Gresh has some really honest, really funny videos, and the thing about the funny part is that the guy is not trying to be funny…he’s just telling it like it is and a lot of times, the truth is pretty funny. This is a video Joe did 7 years ago on the Harley XR1200 Sportster, and the best line in it is the title of this blog. Enjoy, my friends.
Category: Harley-Davidson
Top This
I’m a big fan of electric motorcycles. I like electrical stuff in general and I spent most of my working life as an electrician with benefits. Harley’s new Livewire E-Hog is an impressive first effort but at $30,000 dollars a copy it is a lousy deal compared to E-bikes from other manufacturers. You can easily beat the Livewire in both speed and distance for half the cost but that’s not the Livewire’s major problem.
The Livewire’s problem is industry-wide. Harley and those other guys are trying to duplicate the internal combustion experience with an electric motorcycle and they are burning a lot of joules doing it. Electric motorcycles are not direct IC replacements and their riders understand this.
For motorcycles, battery technology today is not compact enough and recharges too slowly for a rider with no fixed destination in mind. Until manufacturers can agree on a standard-sized, easily swappable battery pack we are stuck waiting for the bike. The first battery operated power tools were like this: you had to plug the whole tool in and wait. No work could be done until the thing was charged.
With standard-sized batteries (within a product line) cordless power tools have nearly supplanted the old, outlet-bound stuff. It takes only a second to swap in a new battery and you are back on the job doing whatever it is that you do. No one has range anxiety because there’s always a hot battery in the charger ready to use. Tesla is working on speeding up charge wait times by swapping the huge battery in their cars and it only takes a few minutes. When an electric vehicle can pull up to a gas station and swap in a charged battery as fast as I can change my power drill battery they will have become viable transportation.
The reality is, manufacturers are not going to standardize battery sizes. The best we can hope for is a battery changeable along the lines of the power tool situation: each battery is specific to the brand. Even that will not happen soon and maybe if you move the goal posts it doesn’t need to happen for the majority of users.
That leaves commuting back and forth to work as the ideal use for an electric motorcycle. You can have a charging source at both ends of the ride and you will be busy working or puttering about the house while the bike charges so there’s no down time. Give up on the idea of e-bikes matching IC bikes in all instances. The highest and best use of electric motorcycles is a situation where you have time to kill between rides.
I know The Motor Company is not going to listen to me, but here goes: Harley, stop making expensive, high performance electric motorcycles. I’ve seen your lighter weight electric bikes and they are so far removed from the traditional Harley-Davidson customer they might as well be electric Buells.
Harley’s marketing for as long as I can remember has been based on heritage. Timeless styling and traditional products have served you well. For a successful E-bike look to your past and the Topper scooter; it’s the ideal commuter platform to modernize (not too much) and electrify. The boxy rear section can hold a huge battery bank without looking like it’s holding a huge battery bank. It’s a classic form that simply drips Harley-Davidson heritage and the youth of America will go gaga over the styling. Keep the thing below $4000 so a normal person can afford one. You’ll have to outsource most of the drivetrain components to keep the price reasonable but you can slap the parts together in an old V-Rod factory and call it made in the USA!
Bike Mags gone by…
Good buddy Buzz Kanter, publisher of American Iron magazine, posted an interesting list on Facebook yesterday. It’s the motorcycle magazines that have folded their tents since 1998. I asked Buzz if I could post it here and Buzz said it was okay:
American Rider
American Thunder
Big Twin
Biker
Biker Parties
Cycle News
Cycle World Buyers Guide
Dirt Bike Buyers Guide
Easyriders
Easyriders’ Buyers Guide
Hot Bike
Hot Bike Specials
Hot Rod Bikes
Indian Motorcycle Illustrated
In The Wind
Iron Horse
IronWorks
Motorcycle Cruiser
Motorcycle Performance
Motorcycle Price Guide
Motorcycle Shopper
Motorcycle Tour & Cruiser
Motorcyclist
Motorcyclist Buyers Guide
MX Racer
Old Bike Journal
On The Road
Outlaw Biker
Outlaw Biker Presents
Quick Throttle
Sport Rider
Twistgrip
V-Twin
VQ
Walnecks Classic Cycle Trader
Buzz’s magazine, American Iron, is still going strong and it is still published every 4 weeks (I can’t imagine publishing to that kind of schedule, but Buzz, Steve Lita, and the AIM crew somehow make it happen). The focus at AIM is on U.S. motorcycles, great writing, and great photography, and it all works. I don’t own a Harley or an Indian and I still enjoy reading American Iron. If you want to subscribe to AIM (and I think you should), you can do so here.
