During the summer of 1998, I started getting the itch to ride a motorcycle. With about two weeks of good weather left before Seattle's 1998 fall rainy season set in, I bought Joan's Honda Elite 80 scooter to putt back and forth to work. 300 miles later, I realized that I hadn't opened the door of my truck since the day I got the scooter. Although I was a complete newcomer to the world of 2 wheels, I was unable to resist the quest for the holy grail of hog heaven: I had to get me a Harley.
I started looking through the classifieds section of the paper, scouting the web, and visiting some local Harley shops trying to get a sense of what was out there and what I could get for 4 or 5 thousand bucks. It didn't take too long before I realized that I had a lot to learn...
Some of these things weigh 750 lbs. Some have no front brakes. Some have no rear suspensions and, with the help of a good pothole, will bounce your kidneys right up into your brainpan. Some have engine to transmission alignment problems that will make the belt linkage shake the bike so bad your hands go numb. Some have the brakes and shifter not where you expect them. All of them are, for some reason, highly appealing pieces of machinery.
I went down to a dealer and sat on a bunch of different bikes. I noticed a considerable weight difference between something like a Sportster and a '55 hardtail Panhead. The sales guys I talked to were pretty much fixated on the goal of obtaining a commission by selling any motorcycle they could to anyone in sight. "I have never owned a motorcycle before, I have no arms or legs or inner ears, and I have just drunk three quarts of Night Train Express", I explained. They nodded enthusiastically. "Do you think I'd have any problem on this 750 pound bike at night with no headlight and a flat rear tire?" I asked. "No problem! This is the ideal bike for you!" they babbled. "Hey, it's not leaking, it's just marking it's territory!" they said fifteen times in a row, laughing after each one.
If sensibility and reason had anything whatsoever to do with it (haw, as if) then a Harley Sportster 883 seemed like a sensible choice. Sportsters are generally lighter and easier to handle than most other Harleys. 883 refers to the size of the engine in ccs. An 883 engine can be converted to a 1000 or 1200 by swapping out bigger pistons, cylinders, and cylinder heads. On the unreasonable side, Sportsters also have an insane power-to-weight ratio when compared with, say, a Fat Boy or a '75 350 L-82 Corvette.
The dealer had about a dozen used bikes. There were plenty of new bikes, but I wasn't particularly interested in a new one. Besides being out of my price range, I wanted something with a few scars on it so it wouldn't kill me, so to speak, to drop it or tool down a gravel road in the rain.
The lowest priced bike there was a '93 Sportster 1200 with a belt drive. It looked pretty beat up. The shift linkage had been moved to the forward footpeg and the arm bolted onto the splined transmission shaft was pretty floppy, making me wonder if the shaft teeth weren't worn down. The rear brake cylinder was wet on the bottom. I figured I could live with an engine crankcase dripping some oil, but I don't want to see any brake fluid. The throttle cable was pretty floppy as well. When I rolled on the throttle and let it go, the throttle cable sleeve slipped out of its socket instead of staying put and having the cable return inside it. They wanted $7000 for it.
Hardtails have no rear suspension. They are recognizable by the four tubes that come back from the rest of the frame to meet at the rear wheel hubs. The newer Harley models called Softails are made to look like hardtails, but actually have a swingarm supported by two concealed springs.
They wanted $11000 for a '53 hardtail Panhead chopper. It wasn't in great shape, but it was a monster with a long front end. It was hard to lift it up off the stand. Kick start. I wanted to fire it up bad. The frame had no numbers on it. I asked the sales guy how the bike was titled and got some rambling explanation that made no sense about how the engine and frame were titled together. The frame, he said, was an aftermarket frame, not built by Harley. I found out later that prior to 1969, Harley didn't put numbers on their frames, so '69 and earlier bikes are titled by engine.
They wanted $16000 for a '56 hardtail frame with a newer Evo engine in it. It was a nice looking bike, very clean engine with anodized aluminum brackets and shiny googaws everywhere and steel braided hose. The frame on that one had a number stamped on it, so it must not've actually been a Harley '56 frame. I guess it's the norm with older bikes to run into all sorts of bizarre engine and frame number inconsistencies. This was not quite so much like the world of SS Camaros and 70's Vettes, where if the engine doesn't match the car, don't bother.
