- 1 day ago
Harley-Davidson debuted the Knucklehead in 1936 and millions of subsequent Big Twins built in its image continue to "potato-potato" down the road! Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer talk about the origins of Harley-Davidson's EL and journey through the Panhead, Shovelhead, and up to the modern era. Think of it as the engine that grew with the American highway system! Join us on the ride!
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Looking to buy? Get prequalified
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Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6CLI74xvMBFLDOC1tQaCOQ
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Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld
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SportsTranscript
00:00:00We have ignition, Kevin says. Welcome back to the Cycle World podcast. Kevin says, I'm
00:00:06the technical editor for Cycle World. I'm Mark Hoyer. That's what Mark Hoyer says. I'm
00:00:10Mark Hoyer, the editor-in-chief for Cycle World. And welcome back to the Cycle World
00:00:14podcast. This week's topic is what drove the designs of Harley Davidson's Big Twins. So
00:00:21Harley Big Twins are a fundamental force in the motorcycle world. They've been thumping
00:00:26along, potato-potatoing for decades and decades. Their birth was a response to
00:00:33things happening, technology marching forward, and every iteration since in a
00:00:41very Harley way, you know. But usually there's a degree of desperation driving the
00:00:47thing because... Well, that's, you know, yes, Harley's been conservative. They don't
00:00:52just willy-nilly throw the book at things and change them for whatever. It's like
00:00:57we're a very tradition-based company. And we like repeatability. And we have a
00:01:02relationship now with our customers based on this 45 and its big twin-ness. And here
00:01:10we are today. And I guess in Kevin and I's talking about this, it reminded me of some
00:01:20recent posts that we've made on CycleWorld.com about the newest engine and then previous engines
00:01:27and, you know, Milwaukee 8s and Evos. And there's an entire contingent that says, you know, all the
00:01:33four-valve stuff just does not have the spirit of the old stuff. We hate the new bike. It just
00:01:38doesn't... It's not Harley. It doesn't sound like a Harley.
00:01:41They've been doing that for decades.
00:01:42Yeah. It reminds me of this punk band from the 80s who had a really big breakout album
00:01:49and it was, you know, hardcore punk and they would, they wanted to evolve musically. So their
00:01:55next album was, was not as punk and they went to shows and everybody said, play album one. Cause
00:02:02they were trying to promote album two at their show. They're like, album two sucks, play album one.
00:02:06And then I was just, it was an interview with the singer and then, you know, so they did that and
00:02:11they played album one, but they also played album two. And then, you know, they went off and did
00:02:15another album and then they came back and it's album three and they're going to go out and promote
00:02:18that at all their shows. And they start playing album three and everybody's like, album three sucks,
00:02:23play album two. And just progress along. And that's exactly what happens with Harley. They
00:02:29change something and everybody's like, oh, it's just not as good as it used to be. And like, meanwhile,
00:02:33it was a mechanic at Arlington Motorsports, our little hole in the wall dealer. Um, his name
00:02:41was Jack and Jack said, Harley hasn't built a decent motorcycle since the knock. And that
00:02:52was, uh, what 19, 1968. So, uh, great stuff. It's, uh, this is, uh,
00:03:03is it, they say that change is hard for children. It's hard for all of us. Yeah. And I'm, I, what I,
00:03:10uh, love about it is that there is a powerful bond and relationship in time. And, uh,
00:03:18where would we be without that? Yes. And you must learn, you must learn to say knucklehead,
00:03:25panhead, panhead, shovelhead, evo, twinkie, and, uh, eight valve. And if you, if you get them out of
00:03:35sequence, you're, you might as well not show your face around here again. And I was on the train
00:03:43coming home from the New York motorcycle show. And there was a, an older, uh, grandee of, of
00:03:52Harley lore holding forth the younger men about what was cool and what was not. And this material
00:03:59has to be learned if you are to be taken seriously in that, uh, operation. So, okay.
00:04:07Okay. Motorcyclists are many different things. I like your expression. Uh, the commonly used
00:04:15expression older. And I always ask older than who? Yeah. Not older than me. Yeah. Oh, I should
00:04:25say older than I, what kind of journalism is that? So well, in many cases, the reason for changing
00:04:35from one, uh, basic engine type to the next one was, uh, to secure cool knock-free operation
00:04:48and mechanical reliability without oil leaks. Now, some people just say oil leaks are part
00:04:57of Harley Davidson. That's not true. They're part of the way Harley Davidsons were once built
00:05:04and they have subsequently engineered around that, but there are physical mechanisms that
00:05:12produce oil leaks almost without, um, any other cause than what I'm going to tell you about.
00:05:20Now, the, the original knucklehead, uh, which came out in 36 and which was authorized for development
00:05:27in 31, this is during the great depression. So, you know, that they had to have something
00:05:34behind this decision to build a new model in the middle of the depression when there was
00:05:41no money. Nobody had any money. But, uh, the thing was that they would eventually put an aluminum
00:05:51cylinder head on an iron cylinder. Aluminum and iron expand at different rates. So as the engine warms
00:06:00up and as it then cools down after use, the gaskets between the head and the barrel and between the
00:06:08barrel, the iron barrel and the aluminum crankcase get scrubbed. And the whole, what they call the
00:06:16stack, the head, the valve cover of the cylinder is held down each by its own set of bolts. The
00:06:22cylinder has a base flange with little bolts, little sharp bolts. You can't get much stretch on those
00:06:29bolts. So when the gasket starts to be rubbed to death, the torque on the bolts becomes blah, blah, blah,
00:06:36loose. And the cylinder moves around on the gasket because it's quite heavy. And the engine at each
00:06:44firing is, is sort of nodding its head quite violently. And, um, I remember hearing that, uh,
00:06:51was 90 G's of acceleration on the, on the VR 1000 at the level of the intake port, 90 G's. That'll squash
00:07:02your puddings. Anyway, um, this is a matter of design. It is not a matter of the name on the company's,
00:07:11uh, production plant. And so many engines have been built with base bolted cylinders
00:07:19that are iron resting on aluminum. Oh, I'm fixing a pre-unit triumph, man. You pre-unit post-unit.
00:07:30Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, they both, both are like that, that, that short bolt and, uh, the stretch.