Buzz is an interesting guy. Like a lot of riders, he’s a shooter, too, and I enjoy seeing his shooting-related posts on Facebook. A lot of folks who are into motorcycles often have similar other interests, including shooting, cameras and photography, watches, bicycles, travel, and more. It’s what drives the kind of things we talk about here on ExhaustNotes.
So what’s coming up? Good stuff, my friends. Arjiu is headed to Bonneville in the near future. I’m doing the 2019 Three Flags Classic on a CSC RX4. Good buddy J and I just got back from a deer hunt scouting expedition (whoa, the mosquitoes sure got us good). And more. There’s always more, so stay tuned!
Do you have an interesting story you’d like to share here on ExNotes? Send it to us (info@ExhaustNotes.us), and if it is right for the blog, we’ll post it here. Don’t worry about typos or spelling errors…our editorial crew is standing by and if there are any mistakes, we’ll fix ’em!
Want to be taller, thinner, better looking, and a faster rider? Hey, sign up for our automatic email blog update notifications here!
Check out the Sierra Mountain Passes website from our good buddies J and Val!
S&S 96 Cubic Inch Stroker Rebuild
So this all got started on a trip to Baja. My beloved ’92 Softail started clanging and banging and bucking and snorting somewhere around Ensenada. I was headed south with my good buddy Paul from New Jersey (not the Paul I grew up, but another one). It was obvious something wasn’t right and we turned. It wasn’t the end of the world and the Harley did manage to get me home, but I could tell: Something major had happened. The bike was making quite a bit of noise. I had put 400 miles on it by the time I rode it back from Mexico. I parked the Harley, got on my Suzuki TL1000S, and we changed our itinerary to ride north up the PCH rather than south into Baja. That trip went well, but there was still the matter of the dead Softail.
Here’s where it started to get really interesting. My local Harley dealer wouldn’t touch the bike. See, this was around 2005 or so, and it seems my Harley was over 10 years old. Bet you didn’t know this: Many Harley dealers (maybe most of them) won’t work on a bike over 10 years old. The service manager at my dealer ‘splained this to me and I was dumbfounded. “What about all the history and heritage and nostalgia baloney you guys peddle?” I asked. The answer was a weak smile. “I remember an ad with a baby in Harley T-shirt and the caption When did it start for you?” I said. Another weak smile.
I was getting nowhere fast. I tried calling a couple of other Harley dealers and it was the same story. Over 10 years old, dealers won’t touch it. I was flabbergasted. For a company that based their entire advertising program on longevity and heritage, I thought it was outrageous. Chalk up another chapter in my book, Why I Hate Dealers.
A friend suggested I go to an independent shop. “It’s why they exist,” he said. So I did.
There was this little hole-in-the-wall place on Holt Boulevard in Ontario, in kind of a seedy part of town, near where the local Harley dealer used to be. The Iron Horse. You gotta love a shop with a name like that. The guy who ran it was a dude about my age named Victor. I could tell right away: I liked the shop and I liked Victor. I got my Harley over there and I stopped by a few days later to hear the verdict: The engine was toast.
“What happened here,” said Victor, “is that one of your roller lifters stopped rolling, and it turned into a solid lifter. When I did that, the cam and the lifter started shedding metal, and the filings migrated into the oil pump. When that stopped working, the engine basically ate itself….”
“You’ve got lots of other things not right in your motorcycle, too,” Victor explained. “The alternator is going south, your cam got chewed up, the oil pump is toast, the belt is tired, and you’ll probably want to gear it a little taller to reduce the vibration like the new Harleys do.”
Victor gave me a decent price for bringing the engine back to its original condition (in other words, a rebuild to stock), but it wasn’t cheap. Then he offered an alternative.
