The best thing I did was the 4" pull back risers, no reaching.

 

I've been thinking the same. How tall are you? I'm 5'9" with a 30" inseam and I'd like to sit more upright.

 

I have a set of those risers that I am going to sell since I put on 10" drag bars, the good thing is these work with stock cables. PM me and if you're interested and I can send photos with pricing. I will sell them for roughly half the price of new .

 

5'-11"

 

 

I bought my Sport Glide at the end of December 2017, so here are some thoughts and observations after a year and 8k+ miles of ownership. For context, I’ve been riding road bikes since 1990 (dirt before that) and tend toward standards and sport tourers. My last two bikes were a Speed Triple and a Monster 796. The bike I owned the longest (8 years) was a BMW R1100RS.

I kind of wanted to get back to something like a sport touring bike, but I also commute by bike more than half the time, and I live in Houston, which is a place that doesn’t really take advantage of sports bikes. I missed having proper bags, and it’s hard to altogether avoid interstates here. And my wife has started enjoying riding more, so I wanted something she’d be comfortable on. In short, I was looking for something to fill several roles. I’d had a Sportster in the early nineties for a few months, didn’t care for the broken-engine-mount feel of the engine, and hadn’t seriously considered Harley for decades.

Reading around online I ran across articles on the M8 and liked what I read, but though all the new Softails were great looking bikes, none quite fit what I was looking for. The Fat Bob was closest, and tugged at my sporty bike leanings, but it lacked the practicality I needed. Then the Sport Glide appeared mid-model-year, as if the bike gods had heard my innermost thoughts, and I knew instantly that it was exactly what I was looking for.

And it has been. I still can’t believe it weighs almost 700 lbs. The handling is fantastic – light, stable, and accurate. The engine has a smooth throb, mechanical, but not the bulb filament-breaking, screw-loosening, teeth-rattling, metal-fatiguing machine that the old Sportster was. (Yes, I know HD made lots of changes between then and now, but that’s my point of reference.)

The pillion pad seems designed to either get rid of your passenger or to hold her against the sissy bar. Since I want to keep my wife, I bought HD’s quick release bar and it’s excellent. I like that I can remove it when riding solo.

But longer outings with my wife have shown the rear accommodations to be limiting, so I’ve got a Saddlemen Explorer seat incoming (today, actually) that I hope will help. I find the pilot seat to be pretty good, but my butt does slide down and forward over bumps, requiring that I push myself back up, so I’m hoping (and expecting, from the reviews) the Saddlemen to remedy that. The slouch position is ok, but tends to put pressure on the tailbone after a while, and I like to sit up on the highway especially. But the basic rider’s triangle is good – I like the height and width of the bars, and the pegs are a good distance.

I (belatedly) cleaned the air filter at around the 8k mark (the reusable stock paper one), and found that the bottom third was soaked in oil. I had thought all the breather stuff was exaggerated, but after cleaning and replacing the filter it was clear how much performance had gradually been diminished. DK Custom’s tests showed that the filter and breathers could be upgraded without re-mapping or changing the stock muffler and without running lean, and they still show a 10%-ish power increase, so I installed their 606 kit with a traditional black cover and with the breather filter mounted over the air cleaner. A very noticeable bump in power and in throttle response and a mod I highly recommend.

I put Hyperlites on it a few days ago and was pleased to discover that the rear fender can be removed by taking out 4 screws (the ones into the frame, not the ones holding on the brackets) and disconnecting 3 wiring connectors – maybe 2 minutes. Routing the wires under the fender was a hassle, but the only real pain was caused by the Hyperlite wires being too short and needing splicing inside the fender. Still, they’re solid lights and make me feel safer around town. I’m thinking about getting a Stebel air horn if I can find a place to mount it. Someone cut me off the other day and the whiney beep-beep of the stock horn sounded like a Vespa.

The cat is in the muffler right under the passenger’s foot and it gets really hot in summer, so I’m on the lookout for a stock muffler to remove the cat from, keeping my original in case it needs to be taken in for a warranty claim. Please drop me a line if you’ve got one to sell.

I love the fairing. It really does take the blast off your chest at speed while keeping your head in a clear stream of air, for me anyway (5’10”, 32” inseam). I take it off for around town in summer and get more cooling air.

