And the voltage regulator and flasher module. Harley was actually one of the first bike makers to adopt solid state electronics, long before the Japs and Germans.

 

For a brief moment, pretty sure this was a Harley forum, I thought I had somehow unknowingly clicked a side link and ended up in the wrong place.

For nearly a dozen pages this thread feels more like a damn Ford versus Chevy site, except that it's all the same brand here, Harley-Davidson...

I happen to think that it really comes down to what someone is comfortable with.
Everything has its' strengths and weaknesses, pro's and con's.
Sure, there are sometimes actual lemons, and yes some products really are cheaply built low cost high profit mass produced garbage while others actually seem to hold up very well but time passes and things evolve, for better or worse and life goes on.

There are a few automotive brands that I consider somewhere between poor and horrible and will personally never buy again but there are tons of people on websites out there who swear by those brands. There are certain brands that I personally believe in very strongly and have chosen to be loyal to for decades that some others totally hate, many of which have never actually owned or driven one.

I understand that people can be passionate about their bikes but saying something's better (and that something else is not) without explanation is like your parents saying "because I said so" and it doesn't really answer the original poster's questions.

Having owned and driven carb'd, TBI, and SPI cars/trucks and having to deal with clogged jets on cars and bikes if I don't have time to run them all on a regular basis and/or didn't winterize them well enough (and dealing with mediocre performance and economy and random gremlins with TBI), personally I dislike carburetors and think I would like to own a FI Harley but a carb'd 1-owner Evo caught my eye recently and once I saw it in person, talked with its' very proud original owner for a while, and then heard it instantly fire up cold, my wallet instantly got a few thousand dollars lighter.

As a first time Harley owner, who happens to have bought a sweet vintage Evo FXSTC this whole "the way to beat an Evo is with a Shovel" and "Twinks are junk" with big ego's and negative attitudes within ONE BRAND is disappointing.

I clicked on this thread hoping to learn more about my bike's engine and instead I got pages upon pages of sarcasm and drama with a few actual bits of interesting and helpful Evo and TC information hidden between the lines.

Although I must admit that the "teaching a pig arithmetic" analogy was awesome!

P.S. potato...potato...potato...

 

GREAT INTRODUCTION!!!
Good luck with the new scooter .......

 

Everyone's an art critic these days, but there are very few people who know how to make paint.

Only now and again, will you'll meet an artist who mixes their own but there are a few of them here.

It's best to always embrace sincere criticism and test it for validity, guarding against unconscious and irrational reactions to it. But think of it more like critics arguing over which are the best pieces by any specific artist or designer and trying to understand why one seemingly faulted work really has some special significance.

Yes, we need a different format for communicating just information. And, listen, it's only November. You've got another 3 or 4 months of cabin crazy to go through before the sun starts shining, so best find some project on your bike to work on.

I'm down to filing off rough welds and brazing.

 

As far as I know, there isn't any. S&S builds emissions compliant Evo style engines. The Evo has a wedge combustion chamber so it's a little harder to bump compression without getting some ping problems. But that's easy to fix by changing the piston crown and head to make it a hemi like the TC is where you got quench area 360 degrees around the combustion chamber. Interestingly, the Shovels were hemi's.

The real advantages of the Evo are a more robust cam drive, although the angle the exhaust lifters and pushrods must run at can be a problem with high lift cams. With the stock cam I've never seen a problem with lifters in the Evo. I got over 121,000 miles on mine with the original lifters in it yet.

The other advantage is that the Evo is easily and infinitely rebuildable, where the Twin Cam takes more specialized tooling to service the crankshaft. Really, I don't know that this is an issue much because the vast majority of riders rarely put more than 50,000 miles on a motorcycle. Harley knows that, they were spending way too much time on the assembly line truing cranks in the Evo's, and demand has increased 10 fold. So they came up with a simple assembly method using a jig and a hydraulic press that doesn't involve beating on flywheels with a brass hammer.

Third, the Evo is all you need. 80 cubes is plenty even for a big Electra Glide. You don't need 103 cubes any more than the automotive industry needed the big 500 cube V-8 in the Cadillac Eldorado back in the day when the cubic inch and horsepower wars were going strong. Riders thinking they need constantly bigger engines that get ever poorer gas mileage just so they can go 0-60 .0000000001 seconds faster are nuts in the head, in my opinion. It only requires about 17hp to move your big 'Glide down the road at cruising speed. And I've never yet had a problem passing somebody - two-up pulling a trailer sometimes - with the '86 with a bone stock engine by simply downshifting a gear and let the Evo spin up to 3,000+ rpm. It's got everything I need and will turn 48-50 mpg easily at steady cruising speed.

And lastly, the Evo's have become desirable among hard-core enthusiasts. They have earned their place alongside the Shovels and Pans as classics. And they have the best aftermarket support of any engine ever built by any manufacturer. The Twin Cams are a dime-a-dozen commodity and I think H-D sold more Twinkies in the first four years after their introduction than they sold Evo's in the entire 16 years of their production run.

So for Evo riders it's the sound of a carb'd Big Twin, the simplicity, decent performance and gas mileage, the fact that it's a classic, and the fact that it can be kept running indefinitely without breaking the bank.

 

The first wholly Japanese motorcycle was a Harley-Davidson, built under license in Japan! Called a Rikuo IIRC. They formed the majority of the military motorcycles used by them during WW2.

Quite a lot, poor thing. All the major castings are relatively light-weight, so didn't dampen internally generated noise very well. The TCs have more robust casings. TCs have a different cam drive to reduce the noise generated by the single Evo cam. To meet noise emissions Evos were suffering from raised gearing, retarded ignition timing and crippling cam timing, all in the name of keeping noise down as well as exhaust emissions in the lower engine/road speed range.

