Would you believe the great success of the HarleyDavidson Softail started in one mans private garage Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and EditorinChief Mark Hoyer talk about the FX of 1971 and how the Softail was born plus how Dyna fits into the picturebr br Looking to buy Get prequalifiedbr httpsoctanecoflex1a171br Listen on Spotify httpsopenspotifycomshow6CLI74xvMBFLDOC1tQaCOQbr Read more from Cycle World httpswwwcycleworldcombr Buy Cycle World Merch httpsteespringcomstorescycleworld
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00:00:00Welcome to the Cycleworld podcast. Kevin Cameron, our technical editor, is here today with me as usual, and I am Mark Hoyer, the editor-in-chief.
00:00:09The topic today is
00:00:11germane to some recent news, and that is the return of the Grey Ghost, or the
00:00:18Harley-Davidson Fat Boy, and
00:00:21in a 35th anniversary commemorative color. It's part of the ICONS collection, where Harley takes
00:00:27one
00:00:28iconic model that it redoes from its history per year, and
00:00:36you know, to honor their past and
00:00:40highlight their history. And the Fat Boy certainly
00:00:44was a big one for them. It signified a shift in design, at least for me,
00:00:51looking at, and also for the lead designer, Brad Richards, the vice president of styling and
00:00:59design. And yeah, a real change. Anyway, now that's the soft tail,
00:01:05but before the soft tail was the Harley-Davidson Dyna, and
00:01:11there's a lot going on. There's just, as ever with Harley-Davidson, there's a lot going on, and
00:01:17cultural currents and the buyback
00:01:201981,
00:01:2313 folks
00:01:25placing their bets, putting all their...
00:01:27Maxing out their credit cards.
00:01:29Well, and the worst, yeah, and possibly the worst possible time to do that.
00:01:34I mean, interest rates were insane. Like, you did not want to be incredibly leveraged in 1981,
00:01:40but
00:01:43as
00:01:45Jerry Wilkie said, who was there for that, I think he was hired in 1975, and he helped direct product.
00:01:50He was actually on the team that
00:01:53helped to come up with the Fat Boy. He bought the
00:01:56original, they called it the Low Boy, and it was a custom that was built in Montreal, the Harley dealer in Montreal, and
00:02:05it had disc wheels. It had a distinct look. It didn't look necessarily like
00:02:10what the Fat Boy
00:02:12turned into. You know, Harley really put a stamp on it,
00:02:14but Jerry Wilkie was the guy visiting the dealer, and he said, you always go to the service department,
00:02:19really see what's going on. You know, the dealer is their customer, and the customer is their customer, and the really good
00:02:25dealers who were cultural centers were making
00:02:28custom motorcycles with Harley products to sell to their customers and to, you know, build a relationship and
00:02:34make an impact, and that's where Fat Boy came from. But Jerry was there, and he said,
00:02:40what did he say? When you're staring at the guillotine, it really brings focus.
00:02:45And so that was his comment about just the buyback and how tight things were in the coming of the Evo.
00:02:53So we are getting a little ahead of ourselves.
00:02:56So I'll get, as Kevin does so well, we'll
00:03:01we'll start with the origin story, where the the molecules somehow seemed to blow, and
00:03:07and there was light and
00:03:10Harley-Davidson.
00:03:12Well, the way, the way it appears to me is that
00:03:19in the post-war years, which really extended into the 60s, the effect of the war on the
00:03:25economy and on the people in this country,
00:03:30there was the sort of comfortable
00:03:34mom-and-pop
00:03:35touring population of people who went to
00:03:40Sunday breakfast with other motorcyclists and
00:03:43who rode long distances on their heavy touring bikes. And then there were the
00:03:49young Blades with their sports shoes, who were
00:03:53going to the Ebb Tide up north of Boston to listen to
00:03:59the Flamingos.
00:04:01Well,
00:04:03along comes the movie
00:04:05Easy Rider, and
00:04:07it shows
00:04:09radical customs
00:04:11in a romantic setting of desperate young men who are trying
00:04:16to do something of
00:04:18their own,
00:04:20not simply to sit keeping a corporate chair warm
00:04:24for the duration of their working lives, but to cut loose and go.
00:04:30And so in
00:04:331971,
00:04:35Harley took a small step, which was at the time
00:04:40modestly hailed as the first factory custom, namely FX. And
00:04:45what that was, was the back end,
00:04:49basically, of an FL, and the front end of a
00:04:54Sportster, which was
00:04:58longer, slightly
00:05:01chopper-ish looking. And
00:05:03then in 82,
00:05:08no, in 1980,
00:05:10Harley put rubber mounts on, made them available on the tour bikes, and
00:05:18then rubber mounting was made possible for
00:05:22the FX, which became FXR. And
00:05:29in 91,
00:05:31the back-and-forthing
00:05:33with the idea that
00:05:36radical custom look
00:05:38could be a third way for Harley-Davidson, which it certainly
00:05:44certainly has been, in a very big way.
00:05:48What have we got here? Let's study this. And
00:05:53in 91 came the actual Dyna name, and
00:05:59this was a motorcycle with
00:06:02rubber-mounted engine,
00:06:05twin rear shocks and swingarm with the shocks leaned forward, and
00:06:12a variety of front ends could be
00:06:15applied to this, with the four tubes spaced more widely apart or more closely together,
00:06:21front wheel with
00:06:23various
00:06:25pertinences.
00:06:28And I think
00:06:30it was decided
00:06:33both by the public and by Harley-Davidson, yes, there's something here. And
00:06:41the notion of putting the big twin into a lighter, more manageable motorcycle, which was
00:06:51Californians might call it a beach cruiser, but
00:06:56this was a motorcycle on which you could make yourself seen in your scenes. And
00:07:04a
00:07:06lot of people went for this. And
00:07:10a proliferation of
00:07:13options made it less and less likely that you were going to see anybody on the same motorcycle that you were riding.
