Eysink
Origins in Amersfoort
Start with a bicycle shop in Amersfoort, in 1886, and a man named D.H. Eysink who wanted to build things with wheels. That is the entire, unglamorous truth of where this marque begins. The operation he founded carried the sort of name only a nineteenth-century industrialist could love — the Amersfoortse Rijwiel-, Automobiel- en Machinefabriek, or the Amersfoort Bicycle, Automobile and Machine Factory — and bicycles were the business before anything with an engine entered the picture. It was a family concern from the start, and it would stay that way for its entire life.
Eysink's sons, Menno and August, pushed the company into motorized transport. Automobiles came first in practice, with the brothers building their first cars in 1897 and going on to produce something in the neighborhood of 400 of them — two, four, and six-cylinder machines — over the following two decades. But it's the motorcycles that gave the Eysink name its lasting identity, and that story starts in 1898, when the factory began fitting proprietary engines from Belgian suppliers Kelecom, Sarolea, and Minerva into its own frames. Serious production of shaft-driven cars followed around 1903, but by then motorcycle and bicycle manufacture had already taken precedence in the workshops at Amersfoort, and that balance never really reversed.
The Early Machines
Eysink built its own engines through roughly the mid-1920s, which was not unusual for a European manufacturer of the period but does say something about the company's ambitions — this was not simply an assembler of bought-in parts wearing a badge. When the firm did turn to outside suppliers, it drew on a genuinely wide net: Villiers two-strokes, JAP and Python four-strokes in the 250cc to 500cc range, plus engines from Blackburne, JLO, Kelecom, Sarolea, Minerva, Matchless, and New Hudson at various points. It's the kind of engine list that tells you a company was chasing whatever combination of power, reliability, and cost made sense for a given model year, rather than marrying itself to a single philosophy.
These machines found real, unglamorous work. Eysink motorcycles served with the Dutch Army during the First World War, and by the interwar years the range included 250cc, 365cc, 425cc, and 500cc singles and twins that built the company a solid reputation well beyond the Netherlands. This was a manufacturer with genuine depth in its lineup, not a boutique operation surviving on one clever design.
The 1930s and the Jubileum
The 1930s were Eysink's high-water mark, and much of that had a name attached to it: Dick Eysink, grandson of the founder, who rode the family's machines in competition with real success. In 1931 he was part of the Dutch "Holland A" team — alongside G. Bakker Schut and A.P. van Hammersveld — that won the International Silver Vase at the International Six Days Trial in Merano, Italy. It's a result that gets little attention outside ISDT record books today, but at the time it was a serious statement for a small Dutch manufacturer competing against the established British and German factories on their own terrain.
Dick Eysink's own competition machine from the 1932 Six Days Trial became the direct ancestor of the Alpenjager — the "Alpine Hunter" — introduced in 1933 as the company's super-sports model. The first Alpenjagers ran Python engines; by 1936 the model had moved to 350cc and 500cc Matchless units, and 1938 brought a 350cc high-camshaft JAP engine. What made the Alpenjager notable wasn't just performance but detail: it used plunger rear suspension at a time when that was still an uncommon fitment on production motorcycles. Eysink never built many of them — around 20 in 1938 alone, by most counts — and only two or three are known to survive today, which tells you how thoroughly these machines were used up rather than preserved.
The other defining model of the decade arrived in 1936: the 125 Jubileum, so named because it landed exactly fifty years after the company's 1886 founding. Powered by a Villiers 125cc two-stroke with a hand shifter, the Jubileum was a smaller, more accessible machine than the Alpenjager, but it would go on to become the model most associated with the Eysink name, particularly in its 1936 and later 1939 form.
Racing and the Postwar Years
The Jubileum's competition record is where the story gets murkier, and it's worth being honest about that rather than repeating the tidier version. Dick Renooy rode a Jubileum to victory in the 125cc class at the Assen TT in 1948, and that result is the one unambiguously documented in the primary TT records — though even the exact average speed varies by source, with figures cited anywhere from 98 to 110 km/h depending on where you look. A second win, sometimes claimed for 1946, shows up in a few accounts of Eysink's history but isn't corroborated in the primary Dutch TT records, so it's best treated as unconfirmed rather than repeated as fact. Either way, the 1948 result alone was meaningful: a small Dutch two-stroke beating the field at the country's home race, ridden by a name Assen historians still recognize.
Bertus van Hamersveld deserves a mention here too — a Dutch rider who raced the 500cc Eysink at Assen in the early 1930s and, by most accounts, became the circuit's first genuine local favorite, particularly around 1932.
After the Second World War, Eysink went back to two-strokes, building machines up to 250cc, again using Villiers engines. The range shifted noticeably by the early 1950s: from 1952 the company introduced tandem mopeds marketed under the Renata name — a Model A with a Berini engine mounted over the front wheel in the Velosolex style, a Model B with a JLO engine in a conventional position, and a de luxe version of the latter. The Renata Tandem Moped ran a 50cc JLO two-stroke producing 2 horsepower, centrally mounted for balanced weight distribution. It's a modest footnote next to the Alpenjager and the Jubileum, but it shows a company adapting to a Dutch market that increasingly wanted cheap, practical transport rather than sporting motorcycles.
Decline and Closure
Eysink kept building motorcycles into the 1950s, with most reliable sources — Wikipedia, Cybermotorcycle, and Classic Cars Wiki among them — pointing to 1957 as the year full motorcycle production ended. The company shifted its remaining energy into mopeds as the motorcycle side wound down. Moped and bromfiets production continued afterward under Dick Eysink, August's son, running out of Soest until 1971 according to the Dutch Museum.nl archive, well after the Amersfoort motorcycle works had gone quiet.
Throughout its run, Eysink stayed a family business. There's no record of it being sold off, merged, or absorbed by a larger manufacturer the way so many small European marques were; it simply ran its course and stopped, a fate common enough among the continent's smaller motorcycle builders once cheap cars and mass-produced mopeds reshaped the market after the war.
Survival, Collectors, and a Short-Lived Revival
What's left of Eysink today lives mostly in museum collections and private hands across the Netherlands and Europe, with the Yesterdays collection being a notable holder of surviving examples. The 1939 Jubileum, and the immediate postwar racing variants tied to Renooy's Assen result, are the models collectors chase hardest, while an original Alpenjager showing up for sale is a genuine event given how few survive. For a marque that never built in huge volume even at its peak, Eysink's surviving machines carry a scarcity that keeps values and interest well above what the company's modest size might suggest.
The name resurfaced in an unexpected form in 2017, when a Dutch venture called Eysing — a name deliberately close enough to evoke the original — launched in Vught, North Brabant. It was founded by four people: Alain van Dijk, Rik Smits, Stijn Smit, and Jasper Smit. The company built electric mopeds styled after the vintage Alpenjager, betting that Dutch buyers would respond to retro design wrapped around modern battery technology. It was a good idea on paper and a hard business to fund in practice: Eysing announced its bankruptcy in February 2024, citing an inability to secure the financing it needed to continue.
That closure leaves Eysink, in both its original and revived forms, as history rather than an active manufacturer. But the original company's place in Dutch motorcycling is secure enough without a sequel — a firm that started with bicycles in Amersfoort in 1886, built cars almost as an afterthought, and along the way produced machines good enough to win at Assen and take a Silver Vase in Italy. That's a fuller record than most marques of its size ever manage, and it's why the Jubileum and the Alpenjager still draw serious attention from collectors who know where to look.