Joe Gresh posted a Dream Bike blog the other day about the Buells and I think he was spot on. A confession: I’ve always wanted a Buell, too. Given the choice, I’d probably go for the XB12s like you see in the photo above. I didn’t much care for the ones at the end of the run with the Rotax engines (apparently, neither did Harley-Davidson), and I didn’t like the ones with the lower bars and the bigger (yet still small) front fairing (the lines just didn’t look right to me). But that XB12s: Wow. I think Buell nailed what a hooligan bike should look like, and Bike Looks Matter (I could start a movement under that name, I think).
Buell had versions of the XB12 with translucent body work (the fairing and the tank) in orange, red, and smoky gray, and those are muey cool, too. I particularly liked the orange one. Orange has always worked for me on a motorcycle. Orange bikes are faster, you know.
I went as far as riding out to Victorville Harley about 15 years ago to test ride a new Buell, and that’s what scotched the deal for me. I had the money and I was ready to buy. The bike was beautiful, but it was slow compared to my Speed Triple and the wheelbase was so short it felt twitchy to me. Maybe it was the steering geometry. Whatever it was, the bike just didn’t feel stable.
The handling wasn’t what killed the deal, though. It was summer when I test rode that Buell and when we were stuck in traffic along Bear Valley Road, I suddenly heard this horrific whine from beneath the seat. The noise startled me. I thought something broke, but it was the rear cylinder fan (something I didn’t even know the bike had). Evidently the Buells ran hot (as did the Big Twin Harleys) and they had a problem with rear cylinder overheating. The answer was a thermostat-activated rear cylinder fan. Nope, that was too Mickey Mouse for me, and I kept the $12,000 in my wallet that day.
But the looks! Wow, those Buell boys nailed what I thought were fine aesthetics for a motorcycle. And the Exhaust Note was perfect. Nothing sounds better than a Buell at idle. It was locomotive like: Big, powerful, industrial, all business. I liked that, too.
As a mechanical engineer, I appreciated Buell’s concepts…the oil in the swingarm, the fuel in the frame, the oversized single disk front brake, and the whole mass centralization thing. These were ideas that made sense and were ahead of their time. Maybe that’s why Buell didn’t make it. There were other reasons, but sometimes you can be too far ahead of the curve, and Buells were out there.
Gresh said he liked the earlier Buells better, and even though I’d like to someday own a later model Buell, I agree with Joe that the earlier ones were also beautiful. Buell had an earlier gray and orange color combo that I thought was especially stunning…
I think the earlier Buells didn’t have the rear cylinder cooling fan and I like that. The fact that Buells were slow compared to Triumphs doesn’t bother me these days. I think I could put up with the noisy cooling fan silliness. Or maybe I’d just ride on cooler days, or stay out of traffic. I’ve found myself poking around a lot on CycleTrader and the Facebook sales pages recently. Who knows what the future holds.
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