00:07:35So what Kevin was talking about, you have a short little boat bolt and, uh, there isn't a lot of
00:07:40stretch there because it's, it's only this long. So if it's 10% stretch, that might be 10% of this
00:07:45distance might be yield. Yeah. Right. Yep. But if it's a, you know, if it's of a six inch stud,
00:07:51then you got way more stretch. There's a lot more spring there to do the clamping. So you get it,
00:07:56you know, you torque your Vela set, which, Hey, take a drink. Did you torque your Vela set? Those go
00:08:02all the way through, uh, the cylinder head and down to the engine cases and you torque them to,
00:08:07I think it's 18 or 21 pound feet and you're done. Well, you're not done. There's so many things to go
00:08:13wrong. Let's go back to Harley's original decision to produce a, an overhead valve engine. Uh, the
00:08:22first, they had lots of experience with overhead valves in racing, uh, dating back to the, to the
00:08:30eight valve racers and also to single cylinder racers that were produced during the, uh, pea shooter
00:08:38era. So it's not that they didn't like overhead valve or overhead valves were non Harley. Don't
00:08:49think that, um, it's just that overhead valves present special problems with side valves, the
00:08:57valves beside the cylinder with their stems pointing downward is easy to seal up and lubricate the
00:09:05tappets, the camshaft, the little shorty push rods that go to the valves. Everything is oil enclosed, no
00:09:13leakage, no trouble. But when you put rocker arms above the cylinder, above the head, how are you going to
00:09:23lubricate them initially? Well, this is a sports model. I'm talking about England. Now you have to carry a little
00:09:29oil can or grease or something and, and scored it, you know, every 25 miles or so. Oh, well, that's a small price
00:09:37to pay for such jacked up performance. I'd love to have oil all over me. So the big problem that they faced was
00:09:45how are we going to enclose all of this? Enclose the push rods, enclose the rocker arms, send oil up there.
00:09:52First of all, uh, the engines that they'd been making up until the original knucklehead did not
00:10:02have recirculating pumped oil systems. They had total loss oil systems. So how are you going to
00:10:09lubricate the top end with oil that sort of drips? How many drips do you want to control?
00:10:18Well, it presented problems, which is why, um, putting OHV engines into production, there was the first step was a
00:10:28tall one. You had to really put out to get up that first step. So the background is, at the depth of the
00:10:36depression in 1933, the thing hit in late 29, there were 13 to 15 million people out of work. There were five
00:10:48thousand banks that were closing, uh, a large percentage of 25% or so of farmers were having
00:10:57their loans foreclosed, their property was being lost. And, uh, this was not a good time to say, let's,
00:11:07hey, let's build a new model. So why did they do it? They had strong reasons to do it. In 1929,
00:11:17they finally discontinued the intake over exhaust models. Originally, this was what the Dion
00:11:27Bouton engines were that 20,000 of them went out of France all over the world to show people
00:11:34how internal combustion engines work. Here's one way to do it. It had a side exhaust valve
00:11:41and directly above it was an intake valve that was held closed by light spring. That's called
00:11:49atmospheric intake. So when the engine suction stroke occurred, there would be a kind of stuttering
00:11:56as the low pressure in the cylinder pulled the valve open in little increments, kind of a,
00:12:03and it was hard to get those models to smoothly accelerate from zero because the valves tended to
00:12:11stick momentarily before they started tapping away properly. And later, a little tiny push rod and a
00:12:21little rocker arm was added on top of the mechanism holding that, uh, surrounding that, uh, automatic
00:12:31intake valve. So that had just been discontinued and they had bought, I'm sure at considerable expense
00:12:39because Ricardo never did anything for free, a license for Ricardo's turbulent flathead or side
00:12:47valve engine design. Now this made a wonderful engine in one respect. And that is that by having
00:12:55the piston come up and squish part of the charge out from between itself and a flat part of the cylinder
00:13:02head, it made the combustion turbulence, which speeds up the burning probably enough to outrun
00:13:10detonation. So that is where flatheads got their reputation for low speed. Those things got some grunt,
00:13:18man. They did because they couldn't breathe. Yeah. Yep. So that had just been discontinued in 29 and they had
00:13:27replaced it with flatheads like the VL. The VL was okay. As long as you didn't want to go fast or far
00:13:37because a side valve engine, the exhaust valve is sitting on metal that is part of the cylinder.
00:13:48So the heat from the exhaust valve and the exhaust port tends to produce a hot place in the cylinder
00:13:55wall. Um, in 1922, Arthur Lemon, who was a peripatetic engineer, he worked for four different
00:14:04companies at different times. Lemon came up with an idea, which you can still see in any old
00:14:10Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine of leaving a complete gap between the structure of the exhaust
00:14:15port and the cylinder. The cooling air could go through there and it wasn't directly connected
00:14:22all the way down just at the level of the, of the cylinder head gasket.
00:14:28So they're getting a bad reputation for this engine and their sales are dropping because of
00:14:38the horrible depression that is leaving so many people without money. See from the end of World
00:14:45War one to 1929 was a boom time. When there's war, people don't have anything to buy. So they save
00:14:54their money. When the war is over, they go out and buy new stuff. And as a result, there was a glut of
00:15:01used cars. In 1933, you could buy a running car for as little as $5. So making a new motorcycle design,
00:15:15why are you guys crazy or something? But, uh, they decided that they had to do this. They had to
00:15:26build their reputation back up from what they had lost with the VL and other flathead models.
00:15:32So they made a conventional, uh, push rod and rocker, uh, cylinder head with a 90 degree valve
00:15:45included angle in a deep hemi chamber. And it had quite low compression, something around six to one.
00:15:54But the great thing about this is because the airflow into an OHV engine is so much straighter than it is
00:16:02into a, into a side valve where it comes out of the carburetor. It goes up to the valve, comes out of the
00:16:10valve, goes across the valve shelf and down into the cylinder. The power of this new 61E, it was a liter, one liter
00:16:20engine, the V twin, 45 degrees, naturally. Doubled.
00:16:27Doubled the horsepower that people were accustomed to.
00:16:30Well, 390 degree turns were the airflow. I mean, honestly, right?
00:16:34Badness. That's bad city. So they had something. At the same time, they decided, okay,
00:16:42our engineers have been telling us for years, look, every car has a pumped recirculating oil system.
00:16:48On the, on the nay side, there were people saying, oh, you don't want that because
00:16:54total loss, you're lubricating your engine with pure
00:16:58brand new oil that's never touched anything hot. So you don't want to lose that valuable feature,
00:17:04do you? Yes, I do. I want to set it and forget it. Oh, look, I have oil. Let's go riding.
00:17:09So the VL had this total loss system. You either had too much oil, in which case
00:17:21there was a cloud of smoke trailing behind you, or you had too little and the engine was kind of,
00:17:26uh, and even Harley engineers would say every now and then you'd have a seizure.
00:17:34So if they're admitting that much,
00:17:38it could have been an understatement. So they put all these wonderful features in
00:17:46and they essentially doubled the power. They made a very attractive package and that's what they sold,
00:17:56uh, from the introduction in 1936 until the war and, uh, for a short time afterward.