00:07:21Because these machines, some of them were produced in quantities like 1,500.
00:07:25That's not a lot of machines if you sprinkle them
00:07:29over 50 states.
00:07:32Indeed the world, Kevin.
00:07:35Yes, the world. Let's not forget export, because it has always been very important in Milwaukee.
00:07:41And I think that's wonderful, because of course
00:07:45the temptation of
00:07:48the motorcycling, the sort of the Japanese bike crowd, is to regard
00:07:54the Milwaukee vibrator as a product of
00:07:59conservatism or even fear of the new.
00:08:03But the people in Milwaukee turn out
00:08:05right from the beginning to have been well-informed.
00:08:10And if they were conservative, it was because
00:08:14that enabled them to survive the Depression, which Indian almost didn't.
00:08:211933, they produced
00:08:221,600 motorcycles. That was the whole production for Indian. And Indian was always doing crazy stuff like,
00:08:30oh, there's some single-cylinder leftover frames in the back.
00:08:34Maybe we could put the 45 in those and, you know, call it something.
00:08:39See, run up the flag, see who salutes it.
00:08:42Indian always in those days,
00:08:4520s and 30s, had suicidal tendencies.
00:08:48At the same time, they were producing these advanced racing singles. So it's,
00:08:55it was a scene. Yeah, the Indians were super, you know.
00:09:00Dyna was joined in due course by the big diagonal.
00:09:10The obvious straight line from the steering head down to the rear axle, accentuated by
00:09:19the hard tail looking, but actually suspended with a triangular swing arm.
00:09:29It was suspension disguised as a hard tail. So they called it soft tail.
00:09:35And soft tail had certain inherent problems.
00:09:43One of them would be 3.4 inches of wheel travel, where Dyna had
00:09:524.1. Well, big deal, seven-tenths of an inch.
00:09:57Well, what happens is, energy absorbing ability of a suspension is proportional to the square
00:10:03of the travel. So 1.2 difference squared, it becomes 1.44, 44% more
00:10:16bump absorbing capability. So this is part of the reason that people
00:10:24had reservations about soft tail, because how were you going to adjust preload? You couldn't.
00:10:31So if you had a passenger, your wheel travel went away. Not necessarily a lot of ground clearance.
00:10:40Back and forth it went. Some people like it this way and some people like it that way.
00:10:49Also, just as Eric Buell had had problems getting the suspension manufacturers to make
00:10:58a shock that would have reverse action, that is, it would extend when the wheel compressed.
00:11:10Harley had the clout to get it done.
00:11:13Well, I think it's a very interesting story, because they had the twin shock, they had Dyna,
00:11:19and a fella approached them, this fella from St. Louis, an engineer and enthusiast,
00:11:27Bill Davis. He wanted a hard tail look. I think he had a super glide and he wanted a hard tail
00:11:33look. And being an engineer and a tinkerer, he worked something up. He called it the sub shock,
00:11:39because it took the shocks and it moved them under the bike. And there's a famous marketing photo
00:11:44that they parked the motorcycle on glass, probably, and they shot the motorcycle from below.
00:11:50And you see the tires and you see the pair of shocks there. So this fella did that and he
00:11:56tried to get Harley to buy it sooner and they didn't. And I think he did a bit more engineering
00:12:01and came back later, circa 1982. And they were like, hmm, this is interesting. And they were
00:12:08able to get that line you're talking about, steering head to axle, that straight line,
00:12:12what they've been selling since with the 61, the original knucklehead. And yeah, I mean,
00:12:21it was really evocative for people. It really clicked into the cultural
00:12:28mind of all the things that we'd experienced at that time. Even into the 80s, how many people
00:12:36were alive or had relatives and how many of those bikes were still on the road,
00:12:40making a visual impression and an audible one as well. So Bill Davis, he's the guy and they
00:12:48licensed it. He had them in production for a while. Yeah, it was Roadworks. He had a company
00:12:54put together with the sub-shock, they called it. And I think he was ultimately abandoned by his
00:13:01investors and left with the debt, which I think made it more amenable to making a deal with Harley.
00:13:06Although Harley was also more amenable, I think, to doing that. I talked to Jerry
00:13:11Wilkie about that, who was there and in product planning.
00:13:19I mean, in 84, they had the Evo and they knew that they had to have the engine and they did.
00:13:26They got an engine that was a big, big step forward for them. It certainly was.
00:13:31But they were still placing big bets. This was not a research-driven, well-funded
00:13:41company. This was a bunch of hard- This was do or die.
00:13:45This was hardcore enthusiasts. I mean, at the buyout, I think 40% of salaried workers were laid
00:13:52off. It's a big deal, man. But you get the people who stay are the deepest into the religion,
00:14:02right? Typically, right? If you're going to place the bet on your career, you have a family,
00:14:08you have kids, you got a dog, you got to really be into it.
00:14:15Yeah.
00:14:18So, these two motorcycles were fairly different in that people who were familiar with them,
00:14:30riding them all the time, regarded Softail as having less pleasing dynamics. You couldn't
00:14:43lean it over as far. By the time a realistic load was on it, it didn't have much suspension travel.
00:14:53And if you look at the structure of the Softail swingarm, the pivot is actually in the vertical
00:15:03between the two struts. The pivot is here. So, this piece is loaded in bending. And it's
00:15:17a little different from a normal swingarm in which the load path is quite direct.
00:15:22The swingarm beam goes to the pivot. So, on the other hand, there's Dyna,
00:15:31which when it was given rubber mounted engine had to have an extremely modern looking chassis.