On long jaunts at 70+ mph, my groin gets tired from holding my legs in, so I may eventually look into some highway pegs to address that (I saw the ones DK has coming to market soon). Also, with feet forward and in a slouch, the wind tries to lift my feet off the pegs. Floorboards would fix that, I guess, but I’m hoping the new seat keeps my upper body in a more forward angle and puts more weight on my legs, so we’ll see on that.

Some dislike the black plastic saddlebags. I read someplace that HD was aiming the SG at the international market, and these bags make me think that might be true. They remind me of the bags on my old Beemer in their attempt at practicality. They’re decent bags, but they’d be even better with handles on top and no bar sticking out, so they could be used like luggage (maybe not possible with the location and swingarm arrangement). The hinges are flimsy though, and the seal is basically weather stripping stuck around the inside of the lid that the edge of the back section presses against the side of. It comes right off in the tight corners inside. My old Beemer bags were sturdier, and the lid had a channel with a gasket at the bottom that the edge of the back section fit tightly into. You could drop those into a lake and they wouldn’t leak. I still haven’t ridden through a lengthy downpour with these, but I doubt they’d be perfectly watertight. I’d much rather have a sturdier build and better sealing than the little damper, which feels upscale, but really just serves to slow you down when you want to pop something in the bag and go. You soon learn to catch the lid and close it with your leg anyway. (I might take them out, now that I think of it…) The bags are good for regular daily use though, and I have a car now that I usually take when it rains, so they work fine. Might be an issue on a long trip, though. It is great having bags again – nice not having to always figure out how to carry basic stuff around.

First bike I’ve had cruise control on, and I’m sold. It’s not specific to this bike, of course, but just saying.

I don’t find having the gauges down on the tank to be a big deal, though it’s not ideal. I can just see everything over the chinbar of a flip-top helmet. I would prefer an analog tach, though. You don’t use it much after you get used to the engine, but it’s still nice.

I was perusing the Owner’s Manual a couple of nights ago (I like to look back through again after having the bike for a while, because I usually find stuff I forgot about or missed before). I was surprised to be reminded of the suggested shift points – shifting up: 15, 25, 35, 45, 55; shifting down: 50, 40, 30, 20, 10 – quite a bit lower than I tend to do. I stayed closer to those points going into work the next day and felt like I was lugging it. Shifting into 6th at 55 drops engine speed to under 2k rpm. It really is a flexible engine.

A second disk on the front would made modulation a bit easier, though the single disk has surprisingly good power. It took some getting used to the rear being so much more useful than on a bike with a shorter wheelbase.

The only problems so far: a squeak from the belt that the mechanic put belt dressing on several times to no avail, but that eventually went away on its own, and the stupid rattling gas cap. They replaced it once under warranty, but said that HD would only do it once, and the second one started rattling within a few hundred miles. There are lots of threads on this issue, so I’m not alone. Crimping the inside lip a little bit with a hammer and screwdriver took care of it, but it’s so simple it’s hard to understand why it can’t be resolved at the source. Still, as problems go, I’ll take them. The Speed Triple had to be taken back 6+ times (first time was 5 minutes after I bought it) for a wiring short they just couldn’t track down. No mechanical issues, runs like a top.

Long story short, the SG has turned out to be a very practical bike that I still like to look at, and that still feels special every time I ride it. There are things about every bike that could be better or that miss the mark and the SG is no exception. But this bike is rich in overall goodness and I expect to be keeping it for a good long time. If memory serves, Lemmy over on Revzilla referred to the SG as a “no bulls**t bike,” and that’s exactly right.

 

 

Hey, man, thanks for the heads-up. Yours looks great, but I don't need a full system, just the muffler. Somebody will probably swap theirs out for a Tab or something and I can pick one up that way and get it cheaper than an aftermarket slip-on.

I hope you enjoy yours as much as I have been mine. Just a great machine! The Saddlemen seat was a bust, by the way. Just got home and tried it out. Great quality, and nice looking, but it puts me more into the cruiser seating position, leaned back, which moves me further from the bar, forcing me to lean forward. It would be great with pullback risers, I think, or for someone who finds the cockpit a little cramped, but I want to be more upright, not less. It may be hard to find a seat that does that.

 

 

they fit but i used some medium blue loctite on them as well since you're losing an 8th to a quarter inch to the mounting plates.