00:18:03But when the war ended in 45, August, uh, there was a building spree going on of four-lane highways.
00:18:17In 1940, the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened. Around the cities, there were a lot of four-lane roads being built
00:18:25and what had been rural roads were being paved. So it was now possible to ride your motorcycle
00:18:33faster and farther. And with an iron cylinder head and an air-cooled engine, here's the problem.
00:18:44The only way an iron cylinder head with a certain number of square inches of fin area can get rid of
00:18:51more heat in the same conditions as, uh, when it was not being used so intensively
00:18:59is by getting hotter. The, the amount of air that's flowing through the fins hasn't changed.
00:19:07But in order to cool this thing that is now running hotter,
00:19:10the cylinder head has to become enough hotter than before to transfer that extra heat to the air
00:19:18that's passing through its fins. So what is the result?
00:19:23The result is shortened exhaust valve life, uh, piston seizure, um, all the evils of
00:19:36fundamental engine failure. The bottom end's okay, by the way. Um, so
00:19:43they decided that they would switch to an aluminum cylinder head.
00:19:47Now, every engineer worth the salt knew that millions of beautiful
00:19:55cast aluminum cylinder heads, some of them forged, not cast, were used on allied, uh,
00:20:03big radial aircraft engines. Literally millions of those heads were manufactured.
00:20:08And they had, they had push rods and rocker arms. They managed to lubricate them.
00:20:17And there's this stunning example there. So there was some trouble with this, with the knucklehead
00:20:22at first because it wasn't totally enclosed or it wasn't well enclosed. And there were 1900 motorcycles
00:20:29that were returned for a, an update kit. So they were really striving to recoup the
00:20:38reputation that they'd lost with the VL and the other side valves.
00:20:43So the big thing with pan head is they address the heat problem by changing the cylinder head material
00:20:51from iron to the same aluminum alloy that was used in all of those big radial engines, alloy 242.
00:21:00Good hot strength, um, sort of okay for, for pouring, fills fine mold details and so on.
00:21:08Uh, at the same time they decided to change the valve angle, which had been 90 degrees in the deep
00:21:16hemi chamber. They changed it to 78 and a half. Why would they do that?
00:21:24They were aware that one of the things that makes the cylinder head hot is the transfer of heat from the
00:21:31combustion gas through the surface of the cylinder head and into the head material. So by making the
00:21:39chamber shallower, they reduced the surface area through which the head could be heated.
00:21:45So that was a step.
00:21:50And, uh, that step came with the shovel head. But, uh, the aluminum cylinder head was a big step
00:22:00and it was a big improvement. But what they hadn't reckoned on was that very soon
00:22:08the motorcycle of the past, which had no rear suspension and was started by might and main,
00:22:20you had to be an athletic young person to start a one liter motorcycle engine.
00:22:25So in 65 along came electric start. And of course, uh, the Japanese had introduced electric start
00:22:40on their little twins in 1959. People liked it. People liked push button starting,
00:22:47even though there was some manliness value in kickstarting. If you were young and athletic.
00:22:58So, uh, it is a relationship builder, I must admit.
00:23:04Well, you kickstart a Norton a certain way. A Velocet has a very, you know, because you have one chance
00:23:09with a single and the gear, the gear ratio, the Velocet Kickstarter, you have to get it just past top
00:23:15dead center and then very slowly push it through one stroke of the Kickstarter. And then you're in
00:23:20position with the best opportunity to start. So there is a relationship, your kick doesn't encounter
00:23:26compression for quite a while during which the crankshaft is speeding up. Yeah. You want to get
00:23:31that momentum or else it's kick pow and it hurts, uh, hurts the old ankle sometimes or can hurt any
00:23:37part of you, but there is a relationship there. Yes. So, uh, by shovel head time,
00:23:44um, there was electric starting, there was rear suspension, rear suspension added 75 pounds,
00:23:56electric starting added a similar amount, and now you've got a motorcycle underpowered for its weight.
00:24:02Hmm. Now what? So they found themselves fighting problems like
00:24:14high oil consumption, um, short exhaust valve and spring life because when the cylinder head is
00:24:26hotter than you'd like it to be, uh, the changes in metal parts are accelerated by temperature
00:24:35and the exhaust gas that's passing under the lifted exhaust valve is wicked hot and it contains stuff
00:24:46that produces corrosion. And eventually you have poor leak down. This thing kicks through really easy,
00:24:54but it doesn't run all that well. So what the story comes down to in many respects is the steady
00:25:03improvement in the nature of the American highway system. Because in the, in the 1960s, they built a lot
00:25:11of interstate highway. Uh, people could go longer distances, which meant that they could reveal
00:25:23the inadequacy of a design that was intended for an earlier, slower highway system. And this is natural.
00:25:33You build something you think you've put an, uh, an adequate margin, uh, for the future into it.
00:25:40And you find out that as the years tick by changes mount up and you have to redesign the thing because,
00:25:49okay, in 1966, they gave the, the shovel high class exhaust valves made out of mnemonic ADA,
00:26:00which was a British developed gas turbine alloy for turbine blades. And this was some pretty good
00:26:10stuff. It resisted corrosion. It had good strength even when it was wicked hot. And I'm sure it cost the
00:26:19motor company something to put those valves in there. They were taking steps to try to, let's call them
00:26:27palliatives. Um, it's like somebody patting you on the shoulder when you've just been in an auto
00:26:34accident. Well, thanks. That feels better now. Um, but they were getting to the point where they thought
00:26:421980, they're saying we, we got, we need a new design. Now the AMF deal had, uh, happened in 69. And AMF,
00:26:57um, it's an amazing thing about capitalism. Capitalists want their enterprises to produce income.
00:27:02And in many cases there, they may have to be ruthless in how they do this. And as a result, Harley quality
00:27:13may have, uh, slipped or the perception of Harley quality slipped. How do we know which it was?
00:27:21Um, so these palliatives were intended to cut oil consumption, to extend the lives of hot parts.
00:27:34And they were getting tired of it because every company has a warranty department and the warranty
00:27:42claims are the reference that the manufacturer has to how well the product is doing in the field.
00:27:48And that's weird. Cause anytime I've ever called about warranties, they've never heard of my problem
00:27:54before. Yes, indeed. Just like when your motorcycle, when a particular brand, uh, particular model of
00:28:03motorcycle shows any instability. If you go and look at the latest, uh, warranty bulletins, they call for
00:28:13reducing tire pressure two to three pounds and tightening steering head bearings.
