Tabla de contenidos para Issue 2 - 18 en Cycle World

Dear Dan, Over the years, you were kind enough to write a few letters. As a letter writer myself, I’d always intended to write back to you, but somehow I didn’t feel as though I should, or maybe that I wasn’t important enough. Getting to know you a little better over the years should have shown me that it would have been fine, even welcome. You were always a model of civility, graciousness, respect, and humor. One of the best examples of this was when you invited Kevin Cameron and me to come talk about the moment-canceling twin you and Chuck Palmgren were building, and it felt like an actual conversation. You and your team asked us what we thought, and genuinely seemed to want to know. So it was…

The finished parts that we casually call “carbon fiber” are more than that. They are composites made of super-strong crystalline carbon fibers, held together by an epoxy resin. The proper name is Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic, or CFRP. Luckily, no one insists on it. The idea of embedding fine, high-strength fibers in a plastic matrix goes back to 1920, when A.A. Griffith, employed in England’s Royal Aircraft Factory, showed that the low strengths of practical materials resulted from surface or internal defects. Without these defects, considerations of atomic bonding would predict tremendously greater strengths. A good example is glass, which in handling accumulates microscratches on its surfaces. Application of even moderate stress causes one or more of these to open and propagate as a crack. Also revealed by Griffith’s analysis…

ROI is the killer of dreams, the murderer of glory. “Return on Investment,” management’s typical test for so many things, when expressed to its fullest results in vehicles like the Toyota Camry, the car equivalent of the killer of dreams and murderer of glory. Not that it isn’t a decent way to get around. But “getting around” is not what we came for. “Decent” can go pound it. We came for dreams and glory. Which is clearly why Indian lit the fuse on the Scout FTR1200 Custom, this hand-made street-tracker a mashup of the Scout FTR750 racebike and the Scout cruiser that has served as the volume leader for the company’s on-road sales and is a much-loved laid-back American motorcycle. But as much love as we have for the laid-back…

Leader of the free motorcycling world? Hard to argue against Matt Levatich, a 52-year-old engineer-turned-executive at Harley-Davidson Motor Company. After climbing through the ranks starting in 1994, Levatich was made president and CEO in 2015, and his charge has been to navigate this $5-billion-ayear motorcycle-maker and cultural icon through the challenges and uncertainty that face the industry. On the increasing strength of the used market and how it influences Harley-Davidson’s widely publicized initiative to add 2 million new riders in 10 years. The biggest competitor to Harley is used Harleys: timeless, reliable, durable, classic, beautiful, affordable. And that’s this “total demand” thing [of new and used]. But when you’re in the business of “building riders,” you love the used marketplace. It’s probably the biggest asset we have, because a 20-year-old…

Dirt-track racing—on mile and half-mile ovals plus TT—is uniquely American. It comes to us from the earliest days of motoring, when the horse tracks of county fairgrounds were the natural place to race motorcycles from Harley-Davidson, Indian, Reading-Standard, and others. Dirt track survived competition from the super-fast and dangerous banked board tracks of 1910 to 1925, and it is having a rebirth today. Why does a motorcycle manufacturer go racing? Harley keeps at it because, having been there forever, it would be seriously strange to stop, like a beautiful smile spoiled by a missing front tooth. Indian jumped in two years ago. Why? Inscrutable corporate reasons? To say they’re more American than Harley? Because it’s a way to get more people excited about motorcycles in general? Pick one. Long before…

Dan Gurney—champion racecar driver, vehicle engineer, motorcyclist, and racing-car builder—died this year at age 86. He came to greatness at a time when American industry, innovation, and power were peaking. His father, retiring from New York City’s Metropolitan Opera in 1947, moved the family to Southern California. The gigantic U.S. aircraft industry—much of it located in that state—had just produced 302,000 military aircraft and 810,000 aircraft engines for World War II, and the plants, tooling, and people who accomplished that miracle remained active. Surplus outlets were bursting with rolling bearings, hydraulics, electronics, and more. A brand-new twin-engine P-38 fighter with full gas tanks was $1,200. Men got rich recovering the platinum electrodes from hundreds of thousands of surplus aircraft spark plugs. Technology in 1947 was almost free. Want trick aluminum…

When Honda first went GP racing in the early 1960s, its four-cylinder 250 was built just as Honda’s production twins were—with a horizontally split crankcase having main bearing saddles bored half in one case, half in the other. When the crankshaft with its ball or roller main bearings was set into the upper case and then the lower case was bolted into place, the crank was well-supported by the entire structure. Honda’s early fours also included both gearbox shafts in this structure, the saddles for their bearings likewise being bored half in the upper, half in the lower case. For its racing engines, Honda soon gave up this apparently rational and robust construction, switching to one in which crankshaft main bearings, in the form of “pillow blocks” (a bearing in…

The carburetor flickered out of existence in modern American automobiles in 1990, but nearly 30 years later, those of us with the inclination can walk into a motorcycle dealership and ride out on a brand-new carbureted machine. Despite the device’s longevity, it isn’t widely understood. To this day, when people talk of accelerating, they say, “I gave it the gas.” That’s a misnomer. Whether our vehicle’s engine has modern digital fuel injection or carburetors, the action we take to accelerate is to open the throttle, which controls only the flow of air into our engine’s cylinders. Some other system then adds fuel in correct proportion to that airflow, resulting in a combustible air-fuel mixture being drawn into our engine. Before the digital-fuel-injection era, beginning in the late 1970s and completed…

In January 1982, David Bailey stood in an airport hangar next to a wooden shipping crate, anxiously waiting to see what was inside. His mechanic, Paul Turner, jammed a crowbar into the seam of the lid. The wood cracked and splintered and the nails squeaked as they bent to reveal the contents: a “works” motocross bike. The smell, the look, the unpainted pipe, the red plastic, the blue seat that drifted high up onto the aluminum gas tank—the image of the moment is burned into Bailey’s mind. It was rolling exotica: a handmade motorcycle composed of rubber and plastic—and metals most people had never heard of. The subframe was removable, the cone exhaust was unpainted and hand-formed, the airbox was aluminum, the swingarm extended, the silencer stubby, and the welding…

Here’s what tends to happen after you’ve worn a great modular helmet for a while: Your standard non-flip-up full-face helmet begins to look like a house without doors. An open-face seems like a house with holes for doors but no doors, so there is reduced security, and it’s absolutely not weatherproof. I’m not knocking either style of helmet because I wear both, but when I am going on a multiday ride for work or play, a modular such as the Shoei NeoTec is what I grab. This is even truer with the introduction of the NeoTec II this spring. The updates were focused on improved aerodynamics, quietness, and watertightness. Avoiding extra weight in a modular isn’t easy. Hinges and latches not only must be present, of course, but they also…

Motorcycle road racing in America has changed drastically from the romantic bygone days of a rider and mechanic crammed into a van full of bikes and spare parts, scurrying across the nation trying to eke out a living. Motorcycle manufacturers’ increasing involvement in racing during the 1980s saw an influx of money and resources that eventually transformed the paddock a decade later into a bustling hive of big transporters, swarms of team personnel, and star riders with seven-figure salaries. But that evolution was merciless over the years; scant few who were involved in that earlier era remain in professional racing today. “The tools and techniques seem archaic now, but that’s what we had to do to make what we wanted.” There is still one veteran from those days of oil-stained…