Barrington Motor Works Publications
Vintage BMW Restoration and Service Manuals

Contact Information:

  • Mailing Address:
  • Barrington Motor Works Publications
    216 Canaan Back Road
    Barrington, NH 03825
  • Telephone:
  • 603.664.9804
  • Email:
  • info@barringtonmotorworkspublications.com
Today's date is Feb 17, 2025

And Who or What
is Barrington Motor Works Publications?

 

 

SOME OLD NEWS AND AN UPDATE

After more than forty years of motorcycle riding and wrenching, and more than twenty years of the restoration and construction of our personal BMW motorcycles, we, Christopher and Barbara Betjemann, established Barrington Motor Works, LLC in 1999 to share what we had learned and knew about the vintage BMW motorcycle with other BMW vintage motorcycle enthusiasts.

Christopher, a former emergency physician who had retired, needed something to direct his considerable energies and abilities toward. And Barbara, an artist and Christopher's lifelong partner, shared that dream. Over the years of restoration of our own BMW motorcycles and the creation of a number of vintage BMW specials, we had not only acquired and developed a significant armamentarium of skills, but had also established friendships and business relationships with many talented and experienced individuals both in the United States and in Europe who, like us, wanted to contribute to the vintage BMW motorcycle community.

Although we enjoyed the restoration of vintage BMW solo and sidecar machines, we also took great interest in the building of both vintage BMW race machines and cafe machines for the street.

Approximately ten years after establishing Barrington Motor Works, LLC we wrote the first of what was to be five vintage BMW motorcycle restoration and service manuals.

Now, in late December 2019 we are announcing the publication of the fifth such manual, the 2019 revision and enlargement of the Barrington Motor Works Publications BMW R50-69US Motorcycle Restoration and Service Manual as well as the passing of the Barrington Motor Works, LLC restoration shop management and operation torch and ownership to our good friend and full time employee of several years, Andrew "Ande" Kahora, who has demonstrated to us his ability to carry the shop torch into the future in the same manner in which we have carried it for twenty years.

While Ande builds vintage BMW engines, transmissions, final drives and motorcycles in the Barrington Motor Works shop, we will continue to bring vintage BMW motorcycle restoration and service manuals to the vintage community.

The 2019 revision and enlargement of the Barrington Motor Works Publications BMW R50-69US Motorcycle Restoration and Service Manual sold out in its entirety and was reprinted in Summer 2024 without changes and US and international shipments of the manual are being shipped several times each week.

Christopher Betjemann
Barbara Rowe Betjemann
January 2025

The 2019 new and expanded Barrington Motor Works Publications R50-69US Restoration and Service Manual.

The Barrington Motor Works BMW R26-27 Restoration and Service Manual.

The Barrington Motor Works BMW R51/3-68 Restoration and Service Manual.

Having said all of the above, join us and enjoy our website, seeing photographic and written essays about some of the machines that have passed through our shop.

Latest Updates

Updated: Jan 8, 2025

As the size, scope and shape of the Covid 19 pandemic became increasingly clear and the world worked to adapt itself to the demands of the pandemic as well as to the stumbling federal response to the pandemic, we too found it necessary to work out our adaptations.

The nature of our Barrington Motor Works business had already changed with our sale of the workshop part of the business to a friend and former employee in February 2019. We had not anticipated how much we would miss the feel of a wrench in our hands or the pleasure of working together on a vintage BMW motorcycle held safely at waist height on a hydraulic lift in front of us.

The shop building which has served us so well for twenty years had become quiet and quite empty. We needed a plan and we needed tools to reawaken the shop. And so, over the course of a few busy weeks we re-equipped the shop with an air compressor, a bead blast cabinet, a portable soda blasting unit, a floor mount drill press, a twenty ton shop press and two tool cabinets whose drawers became filled with wrenches, ratchets, sockets, screwdrivers, ballpeen hammers, alignment and drift punches and more.

With the shop building re-equipped and ready for work, we needed a project for our hands, minds and tools. We already had a good start on our next book, this one on the BMW R5, R51 and R51/2 two camshaft engines. And so thinking of our new book, and our long term interest in the BMW R5, R51, and R51/2 two camshaft engines, we began work on the Betjemann BMW R51/2 Spezial which would help with the design, layout, photography and further development of the new book while allowing us to bring together lessons learned in the Barrington Motor Works workshop, at the Mosport racetrack in Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada, the New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon, NH and the Nürburgring in Nürburg, Germany to the Spezial as we continued work on the new book.

With all preparatory work completed, we were back in the shop or at the computer again. At a time when travel was unwise and unsafe we once again had the solitude, peace, safety and pleasures of our shop or keyboard with dual widescreen monitors in front of us again.

With another New Hampshire winter now upon us again, the Betjemann BMW R51/2 Spezial has been on the road for weeks as we enjoyed its shakedown/break in riding and spectacular performance and the Barrington Motor Works Publications BMW R5, R51 and R51/2 Engine Manual is undergoing its final review and edit before being passed on to our graphic designer and then to the printer and book bindery.


vintage BMW motorcycle restoration