00:28:19It's a, an old song. Anyway, uh,
00:28:27this 1980 decision that, you know, we can't, we can't keep, uh, fixing this thing. It basically needs a
00:28:37complete redesign. They started in and, uh, their lead guy came up with a design in, in about three
00:28:48months, which was remarkably close to what they actually ended up producing. And the focus of the
00:28:56evolution engine or Evo was keeping heat out of the cylinder head. And the first thing they did was
00:29:07they had mercy on the poor piston. How is the piston cooled in older engines by contact with the cooler
00:29:15cylinder? The previous engines all had cast iron cylinders. Iron doesn't transmit heat as well as
00:29:23aluminum. So they put aluminum cylinders on with iron liners that could be bored for oversize.
00:29:30Didn't want to shake people up too much with that necacil business. It's foreign, you know,
00:29:38you don't know what their motives are, those people in other countries. So, uh,
00:29:44the next thing that they did was they radically reduced the valve included angle. It was 78.5 in
00:29:52the previous model. They cut it to 58 degrees. And which is like this, this made the combustion
00:30:00chamber much shallower. It made it unnecessary to put the extra surface area of a piston dome on the
00:30:09poor piston. So less heat going into the piston because of less surface area, less heat going into
00:30:15the head because of less surface area. In a back page of Ricardo's wonderful,
00:30:23readable and largely non-mathematical book, The High Speed Internal Combustion Engine,
00:30:28you will find his statement that roughly one half of the heat taken up by the cylinder head in operation
00:30:38comes from the exhaust port.
00:30:45So they made the exhaust port as short as possible. What a reasonable thing to do.
00:30:49And it hadn't been done before. Um, I think in this, in the, uh, 750 twins, there was some work on the
00:31:03cylinder heads that looked like they were thinking about the exhaust port length, but Evo had short
00:31:09exhaust ports. They were trying to keep the heat out of the head because why do we not want an overheated
00:31:19head? Because the hotter the head is the faster moves the chemistry that changes the unburned fuel out
00:31:28at the edge of the cylinder into a sensitive explosive, which goes pop. This is detonation, knock, ping, tinkle.
00:31:38And what harbinger of rapid demise, rapid demise, because what detonation is, is supersonic combustion.
00:31:50When a shock wave hits the stagnant gas on top of the piston boundary layer, stagnant gas clinging
00:31:59to the inside of the cylinder head, poof, that insulating layer is blasted away and you have a large
00:32:05increase in heat entering those parts. Why do we not want a hot piston? Because cracking,
00:32:16fatigue cracking is greatly accelerated by temperature. The cooler we can make pistons run,
00:32:24the longer they last on every score. So what they were doing here was they were
00:32:30attacking the heat problem in the cylinder head on several fronts. Set that aside for now. Now the
00:32:39gasket problem. We have to stop these engines from leaking oil because it is an easy thing to point
00:32:45to. If it ain't got a puddle under it, it's out of oil. So funny, huh? A lot of jokes. At the expense of
00:32:55hardworking, loyal Harley owners. We can't have this. So the long studs that Mark talked about
00:33:06were adopted and they stick up out of the case halves and it tempts people to pick up the case half
00:33:14as if the studs were the handle on the frying pan. But because the studs are long, it's easy to
00:33:20squeeze them too hard. And now they don't go through the holes in the head or the cylinder.
00:33:29But the thing that's wonderful about these long studs is they had to be made in two pieces so that
00:33:34you can get the head and the cylinder off with the engine still in the frame.
00:33:40Wonderful thing about them is a long stud is quite stretchy. So if you tighten it up to a certain
00:33:46clamp load, when the engine starts and warms up, the crankcase, the head,
00:33:59the cylinder are all a little taller than before.
00:34:02And importantly, they're all aluminum now. So they're expanding at roughly the same rate.
00:34:07Yep. These parts are increasing the clamp load only slightly because the long studs are much springier
00:34:19than a short stud. And for that reason, the studs do not yield. They're stretched elastically so that
00:34:29when the engine cools off, you return to 5000 pounds per stud of clamp load or whatever the number is.
00:34:37And you don't lose the gasket. There were dowels. They doweled the cylinders to the crankcase so that
00:34:46they didn't jiggle around from the inertia of the engine nodding its head with every firing.
00:34:52Incidentally, on the R3350 engines that powered Sky Raiders in Vietnam, each time a given cylinder fires at the
00:35:05level of the intake port, it kicks to one side, 20 thousandths of an inch. So there's that
00:35:12waving of the cylinders. So we wonder why did earlier Harley's have terrible problems sealing the Y-manifold
00:35:22onto the two cylinders? Because the cylinders are moving. Tough one.
00:35:27Tough one.
00:35:28Sky Raider, folks. Oh, beautiful plane. Just a great sound. And a Sky Raider carried a bigger
00:35:37bomb load than the B-17.
00:35:39Yep. One engine. One engine.
00:35:42One engine. It was a single engine, multi-use. Sounds great. I see him at air shows occasionally. It's
00:35:48not the most popular Warbird, but it should be. It's a great aircraft. It was a real workhorse
00:35:54during Vietnam too.
00:35:56So they're really thinking hard about product durability because they want to erase this bad
00:36:05image that Harley had during the early post-war years. And they set as a goal and were able to
00:36:13attain it of making the evolution engine survive a 100-hour full throttle test.
00:36:21Now, imagine the testing. Imagine the gasoline that it would burn in 104 days of operation at full
00:36:34throttle. It should be able to do it. And the reason you test like this is because it's the same reason
00:36:45that you race. Heavy, hard use exposes problems quickly. So if you can pull one off the line
00:36:55and have it survive a 100-hour full throttle test, not a special engine that they pull out from
00:37:03some secret laboratory.
00:37:06What do they call it? The most stock it possibly could be? That's blueprinting.
00:37:11Yes. The most increasing stockness.
00:37:16So with these changes intended to reduce cylinder head temperature, they could increase the compression
00:37:27without running into detonation, which compression ratio helps your engine boost torque at all RPM.
00:37:52Unlike cam timing, late valve closure, lots of overlap valve timing, those are RPM-dependent
00:38:03torque-producing features. Compression boost torque everywhere. And this is what you want for a heavy
00:38:11motorcycle. Because you have to, without a lot of clutch slip, easily heave the thing into motion
00:38:20from rest. And if your customers can't do that, you'll hear about it from them.