00:15:42So, they gave it this wonderful piece of square tubing that went up to the steering head. And
00:15:49the bottom of this tube was reinforced for a considerable distance from the steering head back.
00:15:56And of course, there were people out there grousing, rubber mounting makes the thing 50
00:16:01pounds heavier. Well, if you take out the stiffening effect of a rigid mounted engine,
00:16:08and instead have the engine sitting in these bowls of jelly, you're going to have to come up with
00:16:15a stiffer chassis to replace this loss of stiffness. Well, related story. Loading the engine.
00:16:22BMW with their K engine, the lay down inline four. When they came out with the R1200S, it was circa
00:16:37oh god, what year would that have been?
00:16:40Somewhere around 98 perhaps. They took that inline four and they were trying to get rid of the buzz
00:16:50because they were always notorious for having a bit of a buzz. As inline fours do. Yep, and it
00:16:55was a stressed member. And with that K bike, the sport tour, they built a great big frame to go
00:17:04over it and rubber mounted it. So you had an engine that was structurally ready to be a stressed
00:17:10member, not doing it anymore. That thing was 628 pounds, the sport tour, because it loaded up. It
00:17:19needed the stiffness of that chassis to hang the thing in bowls of jelly, as you say. And yeah,
00:17:26related story. Anyway, we've seen a few breaks. There have been
00:17:35events with rubber mounting. If you put on a lot of miles, if you allow the rubber mounts
00:17:42to become oily and stay that way for a long period of time, there can be deterioration
00:17:49and excessive engine motion. There were what they called stabilizing links that made sure
00:17:55that the engine stayed in the central plane of the motorcycle. Eric Buell started that kind of
00:18:02thing on his own because it was really a reprise of Norton Icelastic in which they said, well,
00:18:12the two pistons are moving together so the engine doesn't rock from side to side. Why don't we let
00:18:18it orbit in its own plane and there won't be any wobbling? But it is possible if
00:18:30advisable maintenance is not adhered to, that the engine in a rubber mounted machine can become
00:18:37less firmly coupled to things. And if you read the forums, you'll find people talking about
00:18:49wobbling and weaving and the engine's going its way and the chassis is going its way.
00:18:55Well, this is something that can happen. And this is a reason why extra weight is
00:19:03added to the chassis in the form of independent stiffness. Well, around the turn of the century,
00:19:12here comes the balanced twin cam. So the twin cam 88 came out and then not long after was the
00:19:24twin cam 88B or Beta. Yes, the twin cam first, then the B model, which had two primary balancers,
00:19:33one ahead of and one behind the crankshaft driven by a chain. And I went to the intro
00:19:44on that balancing setup and it was interesting because there was a transmission engineer there
00:19:52who told us the moment we smoothed the engine out, we had shift trouble. And clutch. And yeah.
00:20:00And of course, any of you who've been through the shift mechanism of the motorcycle gearbox
00:20:05knows that there is a detent that holds the shift drum, which has cam slots cut in it that cause
00:20:15the movement of the shift forks to move the gears from one position to another.
00:20:22Those detents will hold the drum in the desired orientation for each gear and for neutral.
00:20:32Well, without the engine shaking, rattling and rolling, sometimes the shift drum
00:20:41didn't make it all the way to the next detent. And so then you're stuck between gears,
00:20:48a neutral between gears. And this engineer described the very same procedures that I had
00:20:55to teach myself in 1970 to make my H1R road race like transmission shift smoothly.
00:21:08It shouldn't be a surprise. A transmission is a transmission. They were both drum shifted
00:21:14gearboxes. So when they made the appropriate changes,
00:21:20gear changing became smooth and sure again. And you had a balanced engine
00:21:27that could once again be bolted rigidly into the chassis. Well, eventually...
00:21:35I like the quote at the time. We had an interview with the engineer. It was what you were involved
00:21:40with. And he said, it was time to stop beating up the customer. That's what they said. So yeah,
00:21:47the original, you know, the rigid mount un-counterbalanced soft tails were pretty
00:21:54vibratory. You know, if you really revved them up especially, you know, and if you rode the torque
00:21:58and you kept them like 2000 or whatever, it was sort of fine, but man, you can't beat it.
00:22:03I put a lot of miles on the original counterbalance soft tail and it was a really
00:22:09nice motorcycle. Like what a change. And you think, you know, it's weird. It's this conservatism
00:22:17of Harley. And I think it's sort of Harley's rock and hard place is that you have to change
00:22:24the motorcycle enough to make it appealing to people, but you can't change it too much
00:22:31because then it isn't necessarily what they expect it to be. So there's this very fine line of
00:22:40put at the same time. They said that in their marketing research, they found that
00:22:48Harley riders did want good function. They wanted good performance. They wanted
00:22:54light responsive steering, all the benefits of modern motorcycle design. So this was a problem
00:23:03of somehow importing these qualities, the balanced engine, the steering axis,
00:23:14centering the weight of the steered frame, the front wheel and the fork,
00:23:18so that you weren't like you're pushing a loaded shopping cart. And when you try to steer it,
00:23:26you're having to accelerate this mass that is not on the center. And it takes effort.
00:23:33But they got subtle and they made these changes and people like them.
00:23:41There are old timers who want to be vibrated until the bottoms of their feet become red
00:23:49and sore. That's fine. They're welcome. But what people want evolves over time. A lot of people
00:23:59who have bought Harleys did so after having owned several other brands of motorcycle. So they knew
00:24:07that relative freedom from vibration was possible. They knew that light steering was possible.