“I can rebuild it with S&S components for about the same price,” he said, “and that’s with nearly everything new except the cases. We’ll keep the Harley cases because then the engine number stays the same, and it’s still a Harley. It would be a 96-inch motor instead of an 80-inch motor, and I think you’d like it. It would be about the same price as rebuilding it with Harley parts. You’d get new pistons, rods, flywheels, and nearly everything else. I’d have to take the cases apart and get them machined to accept the S&S stroker crank and cylinders, and we’d reassemble it with new bearings. Oversized S&S forged pistons would go in with a 10.1:1 compression ratio, and that means you’d have to run high test. Oh, yeah, there’s new S&S heads, a new manifold, and a new S&S Super carb. And an S&S cam.” Then he showed me the components in a brochure, and another chart that showed the difference in power.
It was an easy decision. For the same money it would cost to bring the Harley back to stock, I could get it redone as a real hot rod. For me, it was a no-brainer. My days of bopping around on a 48-hp, 700-lb Harley would be over. The horsepower would double. Bring it on!
My Harley was still running on the original belt drive, and I had Victor replace that, too. And as long as the belt was being replaced, I went with Victor’s recommendation to swap to taller sprockets. That would give the bike a bit more top end and cut some of the vibration at cruising speeds.
I wrote a check and asked Victor to call me when the parts came in. I wanted to photograph the whole deal. Victor said he would, and I stopped at the Iron Horse frequently over the next several weeks.
I was enjoying this. The parts didn’t come in all at once, and that was fine by me. I enjoyed stopping in at the Iron Horse and taking photos. It was something I looked forward to at the end of each day. It was really fun as the motor came together. Victor asked if I wanted the cylinders and cylinder heads painted black like they originally were, or if I wanted to leave them aluminum. It was another no-brainer for me: Aluminum it would be!
One day not long after the motor went together I got the call: My bike was ready. It was stunning and I rode the wheels off the thing. Here’s the finished bike…my ’92 Softail with the S&S 96-inch motor installed.
The S&S motor completely changed the personality of my Harley. I had thought it was quick when Laidlaw’s installed the Screaming Eagle stuff back at the 500-mile service, but now, at 50,000 miles with the S&S motor, I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, Toto. In the 14 years I had owned my Harley previously, I had just touched 100mph once. Now, the bike would bury the needle (somewhere north of 120mph on the Harley speedometer) nearly every time I took an entrance on to the freeway. This thing was fast! Fuel economy dropped to the mid-30-mpg range, but I didn’t care. My Harley was fast! The rear tire would wear out in 3,000 miles, but I didn’t care. The Harley was fast! It ran rich and you could smell gasoline at idle, but I didn’t care. Did I mention this thing was fast?
You might think I would have kept the Harley and put another zillion miles on it, but truth be told, my riding tastes had changed and I only kept it for another year after the rebuild. I was riding with a different crowd and I had a garage full of bikes, including the ’95 Triumph Daytona 1200 I’ve previously blogged about, my Suzuki TL1000S, a pristine bone-stock low-mileage ’82 Honda CBX, and a new KLR 650 Kawasaki. You wanna talk fast? The TL and the Daytona were scary fast. Yeah, the S&S was a runner, but fast had taken on a new definition for me.
And then one day, it happened. My wife had asked me to pick up something at the store while I was out seeking my fortune on the Harley, and when I came home, I realized I forgot to stop for whatever it was. I could have gone out on the Harley again, but for whatever reason, the KLR got the nod instead.
The bottom line: I had back to back rides on the S&S Softail and the KLR, and that’s when it hit me: I had bought the KLR new for about what I had in the S&S motor. The KLR was quicker at normal speeds, it handled way better, it was a much smoother and more comfortable, and it was more fun to ride. That was a wake-up call for me. The Harley went in the CycleTrader that day, and it sold the day after that. Regrets? None. I’d had my fun, and it was time to move on.
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Gangsters!
My Harley Softail stories seem to be hitting the spot (how’s that for alliteration?), and I mentioned in an earlier blog that I’d tell you about my gangster whitewalls. I keep my promises.
I need to provide some context here, and that entails telling you about two other vehicles. One is what might well be the most beautiful motorcycle Harley-Davidson ever made, and that’s the 1993 Heritage Nostalgia. Quickly dubbed the Moo Glide by whoever did the dubbing in those days, it was a stunning motorcycle. It was essentially a Heritage Softail, but what the Milwaukee maestros did was they painted the thing white with black panels, they dropped the windshield, they made the leather saddlebags smaller, and they left off the windshield.