00:38:26Yeah. Well, it's why we're our crankshafts, you know, our crankshaft assemblies and Harleys
00:38:31would be, you know, whatever they are, 40 pounds or more or less. But they're, they're big and they're heavy
00:38:37and they're, you know, they're, they're there to maintain that inertia so that when you do release the
00:38:42clutch, it's transmitted into movement, it's translated that inertia helps. And then you're
00:38:49popping along and got your compression. Well, you talked about the a hundred hour engine reminded me
00:38:53of Royal Enfield and Royal Enfield's big change in 2008 to their unit construction, 500 CC single
00:39:00air cooled. They, they unitize the engine. They changed the design from a 50, basically a 55 Royal Enfield,
00:39:08you know, separate gearbox and all the things that it had, uh, to be this ancient piece that they were
00:39:14still kind of nursing along. Their goal was for a motorcycle that 500 to go to in production form to
00:39:22go 70 miles an hour all day. I think it was 70, 70 or 75 all day that you could just get on that thing
00:39:28and just make it go. And, um, yeah, huge deal. And that was, that was their basic goal for their
00:39:35customer because, you know, we, they needed to do something new and different and they, you know,
00:39:40they automated a lot of their production and got CNC ceiling machines, but, uh, the goal was shedding
00:39:46heat and, uh, making a good running engine. Now, um, they 12 or 13 Harley executives bought the company
00:39:56back from AMF. This is very important because they undertook this redesign. They knew they had to
00:40:03at a time where it was depression. Like for Harley, it was precarious times and a leveraged buyout tough,
00:40:12a leveraged buyout in 81 when house like money was really, really expensive. So they levered that
00:40:20lever being leverages. We borrowed a lot of money to make this happen. And the rate that you were
00:40:25borrowing at for a house was like 13 to 20% for a mortgage. Yeah. It was a bad time to be leveraged,
00:40:33but they, they put it on the table and they came out. So this was very much, very much like the
00:40:38original risk that was taken to produce the 61E during the great depression, but they had to do it.
00:40:47So this forced them to look into ways of cutting production costs. What did they do? Critics said they
00:41:02adopted Japanese methods. Not true. Just in time, statistical process control and the rest of it
00:41:11were in use in American war production plants in World War II. And when the war ended,
00:41:21manufacturers said, people have so much cash. We don't need all this fancy stuff. People are going
00:41:29to just flock into dealerships and buy them out. And that's what pretty much happened. And the result
00:41:36was that there might be as many as 30% of the cars produced had to be reworked. That is manufactured,
00:41:45not once, but say 1.1 times or 1.2 times costs up, up bad city. So what they did was they adopted just in
00:41:57time, uh, parts acquisition. Instead of buying a hundred thousand widgets and having them in tax
00:42:06taxable inventory, possibly forgetting they were there or designing future parts that wouldn't fit
00:42:16with these widgets. And these things have happened. These are great stories that people tell about.
00:42:22Anyway, they were able to save something like $20 million in a short time by adopting these methods.
00:42:31And they were able to offset the losses they had in the first year, which made them look good in Wall
00:42:39Street. Hey, these boys are progressive. They're, they're coming. Let's, uh, look into this.
00:42:48Well, my old friend, my old friend, Jerry Wilkie said, if you take care of Main Street, you're also
00:42:53going to take care of Wall Street. So they were making a good motorcycle that people wanted to buy at that
00:42:58time. Yeah. Now I remember, uh, going to, um, Aspen Cade once upon a time and talking to people.
00:43:09And one man in particular stood out. He said, well, he said, I'm, I'm riding this gold wing here
00:43:14because it goes. He said, Harley's going through a bad time. And, uh, I hope I'll be riding a Harley
00:43:23again one day, but right now I've got to get where I'm going, particularly because I've got my wife on
00:43:30the back of it and, uh, uh, it, it caused a lot of people to, to rethink their touring ride.
00:43:40So, I mean, if you've got pistons nipping up or you've got, uh, exhaust valves that are guttering,
00:43:48or you've got heavy oil consumption, you know, quarks and quarks of oil and having to carry oil with
00:43:54you on a trip, this was something that's unheard of today, but people were doing it. That's what
00:44:02those big, I used to call them beer carriers, like oil carriers at one time. Oh yeah. No, you, I mean,
00:44:10a new motorcycle, new car, check the oil all you want. Boring. I mean, there's, there are a few
00:44:19motorcycles that will consume some oil, but it's nothing like the old days. Yeah. And, um,
00:44:26a lot of that oil consumption was back in the, in the flathead, uh, side valve days was because of
00:44:34cylinder distortion. Cool air hits the front, but there's nothing that makes that air go through
00:44:39the fins all the way to the back. The air kind of likes to bounce off. Oh, it looks tight in there.
00:44:44I'm not going in between those fins. What if I hit my head? So the back of the cylinder is hot.
00:44:50The front of the cylinder is less hot. So the cylinder can't be round. And it was true of
00:44:57aircraft engines, all those huge radials. You never dared to walk under an engine while wearing a white
00:45:04shirt because a big blop of horrible black oil that could never be got out. It's like chain grease.
00:45:11You know what chain grease does to a cotton shirt stuff would fall on you. So anyway,
00:45:20uh, at this point farther on,
00:45:25they're looking at the competition because a lot of Harley riders had switched to gold wing and other
00:45:32alternatives BMW. That meant that Harley had to match the performance power to weight, had to match
00:45:45oil consumption, reliability of all kinds. They had definite competition at this point. So this is what
00:45:56the twin cam was designed to accomplish. It was to do the impossible, basically, because a lot of
00:46:04people will tell you, don't try to make an air cool pass emissions. Just don't, don't do that.
00:46:12But Harley had to do it. It's worth mentioning the Nova, which is probably a separate
00:46:16podcast, but Harley looked at a four-cylinder design around this time.
00:46:22Yes, that was before they had that wonderful ad agency that said, you've got something that nobody
00:46:29else has, and you don't even know it. You have America. You have American nationalism distilled into
00:46:40solid form. People love these American motorcycles. Well, once they were tipped off, the idea of Nova,
00:46:51which was originally, we've got to make Japanese bikes to compete with Japan. No, we've got to make
00:46:58Harleys that are true to the idea that people have of it. Also true today, by the way.
00:47:06Yes, absolutely. Which meant cooling fins. And I remember my dad took me to New York on my seventh,
00:47:17right around my seventh birthday, and we flew on a Convair twin powered by two air-cooled R-2800s.
00:47:26And as we're approaching the airplane, I could see all these, these wonderful fin shapes.
00:47:35And I thought, oh, I want to look. Can we stay here and look? No, it's boarding now. Then we got in and
00:47:41took our seats and off we went. But yes, cooling fins. For some people, they're very important.
00:47:49On those aircraft engines, cooling fins received the most detailed development. It was wonderful. I've
00:47:58been through all these NACA reports. It's just wonderful to see the things that they had to do
00:48:05to make, basically, they had to do the same things that Harleys had to do to preserve their air cooling.