00:24:13And Harley knew that they knew because they talked to them about it. So these improvements
00:24:22were fitted into the motorcycle as it evolved to keep it an up-to-date vehicle that still
00:24:32felt like a Harley and above all, still was a Harley. It looked right. It sounded right. It was
00:24:41right. There was an interesting period of time there where they did Twin Cam and Twin Cam 88B
00:24:46and the Sportster was not updated. They did the rubber mounting. I think it was the 04 model year
00:24:51and we did stuff with it in 03 to be ready for that. But when they were redoing the Sportster,
00:25:02the Sportster had a heavier clutch pull than the Twin Cam bikes. And of course it vibrated a lot
00:25:09more. So that was their motivation to rubber mount the Sportster and they did a bunch of other stuff
00:25:13to again, you know, bring it into more modern times and take some of the onus off of the
00:25:20operator a little bit. Diaphragm spring? Yeah. That kind of thing.
00:25:27A diaphragm spring becomes softer the more you deflect it. So when you're lifting,
00:25:33when you're pulling the clutch in, the force is strongest when you first pull the lever,
00:25:40but then it gets easier. As on a Norton Commando. And as we recently discussed,
00:25:44I feel certain that they, you said they definitely had an English engineer on the Evo
00:25:52and around during that time. And we ended up with, I think, a 58 degree included valve angle,
00:25:58like a Norton on the Evo. And we got rubber mounting and I think we had combustion chambers
00:26:06that were possibly inspired by Norton Commando. I don't know. And then we end up with a diaphragm
00:26:12spring like a Norton Commando. Like the Norton, yes. Well, that's a result of drinking in more
00:26:20than one bar. It's nice to see your friends, but it's nice to hear something new, a new viewpoint
00:26:27from time to time. And of course, that's what Harley engineers were looking for when they went
00:26:33on that 1924 trip to England, Europe, and the down under countries. Find out what the other
00:26:39people were up to. So the big showdown came in 17 when it was decided to, as it was put, merge
00:26:54Dyna and Softail, which visually means park the Dyna over there. Here's the Softail.
00:27:04And a primary reason that was given was economic. And at the time, a chassis redesign took place
00:27:16in which the chassis was made about a third stiffer with fewer components and a reduced
00:27:26number of welds. And as you may know, Japanese have pursued this direction because welding
00:27:37takes time to do properly, even if it's a robot that's doing it. And your overheads are doing the
00:27:45equivalent of tapping on the desk while all that welding is going on. So the mere passage of time
00:27:53is costing them something. Yamaha ended up with a chassis with no welds. This is the goal,
00:28:01is to simplify and lighten things and rationalize them so they work extremely well and look good.
00:28:10So when the Milwaukee 8 engine was presented to the Dyna reinforced chassis, of course,
00:28:21there wasn't room for it. It's too tall. And that's another thing that was cited at the time
00:28:28as, hey, you Dyna people, we're really sorry about killing your favorite line.
00:28:35It was an interesting period of time because
00:28:40Dyna, if you look, especially on the West Coast, if you look at the Dyna Nation type
00:28:45thing, it was where all the action was. It was all those performance people. You had the lowrider S,
00:28:53which came out, it was a 16 and a half and a 17 model. It was knowingly put together
00:28:59outside of normal product planning as the swan song for the Dyna. They just said,
00:29:04how can we make something cool? And good product planning does that. Good product planning,
00:29:12as we've discussed, predicts what the customer wants before they want it and often can happen
00:29:19without research. Not without it, but there is a relationship with the broader customer base and
00:29:31natural intelligence. Not artificial, but natural intelligence of living in the culture and going
00:29:39to all the events and modifying your own bikes and paying your own money. I think, to me,
00:29:46leadership at a motorcycle company, all the business sense and all that stuff is really
00:29:52important, but you have to have a history of riding in bad weather.
00:30:00Spending your own money on motorcycles, it's not something that you get delivered to you
00:30:06because you get the job and it goes in your garage and you put a couple of hundred miles on it. It's
00:30:11I just got to, right? Why did you go to Daytona? Why did you get in a van every year to go to
00:30:17Daytona? Let's talk. Is that rational? No, it isn't rational. In the 1960s,
00:30:23people talked about motorcycles as leisure products and they carried on into the 1970s,
00:30:32talking that way. It offended me so much because it compared the motorcycle with a
00:30:40fold it up and roll it into the closet treadmill. It's going to stay in the closet forever. That's
00:30:48why it folds up. You won't be reproached by it standing there saying, you want to get on and
00:30:54maybe put in an hour or so? The motorcycle beckons and the motorcyclist yearns for the motorcycle in
00:31:04return. This is not leisure activity. This is part of the rider's life that is very important
00:31:15because you can look at the number of times that the motorcycle has prevailed in the
00:31:22individual's life and other important influences have not. So, as I know well myself. Motorcycle
00:31:33DNA. It's in you, right? Well, the thing is that the rider and the motorcycle are a cooperative
00:31:43entity which generates, well, the Israeli Air Force saying, speed is life.
00:31:52The Bentley Manual with its foreword written by Mr. Honda himself said, primarily,
00:32:00essentials of the motorcycle consist in the speed and thrill.
00:32:06And while we might not all put it that way and we're not implying that Harley-Davidson's are
00:32:14crotch rockets, something's going on along those lines. So, somehow, Harley-Davidson's have come
00:32:25from three speeds, which they were for a long time, to four, then to five, and now to six.
00:32:32And there are good reasons for doing it. The Milwaukee 8 is a change to the classic line
00:32:39of Harley big twins that is akin to Honda's changing the gold wing to four valves per
00:32:48cylinder. Because once you do that, you can shorten the timing and you can fatten up the
00:32:55bottom end torque without having the engine wheeze out on top end, which is what can happen
00:33:02with two valves. You've heard of a shed roof torque curve. It jumps up to a high value at low RPM
00:33:11and slowly declines as you rev up. Even the XR750 dirt tracker has this torque curve.