Harley-Davidson didn’t stop there. The next steps were cowskin inserts on both the saddlebags and the seat, but it just wasn’t a brown leather insert. Nope, it was from whatever breed of cows have that black and white fur, and Harley left the fur on. It worked nicely with the bike’s black and white paint treatment. The motorcycle was stunning.
But wait. There’s more. The V-twin virtuosos had Dunlop add a new part number to their catalog, and that made the motorcycle a home run. The Dunlop dudes took the stock Harley blackwalls and added luxurious wide whitewalls. They (whoever “they” was) called them gangster whitewalls. You know, like Al Capone in a V-16 Cadillac or a Duesenberg. The effect was visually arresting. Literally. It stopped me in my tracks the first time I saw a Moo Glide. But I’ll get to that in a second.
The second vehicle (remember, I said I needed to provide some context here) was my 1989 Geo Tracker. Well, actually, it was made by Suzuki, but GM did their badge engineering schtick and they sold it under the GEO Tracker label.
I saw the very first one of these to arrive in So Cal at our local Chevy dealer, when I stopped to pick up a radiator hose for another Chevy I owned that needed, well, a radiator hose. I liked the Tracker immediately. It was small (a big plus), it was a 4×4 (that appealed to me), and it was a good-looking little truck. My stop for a radiator hose turned into a new car purchase.
As it turned out, I bought the very first Geo Tracker in southern California, and that got me on an early adopter marketing list. I’ve probably been paid to look at new concept cars from a half a dozen manufacturers maybe ten times over the years, but that’s a story for another time.
To get back to this story, I loved that Tracker and I really racked up the miles on it. That’s sort of the point where I’m going with this story. I got more miles out of a set of tires on that Tracker than any vehicle I’ve ever owned. I was at 78,000 miles on the Tracker’s original tires (Bridgestones, as I recall) and they were still going strong. My wife wanted me to get new tires just because of the miles. The Tracker was a small car, and in 1993, a set of tires just like the ones from the factory were $275. Nah, I told her, I can get another 10,000 miles out of these tires. I wasn’t going to spend $275 for tires if I didn’t need to. Money doesn’t grow on trees, I said, and $275 was a lot of money.
So, let’s get back to the point of this story, and that’s my Harley. I had my ’92 Softail in at Laidlaw’s for a scheduled service, and as I recall, I only had about 2,000 miles on its second set of tires. They were blackwalls, just like the bike came with from the factory. They had plenty of life left in them. But at Laidlaw’s I saw my first Moo Glide and my reaction was Wow!
Jerry Laidlaw saw me eyeing the Moo. He knew I wasn’t going to buy a new motorcycle so soon, but he also smelled blood in the water. “We have those gangster whitewalls in stock,” he said.
“How much?” I asked.
“$350 for the pair,” Jerry said.
I didn’t blink an eye. “Let’s do it!”
A Harley wake-up call…
So I had my new Harley, a gorgeous blue ’92 Heritage Softail, and it was a shockingly beautiful motorcycle. Yeah, some of the styling touches were a little hokey, but in a good way. I never even knew what a concho was before I bought the Softail, but I knew after I owned it. I became a Harley-riding cowboy. The conchos made the bike complete. How I ever made it to 40 without conchos I’ll never know. I had them now, though, and they just looked right. My Softail was a fashion statement. It made me look good and it made me feel good. I loved that bike.
There was only one problem, and it was a big one: The Softail was a dawg. It was a 700-lb lump that couldn’t get out of its own way. I’ve already spoken about how unreliable my ’79 Electra-Glide was, but that old clunker would get up and choogy, and it would have walked away from my new ’92 Softail in a drag race. I mean, the thing was slow. When I gave it more throttle going up a hill, it seemed like the only result was a deeper moan. It sure didn’t go any faster.