00:48:11So, well, there's an entire discussion about fin pitch ducting. What will air, what kind of fin pitch
00:48:20will air just freely fly through? And when you look at a radial aircraft engine, particularly
00:48:26something like the big corn cobs 4360s, where it's a 28 cylinder, which I've witnessed hanging from a
00:48:32gantry in your shop? Yeah. Not one, but two. Yeah, they're great. Eventually. Yeah. And the,
00:48:39you know, you've got to duct cool air through all of those things. And then you need, you need to keep
00:48:44them cool. And you, you told me this with, that they were cutting cylinder fins with a saw on a guide
00:48:50that would run the saw. A cam controlled machine. Yeah. Cam control cutting. I mean. And there was a
00:48:57different cam for each fin space because the shape underneath it had to be different. So they had
00:49:05to go through hell to cool those monsters. And of course, every cylinder had to have cold air. You
00:49:12can't take, let air go through the fins of one cylinder and then think you're going to cool another
00:49:17cylinder with it. That's why parade mode exists. Because in parade mode, the rear cylinder gets
00:49:26really hot if you don't have parade mode and it starts to smoke because cylinder distortion just
00:49:35won't let up. The laws of physics, you can appeal to them. Oh, please. They don't hear you.
00:49:42They're immovable. Yeah. And turning off the rear cylinder has become so they turn the rear cylinder
00:49:49off. And, uh, as you're sitting there in horrible traffic and looking at your watch,
00:49:56I'm seven minutes late already. How what's happening? Um, at least you're not smoking.
00:50:03So it's good. Anyway, they had to come up with more powerful engines to keep up with the competition.
00:50:15They didn't want to be in the position of saying, yes, but it's a Harley, you know,
00:50:20what you lose in performance, you gain back in coolness. Tradition.
00:50:25This is, it was the same thing that happened in the fifties with Britain. Cause Britain was,
00:50:31Britain was like flooding our market. Britain had to get Britain's manufacturing was you export
00:50:37because they needed to bring money back to Britain. So they told them you have to export
00:50:4270% of production. And so Bonnevilles are just coming across, you know, and, and they've got
00:50:48qualities that people are enjoying and they too switched to aluminum cylinder heads for sure.
00:50:53In 58. Yep. Um, 57 were iron heads still, but you know, this was happening and Harley had to,
00:51:00Harley had to do something. They had to compete with the British and then they didn't have to compete
00:51:03with the British, but now they got to compete with the Japanese.
00:51:05Competition is something that businessmen will toast at the Kiwanis. But when they encounter it,
00:51:14it can be tough because, uh, the Japanese were intent on making money just as Harley Davidson had to be.
00:51:27If you don't put money first, you may not be doing anything. So, uh, the, the twin cam, um,
00:51:37they had to make, they had to tackle this problem of how do we make an air cooled engine produce the
00:51:48necessary performance to match the or exceed the competition? And how do we get the EPA to pass it?
00:51:57How do we make the engines durable enough to maintain this, this quality? So they at first found, um,
00:52:09oh, well, pistons are running really hot and the cylinder heads are hot and, uh, we need an oil cooler.
00:52:17We got to have an oil cooler. I mean, air cooled engines, the aircraft engines, 30% of their cooling came,
00:52:25was delivered to the oil cooler. So it just made sense to the engineers.
00:52:31Will it put an oil cooler on? No, said styling. We don't like an oil cooler because we think
00:52:36our customers don't like an oil cooler. It's an add on. It makes you look Japanese.
00:52:44They've got stuff hanging in front of their engines, ugly stuff. We're not going to do that.
00:52:49So, uh, the engineers had to come up with a compromise.
00:52:56Sometimes the story is told that they just reduced the flow of oil to the heads and let them get hot. No,
00:53:03what they did was they built some test parts and they found that if they increased the fin
00:53:10area, square inches of fin area per head, they could bring the temperature down.
00:53:16Now let's go to those stick in the muds over at styling and see if we can work out a compromise.
00:53:23Styling didn't like the big fins either. But if you tell them our engine program will fail,
00:53:32if you hold back everything, a compromise was worked out.
00:53:36Well, that's the classic tension in motorcycle design is often engineering and styling. It's just,
00:53:42uh, if you go to the super bike side, it's like, well, what we need is a 30 liter air box.
00:53:48Where, where are you going to put that? You know, so there's this and the exhaust system, you know,
00:53:53you need to pass sound emissions and you've got to fit a catalytic converter in there. And
00:53:58where are you going to put all that? And you know,
00:54:00they've got these huge boxes in between the engine and the rear wheel and there's all kinds of
00:54:04different strategies. And they're Eric showed them out. Yeah. With that, with that torpedo bomber
00:54:12muffler, uh, system of his, and it was widely adopted is still in wide use. So they made that compromise
00:54:21and they also, um, began to squirt oil up into, to cool pistons because, uh, you've done what you
00:54:30could for the pistons by adopting an aluminum cylinder and they're still too hot. You have to
00:54:36squirt oil on them. And that's what was being done for the giant radial aircraft engines at the
00:54:42end of World War II. They had, um, one squirt for, uh, eight of the pistons and two squirts for the
00:54:52master rod piston, which has extra, uh, side thrust on it. So
00:54:58this engine was made to pass a 250 hour full throttle test. So this, all this talk about,
00:55:09oh, they made all these fussy little changes. They did this and that and such a bore. No,
00:55:14it's not because it has a result in enhanced reliability, resistance to detonation, long
00:55:24exhaust valve life. These are adult engines. These aren't some kind of gussied up thing that
00:55:32in the aftermarket where they, they, they bore the cylinders out until it's a stack of washers and,
00:55:38and you get a mail order stroke or crank and you make this monster engine makes good performance
00:55:47for a while. The factory in order to back this product with warranty has to be pretty sure they're
00:55:55not going to lose big money fixing problems that they should not have sold. So this is what I have
00:56:06to say to Harley riders who are upset by change. We're all upset by change, but there are good reasons
00:56:14for these changes, really good reasons. So even with all this attention to detail, they ran into the same
00:56:25problems that the engines on the B-29 bomber did. Even with the latest, uh, of five different modifications
00:56:34to the cylinder head, even with the cylinder head, even with the latest of five successive designs of air
00:56:40baffles to make sure that the air does go through the cooling fins, they were still having terrible problems.
00:56:47Well, what Harley did about it was, uh, Project Rushmore from 2013. If something's running hot, cool it with liquid.
00:57:09Antifreeze, uh, is something like 600 times denser than air. So it can really take away a lot of heat per gram of cooling material circulated.
