They're cool enough, but a lot of other companies do the superbike
thing better than Harley. It's like buying a Buell so you can ride a
sportbike with a Harley-Davidson powerplant. No offense to any Buell
riders on the list, but there are a dozen bikes that do what a Buell
does only a lot better. If I wanted to rev a hopped-up Sportster engine
till the vibration curdled my milk I'd just strap a saddle on a
paint-shaker instead. The whole premise behind the new generation of
Harleys is kind of strange to me. The Evolution engine that was phased
out after '99 was aptly named. It essentially first came to market in
1936 as the original 61" Knucklehead, then it evolved into the 74"
Panhead in 1948, the Shovelhead in 1966 and finally the Evolution in
1984. Most of the quirky things about the engine were artifacts of it
being a pre-WWII design. It was designed pretty much as well as it
could be designed for the era, but that's a by-gone era. The
quintessential Harley-Davidson engine, like the VW Bug engine, was an
air-cooled design that was researched long before modern CAD techniques
were available. It was built as well as the people in Milwaukee knew
how to build 'em in the 1930's. The new engine was designed to sound
and behave like the old engine, but to adopt new technology. That's a
really strange design philosophy, IMO, and one I have a hard time
identifying with. It would be like building an AM radio that digitally
approximates the channel drift and intermodulation distortion of an old
tube set. It's a goofy criteria for building something, IMO.
I know my bike is kind of an anachronism, but that's what I like about
it, really. I know that a lot of the annoying quirks my bike has (as
well as the appealing quirks) were the same things that people
experienced 50 years ago when they climbed on a Harley-Davidson. My
brakes are better, I have hydraulic lifters and a better oil management
system, but my bike isn't all that different than the bikes my uncle
used to work on in his garage when I was a kid. To each his own,
though. That's just my take on it.
-Rob
On Thursday, March 6, 2003, at 07:50 PM, siddiq wrote:
those V-Rods are SWEET, but perhaps anathema to the HD purists due to
a water cooled porsche tuned engine sans the trademark(?)
irregular burble exhaust.
/S
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