I worked in El Monte in those days and the nearby dealer was a famous one in southern California, Laidlaw’s, and I felt comfortable with them. I knew Bob Laidlaw, their founder, and I knew his son Jerry, and I knew both to be straight shooters. When it was time for the Softail’s first service at 500 miles, that’s where I went. Laidlaw’s has since moved to a larger, more modern facility in a better neighborhood, I’m guessing at Harley-Davidson’s insistence, and it’s still a great place. But I liked the old location better. Like I described for Dale’s in the last blog about buying my ’92, the old Laidlaw’s facility had that crusty old motorcycle shop schtick, and I liked that. You know, grease on the floor, a funky shop area, and guys who looked like their lives revolved around motorcycles and tattoos. Guys with calibrated arms who knew how much torque to apply to a 9/16 by feel alone.
I went to Laidlaw’s on an overcast Saturday morning for that first service, and Jerry wrote the service order. After completing it, he looked at me and asked: Anything else?
“Yeah,” I said. “The thing’s a dog.”
Jerry smiled. He knew. This wasn’t his first rodeo.
“They lean them out pretty good from the factory,” he said.
“So what do guys do?” I asked.
Another Jerry smile. “Well, most guys get a new cam, punch out the pipes, rejet the carb, and put the Screaming Eagle air filter in.”
“How much is that?” I asked. I could see this smoking past another $1500 without stopping to look back.
“It’s about $500,” Jerry answered. Hmmm, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.
“So how much would everything be,” I said. “You know, the 500-mile service and the cam and carb and pipes and all the rest?”
“It’s $500 for everything,” Jerry answered, “including the 500-mile service.”
I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
“Let’s do it,” I said. I mean, I know a good deal when I see one. I hung around, as Jerry told me the whole thing would be a couple of hours. In the meantime, it had started raining, and I had no raingear. I walked across the street to some sort of an Army-Navy-99-cent store and bought a $3 rain suit.
In those days, it was no big deal to hang around in the service area and watch the techs work on your bike. The guy who was working on mine was a long-haired dude with lots of tattoos and a friendly smile. He held this giant steel toothpick-looking sort of tool that was essentially a ¾-inch-diameter rod sharpened to a point in one hand, and in his other hand he had a sledge hammer. He stuck the persuader into the end of one of my fishtail mufflers and whacked it with the sledge hammer. Then he repeated the process on the other fishtail. With a big grin, he said, “Adios, baffles!”
Then it was the carb work and the air cleaner replacement. And then it was the Screaming Eagle cam, which actually was pretty easy to install in the chrome cone on the right side of the engine. Then he buttoned it all up.
I finished my cup of coffee, donned my el cheapo raingear, paid my bill, and fired up the Harley.
Good Lord!
It was a completely different motorcycle. It sounded way better than it had before the Screaming Eagle cam work and exhaustectomy. It had been transformed from a smothered, anemic, pathetic, wheezing sort of thing into living, breathing, fire-snorting, spirited motorcycle. It reeked raw power and it had attitude. The idle was lopey and assertive, like a small block Chevy with an Isky cam and Hooker headers. My Harley rocked back and forth on its axles with each engine rotation. It was telling me: Let’s go! I think I’m pretty good at turning a phrase and I’m doing my best here, folks, but trust me on this: It’s hard to put into words how complete and total my Harley’s transformation was. It kind of reminded me of the first time I ever threw a leg over a Triumph Bonneville (I was 14 when that happened, and when Laidlaw’s tuned my Softail I was 14 all over again).
So I rolled out into the rain for my 30-mile ride home and I was afraid to whack the throttle open. I thought the rear wheel would break loose on the wet pavement; it felt that powerful. The rain and the clouds, I think, made the Harley’s Exhaust Notes (love that phrase) sound way mo better. I was there, man.
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Such a deal!
The year was 1991, and the last thing in the world I was thinking about was buying another motorcycle, and within the confines of that thought, the very, very last thought I would have ever had was buying a Harley-Davidson. I had previously owned a ’79 Electra-Glide I bought new in Texas, and that bike was a beautiful disaster. I called it my optical illusion (it looked like a motorcycle). I wrote about the bad taste it left in an earlier blog. Nope, I’d never own another Harley, or so I thought when I sold it in 1981.