00:57:33So they, they made passages around the exhaust valve seats and they circulated either oil 1200 sports or, um, what is it? CVO has, uh, actual antifreeze and there are heat exchangers, uh, in the front of the, uh, fairing.
00:57:53Like little pods. Yep. Yep. Like a bathroom heater. Strategic cooling. Yep. And easy. Sometimes called topical because it's, it's just for a certain area. Like you put mercuric chrome where the injury is, you don't put it all over your hand.
00:58:11So this gave them power over these problems of overheated exhaust valves, overheated cylinder heads. The oil jets gave them power over piston temperature. They could say, we now want to reduce piston temperature 25 degrees. They had the way to do it.
00:58:34So, uh, so, uh, this, uh, this brought us to another level of competition.
00:58:43What happens when a two valve engine competes with four valve engines, Harley's for many years have suffered the embarrassment of having thunderous bottom torque to get the motorcycle moving and to accelerate up on ramps and to deal with, uh, passing situations.
00:59:06But as the engine revs, but as the engine revs up, it wheezes out because the cam timing that produces that wonderful bottom torque doesn't deliver enough air to the engine to make it top end satisfactorily.
00:59:23What do you do if your customers are saying this thing seems to not have a lot of pep?
00:59:30Well, I rode my friend's XYZ motorcycle and it went right along. I, I kind of liked that.
00:59:40Harley guys didn't want to hear that story, but they did hear it.
00:59:45So they had to come up with an answer.
00:59:48Now, with two big heavy valves, there are limits to what you can do in the way of suddenly accelerating them from closed to full lift and from full lift to closed again, without the valve bouncing, without impacts, without bad resonances in the valve springs.
01:00:09All of your problems, Keith Duckworth enunciated many years ago, are divided by the square root of two, roughly 1.41, when you adopt four valves in place of two.
01:00:25Because four valves have so much more perimeter distance around each valve than a single valve in a two valve engine that they don't need much timing to flow a lot of air because the amount of flow area that is exposed is the distance.
01:00:49Curtain area.
01:00:49Yes. The distance around each valve times the lift. That's curtain area. And a four valve produces curtain area faster than any two valve.
01:01:01The shorter timing that four valves thrive on is the same shorter timing that heaves your motorcycle away from still into motion.
01:01:12Good one.
01:01:14Good one.
01:01:16Four valves can be given a lot of extra area, so they outflow the single intake of a two valve, particularly when you take advantage of what is now known about valve control.
01:01:29They can open valves more quickly to a higher lift, shorter timing, higher lift, excellent flow, nevertheless.
01:01:39This is why the Goldwing has 80% of its maximum torque down to 850 RPM, because they too changed from two valves to four for these same reasons.
01:02:00So this is what the Milwaukee 8 sought to do.
01:02:10This was a way of having good passing performance, good starting from rest performance, and good performance along towards the top end without that, oh, ah, ah.
01:02:27It was a really nice change. It was. I mean, two valves, you know, for a big, big terrain bike, it's really nice. You could thunder off the line. I think they kicked the compression up pretty good with the twin cool.
01:02:37They got a couple fractions of a point. I think 10 to 1 is what they ended up with, and it was a good engine. It was nice. But boy, you know, getting four valve, you have that torque, and you have that beautiful pull off the bottom, and then there's this really nice surge in the mid-range.
01:02:54And that's where you want it. You notice where the torque peak on all of these tour motors is around 3 to 3,500, because nobody wants to the equivalent of a 14,000 RPM super bike on the interstate at 70 miles an hour. The engine is turning a fair number of revs.
01:03:16Yeah. I mean, what the four valve gives you, you know, a two-valve torque curve, to exaggerate it, would be very bell-shaped, let's say.
01:03:24It rises quickly to maximum, and then it slowly slopes off as the flow area becomes progressively less equal to the flow.
01:03:35And when you throw four valves at it, it can still peak early, but it stays...
01:03:40It holds up.
01:03:42Holds up longer, and it just feels good.
01:03:44You just keep revving, and it feels like a happy engine revving up.
01:03:48Just like those Galdern BMWs and Goldwigs.
01:03:53So competition is good for the public.
01:03:57They never cease saying so.
01:03:59And this is an example of how it has worked in this case.
01:04:04Harley faced riders who said, I got a Goldwing now, and here's why.
01:04:11Well, we're going to take that reason away from them so you can go back and buy another Harley.
01:04:16And it's sort of the clandestine engineering that Harley's always practiced.
01:04:21I mean, until recently.
01:04:22But it was really, how do we keep this looking and sounding roughly how it has since 36?
01:04:30Yes.
01:04:31And how do we maintain that relationship and that look, but expand it to suit the times and to suit the competition without disturbing our relationship?
01:04:44And that's what they've done.
01:04:45They've really done a good job.
01:04:46People always have kind of derided Harley for not being up-to-date, but in fact they are.
01:04:53And in some ways they're being more clever about it because they're trying to, they're engineering for the experience in a way, what is it, experience and relationship in a way that you don't necessarily have to with a Goldwing.
01:05:09You definitely have to hit technical targets with a Goldwing, and it needs to look a certain way and do the things you want it to.
01:05:15But it's a little bit different with the Harley, that emotional relationship.
01:05:22Well, I always think when I hear Harley, I think of big radial engines in World War II aircraft.
01:05:29This is a P-47 or a Corsair you can ride on the street.
01:05:35It is.
01:05:35So, great big cylinders, air-cooled cylinders.
01:05:40Well, one of the higher-up dudes in design used to take his team to Oshkosh, EAA AirVenture, to the annual fly-in, which is now a 600,000 to 700,000 person in a week event.
01:05:55It's the busiest air traffic control.
01:05:57It's the busiest tower in the world for that entire week.
01:06:0010,000 planes, I think, come in, and it's full of radials, and it's full of air-cooling and water-cooling.
01:06:09I think there were 17 Mustangs or something there when we were there this year.
01:06:14Wonderful.
01:06:14And there's parts to buy, like you can buy duff cylinders, and you can buy pieces of the B-29, and they have all these things that you can get.
01:06:25But he would take his folks there, and he came back with a, I forget which cylinder it was, but the aircraft cylinders, a lot of them are a head and a cylinder as one piece.
01:06:35So you get this great big, you know, this visual signature, you know, the way a knucklehead is.
01:06:42And he brought one of those and just plunked it down, you know, in the middle of the room where all the guys are over their screens drawing or paper, whatever it was at the time.
01:06:53Yeah.
01:06:54But you're making an evocation of, I don't know, historical relationship.