00:33:21The torque is falling at about six foot pounds, pounds feet, pardon me, per thousand revolutions
00:33:29in the torque band. So, this is characteristic of a two valve engine with short timing. So,
00:33:41this allows the combination of adequate airflow and strong bottom torque, which is why these new
00:33:51engines have quite a lot of power on top and undiminished torque on the bottom.
00:34:00And I never thought I'd see it, but they did it. And in order to make two paired exhaust
00:34:09valves, which are quite close to each other, viable, they had to add strategic cooling
00:34:17of the exhaust valve seat region, either by oil or by engine coolant. And that allows
00:34:26an engine with fins to soldier on into the 21st century.
00:34:31Yeah, that's the fabled exhaust bridge, right? That area between the two exhaust valves that we
00:34:37definitely want to keep cool. Yeah. And that's why often if you look at a diagram
00:34:45of cylinder heads of modern four valve engines, the air cooled ones, the two intakes are quite
00:34:54close to each other. And the two exhaust valves are as far from each other as the dimensions of
00:34:59the cylinder will allow, as though they were mutually distasteful. You just stay over there.
00:35:07The reason is to make the exhaust bridge, the material between the two exhaust valve seats,
00:35:14as substantial as possible so that it can conduct away
00:35:19the heat that is received in that region in high concentration.
00:35:29Another change that was important when the Dyna-Softail merge, in quotes, took place,
00:35:39was to switch to a single shock, coil over shock on top, under the seat,
00:35:50which goes from the top of the swing arm up to the steering head. And this-
00:35:58Let's let people take a drink and say TZ750.
00:36:02Oh, okay. Yes. The Yamaha monoshock was noted in the early days, 1974,
00:36:12five thereabouts, that the monoshock was a tremendous unit, like two feet long.
00:36:20Huge. When you see the body off for those bikes, yeah, it's like it just goes all the way up the
00:36:25center of the bike. It goes all the way up to a bracket at the steering head where it's bolted in
00:36:28place. And nothing wrong with that. They made room for it. There wasn't room for two shocks.
00:36:36The two shocks that were underneath where you could not adjust the preload, where you couldn't
00:36:43make any real changes to it unless you were willing to go to a lot of trouble,
00:36:47that's gone now. A single shock on top and all Showa suspension using the modern bending washer
00:37:03technology, which enables a better, a closer identity between the velocity of the damper rod
00:37:14and the damping force that the damper produces at that velocity. You want that to be a nice
00:37:21linear relationship. It lets you get the most out of the suspension travel you have without
00:37:28bumps and glitches. We have an entire podcast on V-squared damping. This is what Kevin's talking
00:37:35about. We did a podcast 45 podcasts ago possibly, but it's on V-squared damping and it goes into
00:37:44all the physics and properties about what Kevin's talking about here in terms of using valves
00:37:51instead of using an orifice, orifice damping only. Go check it out. So that got redesigned
00:38:04and rationalized. The chassis was simplified. Its costs were reduced by reducing the number
00:38:10of components and the number of welds required to assemble it. At the same time,
00:38:19the styling department was seeing to it that Harley-Davidson still recalls a time when life
00:38:29made sense. Those colors that are chosen are ones that I think we remember from childhood.
00:38:41I think there's a lot of subtle stuff that goes on in this evocation of
00:38:49permanence and reliability in a changing, oh dear, that phrase, the changing world.
00:38:57But there's no way to dress it up. They got rid of Dyna. No doubt the aftermarket will make an M8
00:39:08accepting chassis that will allow Dyna motoring to carry on into the future with the latest power
00:39:16plants. I'm sure it's not a unique idea, but every chance I get to talk to somebody in Harley
00:39:24product planning or design or styling, if I see Brad Richards somewhere who runs that
00:39:30entire operation, he's the vice president of design and styling, etc. I always say,
00:39:40please make a chromoly, like a hand-built chromoly frame Dyna chassis and just go full
00:39:47west coast on it. High performance, put the Olin shocks just right out of the factory. Just do a
00:39:52limited run, 1500 bikes, go ahead and do it. I miss the Dyna proportions. That's the thing I
00:39:58think that we lost is it's classic to take the lowrider S as kind of like the poster child for
00:40:06the ultimate Dyna. So you take a 2017 lowrider S and you put it next to the lowrider S that
00:40:12they're making now. And the resolution at the back of the bike is, I think you get shorted
00:40:21on the soft tail a little bit. It doesn't have the same
00:40:25sigh going back to the twin shock. It's just a different proportion.
00:40:33I think, yeah, it just, that made me think of Willie G and Willie G's,
00:40:41Brad Richards said this to me in a recent interview about Willie G's sophistication,
00:40:46his design sophistication. And I think about those models, particularly around Fat Boy and
00:40:54following Fat Boy because Fat Boy, as it was for Brad Richards, he said, you know, this signified,
00:41:00this is when Harley, that model made a real impression on him. And this is all related to
00:41:06the gray ghost that they're making now, which is this physical vapor deposition. Fat Boy, it's
00:41:13it's got, it's not paint. It's, it's a basically like polished aluminum almost
00:41:19applied in vapor onto the gas tank and fenders. And it, you know, the story is just, oh yeah,
00:41:28we're, this is the Fat Boy. They redid it with the disc wheels and all of that. And in 2018 for
00:41:35the 2018 model year, along with all the other soft tails and it's really got a presence and
00:41:40they changed, you know, they, it used to be very hydro glide inspired on the fork and all that.
