivered to China where the bike was build as a Chang-Jiang. 

Most of the Ural motorcycles are delivered as sidecar mounted motorcycles.

This is the IMZ Ural badge.

The original logo from the factory website.

My IMZ Ural

 This IMZ Ural from 1993 has the 35 pk boxer motor and is equipped with the old original headlight and dashboard. The engine has a total of 750 cc and with 4 gears I hope that it has a normal speed to ride also on the highway. Also a 12 volt system is implemented as standard.

The bike has still the original paint. Of course the time shows, the paint has disappeared in some places and small parts has some rust, but overall it shows perfect. Question stays, if I leave the bike in this color, or paint it satin black or a combination of black and orange.

RDW numbers

The Dutch registration government reports on their website the following numbers of Ural motorbikes in the Netherlands:

Ural Imz-8 103 10 : 36 in total (same type Ural with sidecar)

In total the RDW has 200 Ural bikes with a sidecar registered in Holland, from the very early types till the latest 2017 Tourist bike with sidecar. And 37 Ural solo motorcycles are registerd in the end of 2016. In total the RDW has 376 Ural bikes in their database.

Also the RDW has 33 Dnepr with sidecar registered and 19 Dnepr without sidecar, from the earliest type 11 till the MT-16.

And the 3rd type of this bike is the Chang-Jiang, and the RDW has 7 models with a sidecar in their database and I found no solo Chang-Jiang bikes in the database.