Eventually, I found an '86 Sportster 1200 evo in the paper for $5500. I called the guy up and went over to check it out. It was getting late, so I just looked at it in his heated garage, which was very cramped. I couldn't get a panoramic view, but up close it looked really nice, completely blowing away everything I'd seen so far.
The next day, we fired it up and I listened to it, poked at it, checked all the stuff my notes said to check, looked it over some more, sat on it and said "brumm brummm brummmm" a few times. Couldn't get a test ride out of him. This is understandable; when the time comes for me to sell it, I will not give a test ride either. Aside from the potential liability of having someone crack their skull open while test riding a motorcycle that belongs to someone else, if they so much as drop it, the bike can lose quite a bit of value instantly. I don't feel the same way about the scooter though. It's the kind of beast that if dropped four or five times in a day, it won't really matter. Being so much lighter, its safety margins are also much better. As it turned out, a short test ride wouldn't have revealed any problems. A long one would have, however. I came back the next day, Monday, to buy it and ride it home.
Just riding this bike was an adventure. My previous experience with manual transmission motorcycles had been an MSF class 8 years before. The biggest bikes I'd ever been on were 250 cc things. This one was a 1200. I took it real slow, and even practiced engaging the clutch and letting the bike move forward a foot or two, squeezing the clutch in and rolling it back, over and over a few times until I felt comfortable with it. I finally eased the clutch all the way out and motored away, taking everything easy and just getting used to the feel of a 500 pound bike.
I rode it around the block a few times, and it ran great. I headed south and braked and weaved and frolicked and downshifted and upshifted accelerated through turns. It ran perfectly for about fifteen minutes. I took it all in, wide-eyed and euphoric. It thundered. It was a brand new experience, and it was very, very good.
Then it started acting up. It started to run a bit rough, and would occasionally die at lower speeds. When it died, it died totally, just as if I had hit the kill switch. I started having to worry about the route I was taking and constantly planning for engine death. Seattle traffic is probably not the best thing for a beginning biker to contend with something like this. In very short order, I was not having fun. I wanted to ride it into the previous owner's living room and set it on fire.
After several repeats of the necropathic engine behaviour, I noticed that sometimes when I hit the Start switch, absolutely nothing would happen, not even a click from the starter solenoid relay. Waiting 10 or 15 seconds seemed to clear it up. A few more times, and I found myself having to wait longer and longer before the starter would crank. Unfortunately, I forgot to check to see if the headlight was also going out during that time. Finally, pretty close to home, it refused to crank even after waiting about 5 minutes, so I got the opportunity to practice pushing a Harley up a hill. I did this as a matter of course, deciding that every Harley owner must do this with their bikes whenever they ride them. It dawned on me why the Harley stereotype is a cantankerous badass with a deeply rooted need to stomp the living crap out of someone. Harley owners must be in a perpetual state of being pissed off at their bikes, at whoever sold them the things, and at themselves for being stupid enough to buy one. No wonder everyone was keeping their distance. I had ridden it a total distance of about 5 miles.
Went back to talk to the lying cretin who sold it to me, and of course he had no idea what I was talking about. He claimed he'd never seen complete cutouts like that. According to a shop invoice that came with the papers and manuals and all, he had ridden it less than 100 miles over the past two years. The vast majority of the time, it had sat in his garage. Maybe it hadn't ever happened to him, but I figured it had and that was why it was $5500. The problem was obviously electrical. I decided to keep it.
It's amazing what having to push a Harley up a hill does to one's perceptions of the thing. I no longer feared touching it with a wrench, or a sledgehammer for that matter. I was too irritated with it to do any real troubleshooting, which in my mind involved getting it hot enough to duplicate the problem and then identifying the component between the battery and the starter solenoid that was failing to complete the circuit when I hit the Start switch, so on a Tuesday night I started taking it apart. I removed the seat, the battery, battery tray, oil tank, and pulled sections of the wiring harness that could be responsible for an engine cutout and failure to engage the starter. I replaced the four circuit breakers, the ignition switch, a number of cruddy connectors and wires, and since I was at it, replaced the plugs, oil filter, and cleaned everything I could get to. I swapped out the enourmous ape-hanger handlebars that made my arms fall asleep for a shorter set, replaced all of the control wiring, and ran it through some nice steel braid. Friday night I had it all back together, and Saturday it poured down rain.
