I like strange things so of course I was drawn to this at the Hershey car show earlier this month. It had been there before but was priced a little high so it went home with the seller a couple times. This year they wanted rid of it and lowered the price enough that it is now my problem...

When I got it, the bike was very dirty but not beat up and there was very little rust on it, just a little on the bars. It appears to have spent most of it's life indoors...

I found a little information about it online. It is from the Karkov bicycle factory (XB3 or KhVZ) in Ukraine and is probably from the early 70's.
Kharkov was a lot like Raleigh and Schwinn during their heydays they made a lot of their own parts and components in-house.

I gave it a bath and used a little compound on the paint. It almost shines now!

Wow, it's in fantastic shape! Looks like a fun cruiser.

The "made in the USSR" marks, in English, are curious - must have been meant for export? But to where?

Looks great, what kind of compound did you use on the paint?

Kudos ! For a nice job cleaning up quite nicely something you don't see every day ( decade, ever ?)...

Looks great !

Joe

Some kind of McGuiars in a black bottle. I think it was their Ultimate Compound. I know the stuff makes the old Raleigh black paint look like it was clear coated. The paint reminds me of the green that Waste Management uses on their dumpsters.

Does it have standard size tires/wheels? I suppose you wouldn't know about frame threading or bearing sizes unless you took it apart. It would be interesting to see what would interchange with components from other countries, especially since they made all their own parts.

Super-hott bike. Let's see a close-up of the front sprocket, please? Also, gotta love the moustachio'd guy pictured on what I presume is the seat-tube?

My old room-mate once trashpicked a 3 speed that was made in Poland during Soviet rule. We were ultra-stoked about it, but he left it in the alley and someone hauled it off. Easy come, easy go. Make sure you hold onto that one.

Tires are 622-40 (700c). The hardware all seems to be standard metric bits. Other than both pedals, I haven't taken anything apart but I found a few posts online about the Kharkov headsets being a non-standard size and replacements are nearly impossible to come by. The bottom brackets on these might be an odd size too.

No fancy, ornate lugwork on this one!

Note the little factory stamp on the inside of the chainwheel. I found the same markings on the chain.

Wonderful find! Thanks for the photo details. I love that the decals are in such good shape, and that crank is awesome.

Anything but high end, but very desireable, in my opinion. I like unusual stuff, also, and that Russian roller is pretty unusual. Nice find!

V nice. Interesting it has no lawyer lips.

Made in the USSR
You don't know how lucky you are, boy
Made in the USSR..

That front rack is awesome.

In Soviet Russia, lawyer lips sue YOU.

I like it!

I like the typo on the decal, too.

It looks like it may have been repainted. I think I see signs that the decals were taped off. I could easily be wrong here, but especially the "MADe IN USSR" decal looks that way to me.

I didn't even notice that! YKPANHA!!! Those crazy Soviets!

I need to agree with most of the other folks here. It is an interesting old roadster.

Какой красивый велосипед

Definitely not a repaint. The paint that's on this thing is pretty tough. The buffing rag I used barely turned green with the compound I was using. This is probably coated in some indestructible lead-based stuff that would make environmentalists in the US have a heart attack.
No decals either. These appear to be silkscreens and seems that they used the same type of tough paint on the screens.

It's a bit flimsy though. Held on with three little machine screws. Probably strong enough for one loaf of government bread and not much more...

Ah, that would explain why the edges look different. It's definitely a cool find.

MADe is not a "typo" it's a trans-literation. The Russian type set does not include a capital E figure. Made by the Kharkov factory the model is the Ukraine, & looks to be for export to the west.

Interesting! But why isn't there a capital E?

1. The Russian alphabet does have a letter that looks like E and e in English, pronounced "ye" and comes right after д. Ekimov (Екимов) uses it to spell his last name.
2. The Russian alphabet does not have letters that look anything like D, N, U, S, or R, yet they appear in the same decal.
3. The decal looks to be hand painted, not typeset.

Conclusion - just a mistake.

^ correct, not sure what I was thinking...or not thinking