00:41:49But basically what they did with the 35th anniversary icons model is they took that
00:41:56of a piece, that simplicity of the silver paint of the original bike and those disc wheels,
00:42:02and that very spare nature, so much restraint, yet so much impact. And they took this and they
00:42:11put that aluminum paint on it. And you think like, oh, it's just, it's just paint, right?
00:42:15Like not paint, but it's a, it's just a coating, you know, it's just, it's, it's cosmetic. Like,
00:42:20yeah, well they're, they are largely cosmetic, aren't they? And yet they make us feel a lot.
00:42:25That's what art is. You know, this, this is art that has an extra dimension of movement
00:42:30and everything. It's just so, uh, Willie G is the designer. I think really did a lot of
00:42:38incredible work. And one of those was being part of that team that came up with fat boy
00:42:44and it changed it from what came out of that dealer is the low boy, Montreal Harley Davidson.
00:42:49And it was so, it was so designed. And now they've got this new bike and you think like,
00:42:58oh yeah, it's just, it's just real shiny. But the more you stand around that motorcycle
00:43:03and absorb it with the yellow accents as on the original, it's, it's, it's crazy. You know,
00:43:12it's crazy. The impact that it has, it's just, it's beautiful in the world. And there's like
00:43:17an infinite, there's this infinites to the, to the finish. And normally I don't like a very,
00:43:29like there's always the Chrome bike. If you go to any show, there's almost always like,
00:43:33I'm going to Chrome everything. And they just, yeah, they just Chrome the crap out of it.
00:43:40And I always felt like there's something that you lost when you, you were kind of undefined
00:43:47because it was so reflective. You didn't necessarily absorb the shape and contour.
00:43:52You couldn't see it. All you were seeing was the reflection of everything.
00:43:56Right. And so you lost something. And a lot of times those polished alloy tanks, you know,
00:43:59like you got Evan Wilcox making these beautiful polished alloy tanks and somebody's inevitably
00:44:04wants a polished aluminum fairing and they want to expand the tail section. And I always felt like
00:44:11accents on that, some, something to give it some more definition helped it. And I don't know
00:44:17specifically, you know, the, the PVD finish on the new Softail is, it's a different tone than Chrome.
00:44:27Chrome typically, there are lots of different ways that Chrome expresses itself. Like where's the
00:44:33nickel, the copper, and you can get sort of the straw colored, you can get sort of brown tones
00:44:41under a Chrome. You can get very blue tones, like a Jaguar, a Jaguar from the sixties. They were
00:44:46doing the Chrome in Rhodesia and the Chrome from that plant. And it has a very blue tone behind it.
00:44:54This PVD finish has something, it's a little nickel like, but not that much.
00:45:02And it's, it's very sharp. Like the finish is incredibly smooth. They struggled getting the
00:45:07finish right with PVD. The first experiments with it were like, as quote, quoting Brad Richards,
00:45:12were like an orange dipped in Chrome. You know, like it was just, but they figured it out and
00:45:20it's very sharp. So it's a very crisp reflective finish, but it also has a tone to it that like
00:45:29helps express the shape. And we, you know, we wrote it around and did, we did photographs with
00:45:36it and everywhere you walked around it, you, you really did operate with the shape. It's just,
00:45:43it's so interesting. This, this part of the Harley thing that, you know, that design going back to
00:45:53Willie, that being spare, being disciplined, looking at the engine as the, they talk about
00:46:00the engine being the jewel and the rest of the motorcycle is the setting. Well, the goal,
00:46:07the goals of this merge were listed as to integrate the Milwaukee 8 into the product.
00:46:19It had to be able to fit under the back, the cruiser product camp. Yeah. And they wanted to
00:46:25give the motorcycle, they wanted to update the motorcycle's capabilities without interfering
00:46:32with obviously the, the look, the sound, et cetera. And they wanted to escape from the
00:46:42significant handicap of soft tails under the bike suspension and the case of the disappearing
00:46:52wheel travel. Because if you're carrying a passenger, you're not going to have much
00:46:59suspension travel to absorb crossing the railroad tracks. Riding on the streets of certain cities
00:47:08today, which are having to decide whether to pay the police or the teachers or fix the potholes.
00:47:15So it's also important, the attitude of the motorcycle with proper preload, because it,
00:47:22you know, the touring models, when they, when they gave you the ability to pump up the rear
00:47:29suspension in the sort of, Oh, I think that was the Oh eight model year when they really
00:47:36redid the touring chassis, which is basically what they're kind of using today. You know,
00:47:41if you took your road King and you just throw the passenger on the back and wrote it around,
00:47:45it's all right. But if you actually set the preload properly bikes, great. I mean,
00:47:50the steering is massively improved. So it's not just a comfort thing. It's a dynamics, right?
00:47:55You're setting the chassis and the attitude that it's meant to be. And it steers better when they,
00:48:00when they made the racing class for the 1200 sports search, the first thing they did was to
00:48:05jack the back of the bike up about a foot to get the, get that heavy steering head angle out of it
00:48:13and speed up the steering. The last thing was that they wanted to lighten the motorcycle and give it
00:48:25a sportier feel and with the balanced Milwaukee eight engine, which is
00:48:40such a big step forward from the previous two valves. It's a great motor. It really is.