Sunday was bright and clear. I wheeled the Harley out into the sun and fired it up. It idled for 30 seconds and then sputtered and died. I tried a few more times but couldn't quite get it started. I cursed and railed at it, then realized I'd forgotten to open the fuel petcock. Duh. First time of many, no doubt.
It ran great! In the course of about an hour I put about 15 miles on it in stop-and-go traffic without encountering any problems at all. Aside from a few embarrassing moments when I killed it trying to take off while facing up a hill (with cars racked up behind me, all probably laughing uproariously at the geek on the Harley), it was righteous. It was stupendous. I motored around Greenlake in the sun with my feet on the pegs, the wind in my face, and tears of joy streaming down my cheeks. I was a badass. Bad to the bone! Ride to live, live to ride you sumbitches! The sociopathic tendencies that exist in all bikers blossomed and coursed through my veins. A foot-long grey beard magically sprouted out of my face as faded tattoos spread across my arms and back. Blasting through a busy crosswalk doing 40 over the limit, I stuck my leg out and laughed as my titanium shinguard smashed a little ol' lady's walker into smithereens. I tore off my helmet and hurled it at The Man sitting in his cage in a Winchell's parking lot. I pumped 12-gauge rounds into a whole row of Quiet Please / Hospital Zone signs and then held the throttle wide open with my shin through the center of the shopping mall while I leaned back and reloaded. Raised $50,000 for a local children's home through a biker club rally too. It was a most enjoyable day.
I was extremely cautious when riding the Harley. I was looking ten blocks ahead and three blocks behind. I dreaded having to come to a quick stop or deal with someone pulling out in front of me. It had been 8 years since I'd taken the MSF course and since I hadn't ridden much since then, I decided to take it again. The MSF course is probably the best life insurance $50 can buy.
In Washington State, completion of the MSF course waives the DMV's requirement for a riding test. I had already taken the DMV test for the scooter two months earlier, but I still wanted to test myself on the Harley just to compare the two. I drove by the DMV licensing parking lot in North Seattle one evening with a tape measure and a notepad and took down the measurements for the cone placement used in the various skill tests. There's a sharp left turn, the cone weave, a U-turn, a braking distance test, and a swerve test. Using chalk and paper cups, the layout was duplicated in the parking garage where I work, and I was pleased to discover that it was all quite doable on the heavier bike. The key was in being one with the clutch, letting the engine's divine force flow gently through one's fingers and into the transmission. Grasshopper.
Ultimately, I came to believe that skill with low speed maneuverability is a good thing to have lots of, but it's not nearly as important as constant vigilance and the ability to decide on and execute a quick swerve or a controlled quick stop. I'm perfectly willing to embarrass myself by stepping gracefully off the outside footpeg of my bike as it falls over in a parking lot, but I'm a lot less willing to slide into a car that pulls out or stops quickly in front of me. So far, I've had to do neither.
Over the next 18 months, I put over 3000 miles on the scooter and over 1000 miles on the Sportster. I can safely say that there are significant differences between the two. In many ways, the little scooter is the superior machine.
Within about 3 weeks of daily commuting on the scooter, I began to feel more confident in my ability to come to a rapid stop without having to think too much about it. The scooter felt more and more like riding a motorized bicycle. The Harley felt like riding an aircraft carrier in comparison. It never felt as nimble as the scooter, probably because, well, it isn't. This was true at speed as well as when parking. The scooter can be bumped over curbs and wedged between dumpsters without a second thought. There's no danger of it tipping over while you're weaving around at low speed because it doesn't weigh anything. If it does fall over, it's no big deal.
I ride the scooter rain or shine, mud, gravel, whatever. Part of the Harley's appeal, and value, is it's gloss black paint job, stainless steel braided cabling and hoses, and chrome. I don't want to blast through mudpuddles with it.
At only 170 pounds, the scooter's tiny 80 cc (4.5 cubic inches) is enough to zip it out of stoplights and out of the intersection well ahead of heavier things. From 20 mph to 40 mph, however, it's slow going. The scooter essentially has two throttle positions; on and off. On is not sufficient for the 40 mph arterials, and the freeway is right out. The Harley, on the other hand, will accelerate faster than I have any interest in accelerating, and will go faster than I have any intention of ever going without the participation of at least four wheels, a roll cage, and a 5 point harness. For this, the Harley gets about 35 mpg. The scooter gets about 85 mpg. The Harley rocks, but I must confess that most of the time, the commuting machine of choice is the scooter.