Tag: 1992 Harley Heritage Softail

S&S 96 Cubic Inch Stroker Rebuild

My ’92 Softail Harley. After losing a lot of weight.

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.

Here’s my internist…Victor, of the Iron Horse cycle shop. That’s my Harley in the background.

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….”

An Evo motor roller lifter that stopped rolling. The needle bearing in this lifter failed, and departed for points south. And north. And east and west. You get the idea.
The cam wore a path into the roller. That metal had to go somewhere, and where it went was the oil pump.

“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.”

Here’s what the failed lifter did to the Screaming Eagle cam. Note the surface on the right most lobe.
Victor showed me that my alternator was getting close to failing. Look at the insulation on the output lines. Yep, I would need a new one of those, too.
Here’s what happened when the metal dust and needle bearing bits got into the oil pump. Note the abrasions on the inner surface.
Another neat shot.   It was kind of cool to see what was flying up and down underneath me during those 50,000 miles I put on the Harley over the last 14 years.

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.

All the S&S stuff that would go into my new motor. I was getting excited. This was going to be cool.
Twice the horsepower, and twice the torque. What’s not to like?

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.

The S&S manifold for my new engine.
Check out the gorgeous S&S cylinder head.
And how about this machined-from-billet piston? These would kick the Harley’s compression ratio up to 10.1:1.
And here’s the S&S cam.

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!

My S&S motor being assembled. The cases and the valve covers were about the only Harley parts left in the motor.
Isn’t it beautiful? Another view of the S&S 96-incher coming together.
Here’s a closeup of the cam and one of the roller lifters just above it.

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.

It’s beautiful, don’t you think?

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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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.

My ’79 Electra-Glide Classic, as shown in the 1979 Harley catalog. It was the most unreliable and most beautiful motorcycle I ever owned. I wish I still had it.

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.

Dick Scott on his ’89 Electra-Glide. The day after I took this photo in Baja, Dick died when he crashed his motorcycle.

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.

The Harley Softail I bought at Dale’s Modern Harley. I negotiated a hell of a deal. I kept that Harley for 12 years and rode the wheels off the thing.  I’ve since learned how to pack a little better.

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.