00:48:45Yeah. So, and the, the whole thing is this, there's two valves to four valve
00:48:52changeover gives you a fresh set of choices. You can make a lot of horsepower with a two valve by
00:48:59keeping the intake valve open long after bottom dead center. So the air, the intake air that
00:49:05you've finally got up to a high speed, just keeps coasting in, look out here we come and then close
00:49:13the valve. Piston is rising air, still rushing in. You get a good cylinder filling that way,
00:49:19but at lower RPM, the air is moving more slowly. And when the piston starts up,
00:49:27the air says, Oh, I guess I, there's no room in there. I'm going back this way. And you get back
00:49:34pumping of the charge with the result that torque dwindles away so that you've got this, this weak
00:49:42sport bike, bottom end, turn the throttle and nothing's happening. So
00:49:51who knows only the customer can tell us whether Harley-Davidson achieved these goals
00:49:58of integrating the M8 engine, improving all the motorcycle qualities while retaining
00:50:06the Harley-Davidson qualities and modernizing the road ability of the motorcycle with all these
00:50:17changes that we've discussed. So sounds good, but also we have to remember, they mentioned
00:50:27an economic motivation because we're living in variable times. We have been for a number of years
00:50:35and watching the pennies is the responsibility of a responsible management.
00:50:42Yeah. I mean, it made sense. I mean, you know, from a rational perspective,
00:50:46doing two big twin cruiser lines, a Dyna and a Softail kind of competing, like is, is that
00:50:54fracturing of the market necessary now versus then, you know, now versus 1995? I mean, in the
00:51:02nineties, the only problem that really Harley had or the, let's say not, not, that's not the right
00:51:08way to say that the, the greatest focus through the nineties for Harley-Davidson was capacity.
00:51:13How do we make more? Enough. I mean, that was it. Because what they had accomplished
00:51:24with their, the buyback, the new Evo engine and the adoption of just-in-time manufacturing
00:51:38and the acceptance of a third stream of enthusiasm in motorcycles, namely
00:51:47the so-called cruiser, the custom motorcycle look,
00:51:54they became the most profitable motorcycle manufacturer in the world.
00:52:01So this is not some old dudes up in Milwaukee, staring at their navels. This is
00:52:11a progressive company that is taking care of business so that they're not falling behind
00:52:19in important wishes and feelings of their, of their riders. So this is, this is important stuff.
00:52:32Not just, oh, well, we'll make a little change. Oh, we plan to make that change, but we can't
00:52:38because we don't have any money. They made this really massive program to achieve this,
00:52:46this result, the elements of which I've now read you twice.
00:52:54But this is, this is admirable American initiative and action. So I want to, I want to applaud that.
00:53:07Yeah, I think, you know, it made, it made economic sense to combine the lines
00:53:24from a, from the spiritual perspective. You spent, you know, how long did Harley tell us
00:53:30they were different and now they're the same. But I, I think, you know, as, as we were all,
00:53:38so many people were kind of religiously offended that the Dyna was going away and like,
00:53:42why would you kill the Dyna? Cause that's where all the kids are. And,
00:53:48you know, looking at it now, I mean, I, I would say
00:53:51the bulk of the audience didn't care that much. And the number of modified lowrider S type
00:54:01West Coast style, high performance, air quote, Dynas has not diminished. They're,
00:54:06they're up there at the, at the bar, they're at Cook's Corner and.
00:54:11And it can't be 1995 forever.
00:54:14I guess not.
00:54:15Uh, it's, uh, there are economic ups and downs and they have to be respected.
00:54:21Indian failed to respect them. And in 1953, they ceased production. They designed a motorcycle
00:54:28and did not do adequate product testing such that the rocker box, cantilevered rocker boxes
00:54:36broke off of the cylinder head. No point in saying we'll warranty it. The replacement head
00:54:43is no different. And that kind of failure to attend to your business, it won't go in this,
00:54:53in this operation because people don't buy motorcycles if they can't afford them.
00:54:59So the motorcycle business is very dependent on how well people feel they're doing.
00:55:06In our Triumph dealership, we would have, we would see two of our regular customers coming
00:55:13in with a young guy we hadn't seen before. This was a ritual. The two experienced Triumph owners
00:55:21bring their friend who wants to buy a Triumph into the store and they're saying to him,
00:55:28go ahead, sit on it. And of course, we learned that this was why all the bikes had the mirrors
00:55:33adjusted so you could see yourself. And eventually the young kid would go over to the counter and
00:55:40say, I want to, I want to buy that bike over there. And he'd start fetching cash out of his
00:55:46pocket. He'd worked as a supermarket bag boy, or he'd, he'd had a, some kind of a little business
00:55:53in some way. He, he worked, he got money, was all his. Now he's going to turn it into a motorcycle.
00:56:00The fruits of his labor. And I had to, I very much enjoyed that because I sort of crept into
00:56:14motorcycling, not on my own, but not as formally as that. And it was nice to see.
00:56:21It was inevitable for me. I just, I love transportation. And I, when I saw motorcycles,
00:56:30you know, that was it. There was no question it was going to work out. I was going to be
00:56:36on one. And I, I did get, you know, I got my RD 400 and it was my first street bike,
00:56:41possibly not the greatest choice, but Hey, you know, that's, that's why we're 16 and totaled
00:56:49that bike should have bought it back from the insurance company. But my parents said water
00:56:54motorcycles are water under the bridge. Look at me. They came around. They said,
00:57:01motorcycles are water under the bridge. Look at me. They came around. They understood
00:57:07at that time when I was 16, you know, they were like, nah, you got to do something else about,
00:57:11about a car. Yeah.
00:57:21So we don't know what's next. Well, that's part of the delight of being alive.
00:57:26Yeah. I think, I think, you know, at the core, my feeling has always been in my observation
00:57:33in business, the motorcycle business all this time is that the primary motivation is love.