But like the title of that James Bond movie, you should never say never again. I was a big wheel at an aerospace company in 1991 and I was interviewing engineers when good buddy Dick Scott waltzed in as one of the applicants. I had worked with Dick in another aerospace company (in those days in the So Cal aerospace industry, everybody worked everywhere at one time or another). Dick had the job as soon as he I saw he was applying, but I went through the motions interviewing him and I learned he had a Harley. DIck said they were a lot better than they used to be and he gave me the keys to his ’89 Electra-Glide. I rode it and he was right. It felt solid and handled way better than my old Shovelhead.
That set me on a quest. I started looking, and after considering the current slate of Harleys in 1991, I decided that what I needed was a Heritage Softail. I liked the look and I thought I wanted the two-tone turquoise-and-white version. The problem, though, was that none of the Harley dealers had motorcycles. They were all sold before they arrived at the dealers, and the dealers were doing their gouging in those days with a “market adjustment” uptick ranging from $2000 to sometimes $4000 (today, most non-Harley dealers sort of do the same thing with freight and setup). There was no way in hell I was going to pay over list price, but even had I wanted to, it would have been a long wait to get a new Harley.
One day while driving to work, a guy passed me on the freeway riding a sapphire blue Heritage softail, and I was smitten. Those colors worked even better for me than did the turquoise-and-white color combo. The turquoise-and-white had a nice ‘50s nostalgia buzz (it reminded me of a ’55 Chevy Bel Air), but that sapphire blue number was slick. Even early in the morning on Interstate 10, I could see the orange and gray factory pinstriping, and man, it just worked for me. It had kind of a blue jeans look to it (you know, denim with orange stitching). That was my new want and I wanted the thing bad. But it didn’t make any difference. Nobody had any new Harleys, and nobody had them at list price. I might as well have wanted a date with Michelle Pfeiffer. In those days, a new Harley at list price or less in the colors I wanted (or in any colors, actually) was pure unobtanium.
So one Saturday morning about a month later, I took a drive out to the Harley dealer in San Bernardino. In those days, that dealer was Dale’s Modern Harley (an oxymoronic name for a Harley dealer if ever there was one). Dale’s is no more, but when it was there, it was the last of the real motorcycle shops. You know the drill…it was in a bad part of town, it was small, everything had grease and oil stains, and the only thing “modern” was the name on the sign. That’s what motorcycle dealers were like when I was growing up. I liked it that way, and truth be told, I miss it. Dealerships are too clean today.
Anyway, a surprise awaited. I walked in the front door (which was at the rear of the building because the door facing the street was chained shut because, you know, it was a bad part of town). And wow, there it was: A brand new 1992 Heritage Softail in sapphire blue. Just like I wanted.
Dale’s had a sales guy who came out of Central Casting for old Harley guys. His name was Bob (I never met Dale and I have no idea who he was). Bob. You know the type and if you’re old enough you know the look. Old, a beer belly, a dirty white t-shirt, jeans, engineer boots, a blue denim vest, and one of those boat captain hats motorcycle riders wore in the ‘40s and ‘50s. An unlit cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth. His belt was a chromed motorcycle chain. I’d been to Dale’s several times before, and I’d never seen Bob attired in anything but what I just described. And I’d never seen him without that unlit cigarette. Straight out of Central Casting, like I said.
“What’s this?” I asked Bob, pointing at the blue Softail.
“Deal fell through,” Bob answered. “Guy ordered it, we couldn’t get him financing, and he couldn’t get a loan anywhere else.”
“So it’s available?” I asked.
“Yep.”
Hmmm. This was interesting.
“How much?” I asked.
“$12,995, plus tax and doc fees,” Bob answered, walking back to his desk at the edge of Dale’s very small showroom floor.
$12,995 was MSRP for a new Heritage Softail back in 1992. That would be a hell of a deal. Nobody else in So Cal was selling Harleys at list price.
I followed Bob to his desk and sat down. I was facing Bob and the Harley was behind me. Bob was screwing around with some papers on his desk and not paying any particular attention to me.
“I’ll go $11,500 for it,” I said.
Bob looked up from his paperwork and smiled.
“Son,” he said (and yeah, he actually called me “son,” even though I was 40 years old at the time) “I’m going to sell that motorsickle this morning. Not this afternoon, not next week, but this morning. The only question is: Am I going to sell it to you or am I going to sell it to him?”
