It's 1983, and BMW is getting ready to introduce its new Paris Dakar GS model. They need a bike for advertising purposes, but the new tanks are not ready yet. So what does BMW do? They take a stock small GS tank, and weld on the outside panels of the PD tank. That's what this tank is - a pre-production mockup of the very popular Paris Dakar tank. It was used for the early advertising photos of the (then) new PD GS. Despite its size, the tank inside still holds only about 5 gallons of gas. This tank recently came up for sale in Germany, and was brought to the USA.

If you look down the filler neck of the PD tank, you can see the long connector to the smaller stock tank inside.

From this view you can see the petcock connection that goes in through the outer shell and then connects to the small tank inside (note gap around the petcock tube). Yes, with all that metal the tank is pretty heavy!

A lot of emails come in asking about running a solo seat with a big Heinrich tank, and I have to reply that doing so is an invitation to damage the family jewels. Well Daron Strub, one of my web page readers, has come up with a simple solution to allow this combo to work. This is his bike with solo seat attached (also see next two photos).

Daron made up a simple steel bracket that moved the rear seat mounting holes back 2.5 inches. He then moved the front (stock) bracket back as well. Total cost about $10.

Here's a close-up shot of the finished conversion. Daron says that in 600 miles of test rides he has not bottomed out yet - and he's not a featherweight either (my man!) so I'd say he has given it a very good testing.  Thanks Daron for sharing this - I know a lot of people will be interested in this conversion.

Speaking of Heinrich's, here's a close-up photo of a Neiman lock, as used on all Heinrich tanks fitted with a toolbox lid. This lock gets riveted to the toolbox lid from the underside, which leaves only the round center of the lock (the point where the key enters the mechanism) showing. I found a few of these in Germany in 2002.

From literature I've seen I know that Hoske produced at least one tank for the then-new /5 series BMWs. The tank I saw was bigger than this one, so this appears to be yet another size tank that was offered by Hoske. This tank appears to have the /6 style stick-on BMW tank emblems (or they may be car emblems?).

Left side view. If anyone has access to any original Hoske literature from the 1970's and can share that with me for scanning, it would be interesting to add that information to the online collection.

Same tank, top view. I think this is the largest tool box that I've ever seen on a Hoske!