01:07:00Another thing that they wanted to match was the acclimatization of riders to modern suspension and handling capabilities.
01:07:18They don't want, obviously, Harley-Davidson to fall behind.
01:07:23Well, it's got no suspension travel, so it's really stiff, and you have to stop to pee every 20 miles.
01:07:30That's not, that's not good design, is it?
01:07:36So a lot of mathematical analysis and so forth went into this, and in the account that I read, it said these suspension people were optimizing various figures of merit.
01:07:53And it was all a lot of computations, but then they get to ride the result of fresh understandings of how a motorcycle responds to human control.
01:08:05And they said, this is better.
01:08:08This is really better.
01:08:09And I remember the words in the Honda Bentley manual from 1959, which I have in a bookcase behind me here.
01:08:19The words were, far more super fine drive feeling.
01:08:26That's great.
01:08:27And I know that big, heavy motorcycles have become far easier to maneuver, particularly at low speed, because of understandings like this.
01:08:40All motorcycle manufacturers conduct similar development.
01:08:45Harley have put a lot into suspension and handling, and there's more to come.
01:08:54So these, these changes are not undertaken lightly, particularly designing a new motorcycle in the depths of the depression.
01:09:07Amazing.
01:09:08Or designing Evo and launching it in another time of, we don't say depression anymore, it's too depressing.
01:09:21We say recession.
01:09:24It sounds like a cold.
01:09:27I'll feel better next week.
01:09:28It's going to be great.
01:09:30But Harley could have failed.
01:09:32Those 13 executives who put their names on the document were taking a big risk, just like the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
01:09:45They catch me.
01:09:47They're going to do bad things to me.
01:09:49Yeah.
01:09:49So this is, I think it's really a great story, because there was risk, and there was recovery, and there was profitability.
01:10:03Right now, not so much.
01:10:06We read that Harley's having all this trouble.
01:10:09We hope that they'll be able to overcome it, because we wouldn't like to think that the age of the motorcycle is drawing to a close.
01:10:19Don't even think it.
01:10:20No.
01:10:21Because registrations during such times hold up quite well.
01:10:25People want to ride motorcycles, and if they have to ride a used motorcycle and learn how to clean carburetors and how to trace ignition faults, many of them will.
01:10:39And more power to them, because the more you know, the more you can do.
01:10:45So I think that these several designs, knucklehead, panhead, shovelhead, Evo, Twinkie, twin cam, and M8,
01:11:03are, each one of them is a kind of gamble, and Evo was tremendously successful.
01:11:12It did recoup the company's reputation, because it leaked far less oil.
01:11:19It was far more reliable.
01:11:21It didn't scrub its gaskets.
01:11:23More of what you want, less of what you don't.
01:11:26Yes.
01:11:29It didn't need a rebore every 20,000 miles, or even 15.
01:11:35It was like a mature product, like an automobile.
01:11:39You expect to get in a car, turn the ignition, start, and go.
01:11:47It's just supposed to go.
01:11:49Oh, it's been 8,000 miles since I changed the oil.
01:11:53I'll take it in next week.
01:11:54But it's set it and forget it.
01:11:58And while we may like to remember times that we have solved running problems on the road
01:12:06with few tools that we carried with us, and all these things make wonderful stories,
01:12:11but they're not so much fun when you're not getting where you're going.
01:12:15Well, it's a sport that some still enjoy.
01:12:19It is.
01:12:20It's a sport that some still enjoy, but if you have to be at school to pick up your son,
01:12:26and they're out at 3 o'clock, you don't have time to whack the side of the carburetor
01:12:33or wonder if the point slipped or whatever.
01:12:36It's just there's some things you want to be there.
01:12:39You need to do that.
01:12:40Starts, runs.
01:12:41Yep.
01:12:42And the motorcycling experience used to include all of these troubles that have taken so many
01:12:50companies so many years and so much cash to put behind them.
01:12:56And I think it's a great story.
01:12:59Well, there are many things like this, you know, Ural sidecars, you know, they've been
01:13:04making those since World War II.
01:13:06Yes.
01:13:07And there were all these, all the old Ural guys, if you hold one of the pistons, they
01:13:13were like, well, it'll still run on one.
01:13:15You know, you could like pull the plug out of it and you could ride, you could still ride
01:13:19on one cylinder and make it.
01:13:20And so when they first switched to fuel injection, they had to use a system that didn't rely on
01:13:26both cylinders firing or talking to each other.
01:13:29Yeah.
01:13:30It needed to run on one cylinder to appease the old, the old guard.
01:13:35Sure.
01:13:36It was a big, it was a big deal with Royal Enfield.
01:13:39You know, it's like, well, yeah, they're not that reliable, but they're very fixable.
01:13:43And in India, what you were talking about, maybe you don't, you know, you can't buy a new
01:13:47bike.
01:13:47You need to keep your old one running.
01:13:48And that was one of the positives is that you could make those run and you could file
01:13:53the points or do whatever it took.
01:13:55But there was a, there was a guard that felt like something was taken away from them with
01:14:01the, you know, unit construction 500.
01:14:03Cause it wasn't this, it had fuel injection gasp, you know?
01:14:08But look at, look at what Enfield's doing now, you know, million motorcycles a year.
01:14:13They're not, they're not doing that with ignition points and carburetors.
01:14:18But, but judge have said, have told KTM that they expect to cut overheads by 50%.
01:14:26Yeah.
01:14:27Now, what's that?
01:14:29What does that mean?
01:14:30It means that people in India know how to do that.
01:14:34Yeah.
01:14:35We wonder how can those, our Royal Enfields be so inexpensive because they know how to manufacture
01:14:45at lower cost than other outfits.
01:14:50Lower cost products provided that they maintain standards of reliability are better because
01:14:58more people can ride.
01:14:59How about that?
01:15:01Do we want a future in which, uh, only top 10% can afford a motorcycle because the first
01:15:11cost is so tremendous?
01:15:13This is, this is not good.
01:15:16We want, we want Royal Enfield to do what they're doing because it brings us more choices.
01:15:22So each time I, each time I, uh, study through one of these stories, like the, uh, the big,
01:15:34the Harley big twins, I learned a bunch that I didn't know before.
01:15:39And I see patterns that I wasn't aware of before.
01:15:41So I find this a rewarding process.
01:15:48I do too.
01:15:49It's, uh, it's fun.
01:15:50No, it's really, you know, um, I've got a big twin sitting right over there on a stand.
01:15:57Look at it every day.
01:15:58Yeah.
01:15:59It's a, it's a wonderful segment of motorcycling.
01:16:03And, uh, anyway, uh, thanks for listening.
01:16:07That's it for this podcast.
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