hennesse wrote:In the next post, I'll include a little story from 20 years ago how I became involved in a two-way pipeline from the US to Germany.
Pipeline to Germany
At the end of World War II, the Allies appropriated a lot of things from Germany as “War Reparations”. One of the things they took was the designs of the German DKW two-stroke motorcycles. Two-stroke engines were not new, but DKW had come up with a really efficient engine design. Not only did the Allies copy the engine, they copied the entire motorcycle. In the late 1940’s, Harley-Davidson produced the Hummer. In England, BSA produced the Bantam. The Russians produced the Moscow M1A. In the mid-1950s, Yamaha decided to build motorcycles, and their first model, the YA-1, was a direct copy of the little DKW RT-125. One day, I decided that I just had to have a RT-125, preferably a 1939, the first year.
So I set out on a quest to find one.
This was not going to be easy. A few returning servicemen probably found a way to bring one home with them, but that was fifty years ago. So I started my search on the Internet, posting messages on German motorcycle sites. After awhile, I received an e-mail from Mike Klais, who runs a golf and sporting goods store in Chieming, a resort town on a lake in Bavaria. He knew someone locally who had a 1941 model, and might be interested in selling it. A week or two later, he took pictures, and sent them to me.
I liked the bike, but getting it from some town in Germany back to Maryland was going to be a problem. Mike offered to purchase the bike, bring it home, and build a crate for it, if I would arrange for shipping. The price was right, about $1300 in 1999 dollars. I was a little skeptical of sending money to some guy who I only knew through e mail for a bike that I had only seen in pictures. I took the plunge, and wired him the money.
The bank charged me $35 for the wire transfer. I have never figured out why American banks charge so much for wire transfers. They simply type the amount, my bank name and checking account number, and his, into their computer. Poof, the money is transferred within seconds. For this they get $35?
Germans handle money a lot differently than Americans, and they are a lot smarter than we are. Germans pay cash for routine purchases, reserving credit cards for larger purchases like a new suite of living room furniture. Americans use credit cards to buy a 98 cent bottle of water at the grocery store. For non-local purchases, Americans will hand out their credit card number to just about anyone on the telephone or Internet. A German seller gives out their bank account number, and the purchaser has his bank wire the seller the money. Wire transfers there only cost a dime.
While Mike was building the crate, I contacted companies who handled international shipping. I quickly found out that importing vehicles into the U.S. is complex. First, there are customs duties to be paid, and I had to determine which category of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States this motorcycle would fall under. I found it, and fortunately, there was no import duty to be paid. Next, the U.S. Department of Transportation requires that vehicles imported into the U.S. meet exhaust emission standards, bumper standards, windshield standards and a lot of other standards. I found the exemption for antique vehicles, and happily filled out the paperwork until the form asked for the VIN (Vehicle Identification Number), which has been used worldwide since 1981. One letter in the VIN identifies the model year, and that would substantiate my claim of exemption. Of course, they hadn’t invented VIN numbers in 1941. I had to get a picture of the serial number plate from Mike. Blow it up, add an explanation and attach it to the paperwork. Whew.
I finally found a company who would pick up the crate at Mike’s home in Chieming and deliver it to my home in Bethesda. Then the problem was that it would arrive at my home via commercial carrier (tractor trailer). Since I didn’t have a loading dock, they’d have to send a small truck with a lift-gate at considerable extra cost. Ugh. I reluctantly agreed to pick it up at the dockyard in Baltimore.
By sea, it would take three weeks and cost $300. Then they offered me the option of air freight – three days and $500. Picking the crate up at the terminal at Dulles airport in nearby Virginia seemed a whole lot easier than hassling with a huge dockyard in Baltimore. Following the old saying “In for a penny, in for a pound”, I sprang for the extra $200 for air freight. It was well worth it. I arrived at the Lufthansa terminal at the flughafen (airport), and about 15 minutes later I was on my way home.
Mike’s crate was an excellent example of German engineering – it was so sturdy an elephant could have sat on it. The bike inside was just as he described it, and I was a happy camper.
- Dave's (former) 1941 DKW RT-125
- dkw.jpg (68.45 KiB) Viewed 14047 times
Mike asked me for a favor, and I happily complied. He was buying things on eBay in the U.S. and selling them in his shop in Germany. Most of them were small items, and shipping would be relatively expensive. So he had them shipped to me, I would store them on my back porch, and when I had enough to fill a large box, I’d send it over to him.
Soon all kinds of boxes started arriving at my door. Most of them were small, like antique golf balls and various other golf and sporting paraphernalia. Sometimes they were larger, like a dozen titanium golf clubs. They got stored, and later they got shipped.
Then he e-mailed me with a special problem. He wanted to buy 50 cowboy lassos from some wholesale company in Arkansas, but they wouldn’t ship them to Germany. He tried to have them shipped to me, but they wouldn’t agree. Mike’s English is excellent, but I think his German accent made it difficult to negotiate with the little redneck company in Arkansas.
So I called them, explained that since they wouldn’t ship to Germany, I would be his shipping agent. So send the lariats to me, and I will ship them to Germany. They told me “We’re a wholesaler, we only sell to retailers. You’re not a retailer, so we can’t sell to you”. I told them “Marken Golf in Germany is a retailer. I’m just the shipping agent”. They responded “We don’t ship to Germany”.
We went round and round like that for a long time. I was insistent. Finally, they agreed. I don’t think they ever understood the logic of this argument, they just got tired of arguing with me. A week later, five large boxes of lariats arrived at my door.
Lariats are not just rope, or you could never twirl them. They’re made of fairly stiff rope, and I think they dip the loop end (the lasso part) in some kind of goop to make it even stiffer. So they arrived in large boxes. They did a lousy job of packaging them, and the boxes were all squashed and broken, so I had to repackage them.
I can’t imagine just what,
or who, these folks at a lakeside resort in Germany would be lassoing. But it’s not a shipping agent’s job to wonder why. I just sent them on.
After this fiasco, I guess Mike figured that he had used up his favor, and the boxes stopped arriving at my house.
At the time, I worked for the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington DC. I was a just a computer geek, but I was the only one in the whole agency who had any actual experience in international trade. Go figure.