As a further example of how the MoCo has had to address noise generation, the 6-speeds use pressed gears on both input and countershafts, to reduce noise from the transmission. And as emissions get ever tighter so there will be further developments, so that we can continue to enjoy Milwaukee's finest. Of course all other manufacturers are engaged in similar changes.

 

The Honda ST1300 engine, which is two decades newer, makes way more noise from the cam drive than the Evo does.

The main reason they went to chains on the Twink instead of gears is because the chains are more tolerant of the sloppy radial runout on the pinion shaft on the pressed crank assemblies. Some people that have converted to gears on the Twinks have had to have the flywheels trued and weld the crank pin so it stays, so they can put the gears in.

 

Yeah, although there's a lot of aftermarket alternatives for the rectifier/regulator and the self-cancelling turn signal module. Some of the Evo's prior to '91 didn't have the turn signal module and just used an off-the-shelf automotive flasher with a bi-metallic strip in it.

Try finding a CD ignition box or pickup coils for a early to mid-80's Suzuki GS. Suzuki discontinued both parts 1 year after the last GS 8 valver was built.

They outsourced those parts to Nippondenso and the aftermarket never picked 'em up because they were all in junk yards 5 years later. And the reason most of 'em ended up in junk yards is because of the cam chain tensioner. People talk about the Twinkie cam chain tensioners. But the Suzuki GS had a spring loaded affair on the rear of the cylinder block that was locked in place by a set screw. People would never loosen that set screw and adjust 'em, the chain would get loose and tear the guide shoe up and then jump on the crank sprocket - instant bent valves. And the Suzuki parts were made of unobtanium because once you bent the valves in those and went to the Suzuki dealer to get parts they looked at you with a blank stare and said, "you want what for what model?" BTDT with them.

So the Harley's may not be perfect, but they're one hell of a lot better than anything the Japs ever built, from the standpoint of being able to keep it running long term. There's lots of mid-80's Evo's on the road yet. Take note of how many of Jap models from that era that you still see running.

 

Firstly, rather than Harley, aren't you're really saying "Evo" here?

I think we need to factor in something else, which is that part of these equations is sociological rather than technical.

By "social", I mean relating to the nature of the primary target audience. Mainly glides for old geezers, those who will keep things, look after them, and have the money to invest in them and use their motorcycle for fairly unchallenging purposes but, secondly, blue collars guys who probably don't have the money to swop rides every year and want functional transport.

A closer comparative in both audience and design would be old air-cooled BMWs. It would be a harder argument to say which was "better" or had more longevity. Both were aimed at older upscale consumers.

The vast majority of Japanese motorcycles were specifically designed as temporary consumer products for younger and more challenging riders and a far wider spectrum of purposes (i.e. highly crash-and-burnable). A market of 'non-keepers'; younger, less experiences and wealthy, more careless and just going through a phase to learn and upgrade. They were 'journey bikes' to be left behind, not 'destination bikes' to be kept.

Harley also went for "timeless", as in already "out of date" styling; whereas the Japanese went for faddish styles.

There are only a few exceptions but they are so unlike the H-Ds niche, e.g. the Honda Cubs in Asia, the Yamaha SR400/500 etc. The Z1000 would, to my mind, be the closest thing to a Japanese "Evo". It had a long run and continued to exist long afterwards.

In Japan's domestic market, they also have much stricter laws for both emissions and maintaining older vehicle on the road which is deliberately designed to drive them off the roads and dissuade customization, read up about the "shaken". I don't think is because the Japanese companies can't build better bikes or engines, that's patently not true. They're just stuck responding to the box they are in.

In truth, I think the closest comparative would have to be the Enfield Bullet in India. The Bullet is to India what the H-D is to the USA and, amazingly, it has been continuously in production since 1948. Moto Guzzi would have to be the Italian equivalent.

As far as what another poster wrote about its success being the largest aftermarket for any motorcycle (except, perhaps, for the Honda Cubs in Asia and the Enfield Bullet in India), I would have to agree but it's paradoxical, because I don't think the genius of that was intentional or "designed". It just came about because H-D could not produce or market more vehicle types.

And it actually damages H-D's financial success.

I'm trying to work out what the appeal is, even for myself, because the truth is that, technically speaking, engine design is not a great a design. It's fraught with legacy problems and severe limitations. The Evo was certainly a quantum leap but it remained trapped within a highly constraint box. It's certainly not the "best" or most well designed engine. What is would be an interesting discussion.

Here I'm remembering the old Sonny Barger quote regretting that his tribe chose H-Ds for their symbolic steeds, a style decision which probably saved the factory as much as the Evo did. H-D could have built any style of engine and dominated its niche market with it (but would we still have been having this discussion if we had been riding Novas?).

I think a large part of the appeal is actually it's unchanging nature. I think there's something in that which resonates with us as being more natural and human, a rejection of the fast pace of consumer capitalism led change. It's a horse and cart which did not change for 100s of years, and we are the content blacksmiths by the side of the road repairing them.

We're motorcycling's Amish people.

A smaller part of the appeal is it's technologically reactionary nature. It's big finger to common sense and progress. Human beings are not like Goldwings, they are a bit rough around the edges and lumpy and so, again, something resonates within us towards them.

 

I'd have to disagree with this. I sometimes pull an Aspen Sentry pop-up camper with my '96 ci TC and even though I do downshift, it struggles on steep mountain passes.



Yep, it certainly is for me. I don't need or desire the latest and greatest unless there is some fundamental feature(s) I really need. For me and my touring requirements, it was features like ABS, larger gas tank capacity, increased touring/load capacity that caused me to upgrade.

One of the reasons I was a big fan of the 3 & 5 series BMW's of the 80's is that the body style didn't seem to change from year to year.