Bob actually said “motorsickle,” I thought, and then I wondered who “him” was. Bob sensed my befuddlement. He pointed behind me and I looked. Somebody was already sitting on what I had started regarding as my motorsickle. That guy was thinking the same thing I was.
“Bob,” I began, “you gotta help me out here. I never paid retail for anything in my life.”
“That’s because you never bought a new ’92 Harley, son, but I’ll tell you what. I’ll throw in a free Harley T-shirt.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking or if he was trying to insult me, but I didn’t care.
I looked at the Harley again and that other dude was still sitting on it. On my motorcycle. And that’s when I made up my mind. $12,995 later (plus another thousand dollars in taxes and doc fees) I rolled out of Dale’s with a brand-new sapphire blue Harley Heritage Softail. And one new Harley T-shirt.
Motorcycle Entertainment: Monkee-Moto!
Television in the mid-1960s was nothing if not predictable. As we watched the shadows on the wall, behind us society was undergoing dramatic change. The old ways were failing, cracks formed in the smooth, comforting facade. Bit by bit it was revealed that whoever was in charge was not being entirely truthful. One of the first television shows to reflect our growing national cynicism was The Monkees: Four longhaired kids who respected neither the camera nor the situation comedy process. The Monkees broke the fourth wall so many times you felt like you were on set with them.
My favorite Monkee episode (because of the motorcycles) opens with Micky Dolenz singing Going Down. Micky was the drummer and the best singer in the band and he nails Going Down’s proto-rap feel. From there, the show falls apart beautifully with motorcycles, a chalkboard Hog reference, dust and pretty girls beating up The Monkees.
Amid typical Monkee chaos in walks The Black Angels biker gang featuring a leader who just wants to destroy somebody. 50 years ago the cliché biker image was so embedded in our culture that all it took was a black jacket to signify a hoodlum. Harley Davidson has mined that image right up to today, creating an entire sub-set of true believers. The rest of us modern motorcyclists with our high-tech, high-vis monkey suits look more like school crossing guards.
The monkees form their own biker gang called The Chickens and during a race between the bad guys more cinema magic is revealed. There is a plot to all this but it’s mostly there to keep the boys from walking off the set. At the end of the show peace and love is restored, Triumphs and Harleys get along together and you’re filled with hope for the future.
This was situation comedy television unlike any that came before. It was random. It exposed the fakery. Jack Benny’s old TV show was The Monkees spirit guide. After 2 years the Monkees show was cancelled. The Monkees became a real band and had many hits written and preformed by themselves. Which just goes to show you that living a lie sometimes leads to success.
ScooterScribes.news and more…
Ah, lots of good news and a few things to catch up on. For starters, I was alerted to another top notch motorcycle site, and that’s Terry Roorda’s ScooterScribes.news site. You’ll like it.
Terry is the former Thunder Press editor, and there’s lots of cool V-Twin stuff on ScooterScribes, and you don’t have to be a Big Twin dude or dudette to appreciate it. It’s good. Trust me.
More good news…the ExNotes stickers are in, and the extensive Direct Mail arm of the ExNotes empire is busy sending them out.
We sent an email requesting your address if you signed up, so watch for it and shoot that info back to us. We promise that as soon as we get your snail mail address and confirmed that you’re on our email list, we’ll shoot them out to you as soon as we get around to it. Want to help us more? Hey, share our site and get more folks to sign up for our automatic emails, or just get them to visit www.ExhaustNotes.us. We think we’ve got a good thing going. Guns, motorcycles, scooters, opinions, dream bikes, resurrected bikes, books, articles, Baja, and lots, lots more. Let us know what you think by posting your comments here on the blog. We get all kinds of inputs. Folks want more on Harleys, they want less on Harleys, they want more political commentary (seriously?), they want less political commentary…hey, let us know. There’s no guarantee we’ll take any of it seriously, but you never know.
Yet more news…several online pubs are breaking the news that Harley is working with a Chinese company to offer a small HD.