00:57:38So when you want a motorcycle, it's love. Everything else is a secondary justification
00:57:44or tertiary, or it's a supporting justification. So it gets good mileage. It's economical. I can,
00:57:51in California, I can lane split and save time. It's all there to support the love. And I think,
00:58:00you know, I would just start there in product planning, you know, I would start there
00:58:05and say, okay, motorcycle, this evokes love these things, this looks down and feel
00:58:11for Harley, uh, for sport bikes, you know, 200 horsepower, 210 horsepower,
00:58:18uh, significant rider aids, functional arrow. We're getting truly functional arrow on street bikes,
00:58:25BMW M 1000 double R you feel, you feel it working. It's real. This is not some decoration.
00:58:31It's not like supersonic streaks on your, on your sport bike. It's actual functional arrow. And, um,
00:58:39but it's still what's, what's the kernel of the product that evokes love. And I think if we start
00:58:45with that motorcycles turn out pretty good and, and more people like them. Yeah.
00:58:55I used to like when I was assembling my H1R or H2R for a race, uh, before putting the tank on,
00:59:05I liked to look in the three carburetors and operate the throttle and see those mouths open
00:59:13ready for the air. And that's part of my relationship with the motorcycle is to
00:59:24enjoy all the details and stylists all say
00:59:32that each detail of the motorcycle must in some way reward you. Gary's dipstick. And I told us
00:59:39on the Indian podcast we did, uh, recently, Gary, Gary gray was part of the team that, you know,
00:59:45he'd been with victory and, uh, he'd been with Polaris, you know, for the 15 years since victory
00:59:50was, um, born and was charged, you know, as part of the team to make Indian come to life. And they,
00:59:58he, he insisted that the dipstick be a beautiful, I mean, it was a pound. It was this really nice
01:00:04metal piece and it had the Indian head on it and it was shiny. And it was Gary's dipstick.
01:00:09Cause he, he fought so hard for it. And, uh, it's those details matter, uh, looking up the
01:00:15carburetor through it. Like I, you know, uh, the first time I was able to look up a carburetor
01:00:19while the engine was running, I'm like, Oh, I wonder what's going on in there anyways. And you
01:00:24whip the thing open and you watch all of this mist pulling out of the jet, all the droplets. You
01:00:30think, how does that even work? How does that even work? It's fascinating. Wonderful. Yeah.
01:00:36All the way back to Oscar Hedstrom. And before that, to, uh, my Bach before 1900,
01:00:45my Bach is widely credited with inventing the spray carburetor as opposed to passing the intake
01:00:52air through a damp drag surface carburetors, which works. You just wouldn't prefer it.
01:00:59So yes, that's true. You look in when you, when you flip the throttle and you see that,
01:01:06that sheet of mist come from the needle jet. It's it's wonderful. Yeah. Well, it's, it's,
01:01:13it's, yeah. I mean, predict now we have it so easy with, uh, with fuel injection. You don't
01:01:18have to rely on signal. You can, you can do so many different things with fuel injection that
01:01:23you couldn't do with a carburetor. But I'm, I'm always delighted to see, you know,
01:01:28delighted when a carburetor, a motorcycle will idle and it will idle at the same speed every
01:01:34time. The meaning that your mechanical spark advances working in your points are working
01:01:39and you're, you're metering the fuel properly. It's just, uh, as you said, there's many different
01:01:45ways to enjoy the motorcycle. And some of us get a little bit further into the details.
01:01:50Some people take idle for granted, which is great. And you should be able to write like
01:01:55you should be able to the mass mass market people. Like I, I gotta get to work. I gotta
01:01:59do whatever. I don't, I don't need this other fuss. I'm, you know, they're enjoying it in their
01:02:04own way. Right. We just, there were people who, when they pulled the clutch in to, after having
01:02:12started their triathlon, they're going to go to work and they tried to tap it into first,
01:02:18the engine died. Oh damn. Clutch plates are stuck together. So what do you do? You put it in first
01:02:26or you, you pull a clutch in, in neutral, roll down the hill, clunk it into gear. Oh,
01:02:33it does my, my mechanical sensibilities. No good to see this, but it starts the engine.
01:02:40And then you're on your way. By the time you arrive, the clutch plates are warm and they
01:02:45separate nicely. But in modern times, they're clutch disc separating springs.
01:02:54So that little by little motorcycles have become more civilized and easier to enjoy.
01:03:03Well, you mentioned the gearbox, how you make a gearbox work. I'm going to need your consultation
01:03:08on my 1972 Yamaha XS 650. When I pull that apart, we're going to, if we make the race motor,
01:03:14we're going to have to, we're going to have to get all the secrets on shimming that and making
01:03:19sure the dogs are what they should be. Well, the reason that they're secrets is that nobody wants
01:03:25to mess with transmissions because if you get it wrong and something locks up, pulling the clutch
01:03:33has no effect. And I thought about that when we were having shifting trouble with that
01:03:41500 triple. And I decided, well, old Matt McConnie, who lived to be 99 years of age,
01:03:52he said, I have seen some young fellows kick a motorcycle 50 or 100 times, never stopping to
01:04:02think something is wrong. Just as a human mind can make, can create a motorcycle,
01:04:12another human mind can comprehend it and fix it. So I went ahead and learned a lot.
01:04:20Look at you now.
01:04:22Never had a lockup.
01:04:25Oh, that's good. Yeah. Well, we've wandered off of Dyna and you can't have
01:04:30a soft tail without Dyna. So we, we did an entire program on the Harley-Davidson Sportster
01:04:38and that's a, that's a few episodes back and there are 68 or seven, 69, 70 of these in the
01:04:46back catalog. Check them out if you haven't, share them with your friends, et cetera.
01:04:53Kevin and I could certainly talk, talk through as we do on many topics,
01:04:58the excellence of butter was one we spent some time on years ago and gearbox rebuilds and
01:05:05MotoGP and aerodynamics and you name it. So we appreciate you guys spending the time with us
01:05:11and we'll catch you next time.