Hey, we saw a Chinese manufacturer making parts for Harley a decade ago. But the recent news is this is going to be a complete small bike, just over 300cc. I’m surprised Harley didn’t do this several years ago, but then, Gresh and I were in the catbird’s seat on the small bike thing from the gitgo. CSC and Zongshen were way ahead of the curve on this one. Dollars to donuts says that the small Harley will find its way to the US, and that’s a good thing. I’ve seen the photos and I think it looks good. I’m waiting for the inevitable jokes and the anti-China rants to start, but Harley, if you’re reading this, ignore those folks. The only thing worse than a smartass is a dumbass, and anyone who criticizes a motorcycle based solely on its Chinese origin is most definitely in that latter category.
One last bit of news…make sure you pick up the latest issue of Motorcycle Classics magazine. It’s got my feature story on our Enfield Baja trip, and my Destinations piece on Tecate. Good stuff, Motorcycle Classics is.
The Crimes Men Do
Glenn sent me a few photos from the old days and one that got my attention was a shot of us building a Sportster in the living room of the shack we used to live in. Having a living room to work in was a luxury because prior to renting the shack I was homeless. I had an old Chevy truck with a bench seat that I could stretch out enough to get some sleep and I had a job that let me take a dry bath in the restroom after work. But when Admiralty Marine closed its doors for the evening I was on my own until the next morning. The boss let me know that the situation couldn’t go on forever and that I really needed to find a place to live.
It wasn’t so much lack of money. I was working a lot of hours, but I was only 19 and landlords didn’t want to rent to a greasy, punk kid. I can’t blame them. I would do the same thing myself. Finally a co-worker who was a full-fledged adult vouched for me when his landlord had a vacancy next door. I shaved, dry-bathed, put on clean clothes and did everything I could do to look like a respectable young man with a future. I’ll be dammed if it didn’t work. I was in after paying first, last and a deposit. Cash.
After waiting for the dust to settle the first thing I did was to rebuild my Sportster in the living room. When I bought the 1968 Sportster I was kind of shocked at how archaic the motorcycle felt. It was cool and all but the front end was so wobbly it felt like silly string and the front brake might as well have been deleted and an AM/FM radio installed in its place for all the stopping it would do.
The engine seemed to run well but I was going to ride across country on the thing, so a freshen-up was in order. I don’t know if it was a good idea because the 900cc V-Twin had some strange things going on inside and I was destined to do even more stupid stuff to the poor bike.
Someone had replaced the stock Harley intake valves with huge, unknown-origin valves. The valves were so big they had to cut the seat into the dome of the combustion chamber. Once the giant valves were removed the old seats were revealed along with the stock porting. The only advantage I could see to the big valves was a bump in compression ratio due to the valves occupying more space in the combustion chamber and the circumference increase giving slightly more flow when the valve first popped open. Once into the lift though the stock ports would probably be the limiting factor.
I wasn’t having any of it. I bought standard Harley valves and guides and set about putting things right. Admiralty Marine had a Sioux valve grinding kit so I could do all the work myself. After the seats were re-cut to fit the new valves the installed height was wrong so I had to trim the ends of the valves and shim the springs. The heads were a mess.
The Sportster’s high dome pistons were ok so a quick hone job and a set of rings finished off the top end. After that you’d think I’d leave the engine alone but I had to have a tin primary cover like the XR750 flat trackers ran.
Opening and consuming a whole ‘nother can of worms, I had to get rid of the crankshaft’s spring and ramp style compensating sprocket. The compensating sprocket absorbs the 45-degree V-Twin’s power pulses before sending smooth, less spikey power on to the clutch basket, gearbox and rear sprocket. This vital part stuck out way toofar for my tin primary so into the trash it went.
A solid front sprocket was fitted to the crankshaft and the tin primary would still not fit so I had to make a 3/8’ aluminum spacer the same size and shape as the primary cover gasket. The ’68 XLH was electric start but I wanted to eliminate as much weight as possible. At an independent Harley shop I swapped the starter motor, big battery box and oil tank for a kick-start shaft, gears and kick lever. You can anticipate the next problem: the electric-start primary case had a square-ish hump on the back to accommodate the starter Bendix. I had to weld a flat metal part onto the tin primary to cover the hole.
Without an XLH-style starter motor there was another gaping hole on the other side of crankcase. I blanked off the hole where the electric starter fit with a large chunk of angle aluminum that doubled as a battery box for the much smaller kick-only battery. Now the engine was ready to slot back into the frame. And that’s yet another can of worms I’ll write about later.
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